Maze-like waterways like this can be quickly, and safely, navigated with a console-top chartplotter.

I tend to be a minimalist when it comes to putting stuff on my boat. If I don’t think I’ll really, really make use of it, every time I leave the dock—I leave it at the dock. The less junk on the console and in the cockpit, the less there is to corrode, break, fall overboard or get swiped, and I like that.

Which is why it took me so long to get it through my head that, yep, chartplotters can actually be downright useful on flats and bay boats. In fact, now I simply don’t leave the dock without my magic machine; I stow it in a soft bag along with the boat key, and that bag goes with me everytime I drop the boat into the water.

And this is on waters I’ve been fishing for 20 years. The danged plotter (mine happens to be a Lowrance X-104 with combo color sounder, but many others offer similar magic) is addictive because of the ease with which it allows me to run my routes day and night, in fog, rain, any weather that I don’t have enough sense to come in out of. I live on the Little Manatee River on Florida’s Gulf coast, where one has to run through a mini-Everglades just to get to water that’s knee deep, and having the machine reduces navigational worries and helps me catch more fish in a variety of ways.

This is not to say you can simply turn on the chart function and navigate without ever looking through the windshield, ala IFR airplane pilots in training. Because, while it’s true that the WAAS-enabled GPS systems of today are amazingly accurate, it’s also true that the maps on many electronic charting systems don’t register exactly with the GPS signal. On one part of my run down the Little Manatee, my system consistently shows me motoring right through the center of a rather large and rocky island. Fortunately, so far it has consistently been wrong. But you can see the potential for problems in areas that are new to you.

"Sunlight visible" screen makes viewing easy in bright conditions.

Which brings us to the tracking function—one of the major values of the plotter. When it is turned on, the system lays down a track wherever the boat goes, and these electronic bread crumbs offer amazing repeatability, to within three or four feet most of the time. That means that I no longer have to worry about seeing that 1-inch PVC pipe that sticks about two feet above the surface of the south entry of the river, and which marks the only navigable passage on a full-moon low. I know that so long as I keep the arrow marking my boat’s position on that purple line, I’m not going to run aground. And that means I don’t have to head home at sundown; I can stay out there fishing those little low-water passes until black dark, and it’s been my experience that the best bite is often in that last 30 minutes. I can then head home with complete confidence that I can not only find the pass, but run right up the center of it without having to drop off plane to take my bearings. The only danger is, if I don’t keep a sharp eye, I’ll run right over the marker stick.

A plotter also makes it possible to mark all those little disappearing sloughs that cut through the outer bars of major bays surrounded by grassflats. Such little cuts are invisible at high water, but become fish highways on low. I used to push tree limbs into the bottom to mark some of my favorites, so that I could locate them before daylight. With the plotter, I can put an electronic marker at each of them and then return to exactly the same position time and again. And I can hit them on cloudy days, at dawn and at dusk, even after dark.

Console-top chartplotter.

The same is true for drifting a deep flat where there might be a rock outcrop that holds stripers, or in my waters, redfish, snook or maybe even a gag grouper. There’s no comparison between knowing about where you are and knowing exactly where you are, and with the plotter you know exactly where you are, every time.

The machines also are a big help in fishing for, and staying on, seatrout over grassflats in big, open bays. With the wind and the current pushing your boat, it’s very easy to get off a school after you drift down through them and then motor back around for a repeat. But with the electronic chart, you can see exactly where you drifted before and repeat that drift precisely. Again, it makes things almost too easy.