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Fisheye View: Using Bathymetrics

Wouldn’t it be great if you could zoom around under water, and look at the structure you fish around? Wouldn’t it be incredible to have a detailed look at channel edges, lumps and humps, shell beds, and drop-offs? To have a 3-D picture of bottom contours of every inch of the Chesapeake, the Atlantic seabed, or wherever you fish? Well, you can. Modern electronics allow you see the unseen view below the water’s surface, just about anywhere in the continental US. And all you’ll need is a few bucks, some computer savvy, and maybe an extra wire or two.

Eye in the Sky

If your budget is big, you can have full-blown 3-D bathymetrics right in front of you as you fish from your boat. For a mere $12,000, you can get a unit like the Northstar new 972, an integrated navigation system that has 3-D imaging built right into the hard drive. The 972’s three dimensional picture gives you a bird’s eye view of the land surrounding your boat and the ocean floor below. You can use the cursor pad to “fly” around, and you can even overlay aerial and satellite photography on the screen. “dive” below the surface and you can look at the floor of the bay or ocean. And since the info is all pre-loaded into the unit, all you’ll need to do is get the unlock code—yup, this costs more money!—and you can start seeing the world from the eyes of a fish, today.

Northstar may have been the first, but now, just about every major marine manufacturer from Raymarine to Furuno offers 3-D. When Furuno introduced the Navnet 3-D it took the market by storm, and today, is probably the most all-around popular system with bathymetrics built in. But, these systems still cost an arm and a leg.

Hard Drive

The more reasonably priced way to break into the 3-D world is to buy a bathymetrics computer program, and load it onto your laptop or PC. All of these programs include software that lets you integrate the computer with your fishfinder, GPS, and/or radar. Of course, to do so you’ll have to carry your laptop onboard, a bold maneuver for those of us with center consoles, or small outboard-powered boats. Still, these programs are useful even if you’re not crazy enough to put the Dell on the dash and pray it survives a saltwater bath. Fire them up in the security of your home the day before you fish a specific spot, and you can study and print the underwater view of any number of hotspots.

There are three options when it comes to these types of programs: Maptech’s Marine Navigator ($400 – 500 depending on what charts you purchase), Nobletech’s Admiral ($1,000) and Furuno’s MaxSea ($600). All three of these offer 3-D bathymetric views of the floor beneath the sea plus real-time and trip planning navigational functions. And, all three rely on NOAA as their main source of information. Remember—NOAA’s database includes everything from hi-tech soundings to lead-line readings taken in the 1800’s, so the information is not 100-percent reliable. In fact, I was able to locate a pinnacle in Poor Man’s canyon that appeared on both The Admiral and MaxSea, which does not exist in reality. According to the experts I interviewed, this is probably the result of pinging a whale or a school of fish, during NOAA’s surveys. This is the exception, not the norm—I was also able to use these programs to locate a notch in the western edge of the channel near Poplar’s Island, which turned out to be very real and very full of fish—but one should be aware of the possibilities for inaccuracies.

Error Message

So, ready to try one of these programs out? You’ll load them into your computer and press “go,” right? Hah! These programs are all very complex, and getting them onto your hard drive can be a major headache. To boil it all down to the bottom line, Maptech is the easiest to deal with, and takes an hour-long, nine-disk installation followed by a trip to the company’s web site, a 20-digit product code, and a nine-digit installation code. It took me about an hour and a half to get the program up and running. Furuno’s MaxSea is slightly more of a pain in the butt, and took me over two hours plus a phone call to the help line. Nobletech’s Admiral takes the cake for pure frustration, and it took me four and a half hours, several phone calls, and a few newly-developed gray hairs before I had the program properly installed. Figuring out how to use it took even longer. The flip side to the complexity? Detail and function levels. While dealing with Nobletech was frustrating beyond belief, its level of complexity was matched by the level of functions—you could run a battleship with this program. Seriously. And, on-screen detail was extraordinary. Computophiles and electronics geeks will love it, and one should note that other people may have a much easier time loading and using these programs than this bone-headed angler. Furuno’s middle-of-the-road complexity level also provided middle-of-the-road detail, and Maptech’s relatively easy to use program had the lowest detail level. Furuno has also found a way to constantly improve the data pool for the waters you regularly fish, with the PBG (personal bathymetric generator) feature. You can add the PBG to your MaxSea system (it adds $1,500) and it will integrate your laptop with your depthfinder, which then constantly updates the bathymetric data. Cool stuff. Insider sources at Maptech and Furuno both say they’re working on a similar real-time updating systems.

Open Your Eyes

Is all the cash and all the effort worthwhile? For an angler, having this perspective of a spot is invaluable. Note that exact GPS coordinates for specific locations on the spot, depth readings, cruising courses, waypoints and trolling routes can all be pre-planned and saved on the computer, printed out, or in some cases, uploaded onto the Chartplotter already fixed to your helm. With these advantages, will you save time? Will you catch more fish? Damn straight. So if you’re looking for a new and improved perspective as you hit the fishing grounds, 3-D bathymetrics is it. Look for more electronics manufacturers to start integrating 3-D into their units, and expect that prices will eventually become more reasonable. In the mean time, use one of these ways to check out the sea floor below your boat. It absolutely, positively, will help you fish more effectively.

-- Lenny Rudow