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Premium digital charts feature 2D shaded relief, enhanced aerial imaging, other detailed data layers for clearer view beneath your hull and potential hazards ahead.
Longtime boaters have witnessed an electronic evolution as paper charts have transitioned to digital, which has surpassed paper for detail and flexibility. More recently, digital charts have become customizable. Bottom line: The utility of today’s digital charts far surpasses anything we could have ever imagined doing with paper.
The latest digital product to impress is Humminbird’s new CoastMaster Premium Digital Charts. BoatUS Magazine recently tested these charts on a Humminbird Apex 16 chartplotter, and we were impressed with its enhanced shaded relief, bottom composition details, additional contour detail, and user-defined depth highlight ranges.
What really popped for us, however, was the ability to overlay aerial imagery. You’ve probably seen aerial or satellite imagery overlaid on a chartplotter, which can be helpful when entering an unfamiliar marina or trying to identify a visible landmark. CoastMaster Premium delivers imagery of the water that provides heightened detail as compared to aerial and satellite imagery we've seen on other digital charts, and you can customize the transparency of chart layers, which allowed us to spot rockpiles and jetties that would otherwise remain hidden beneath the water's surface. In fact, when we zoomed in on a few fishing hotspots we already knew about, we learned a thing or two about how the structure was oriented and where it extended – well beyond our existing knowledge.
Coastmaster Premium charts are compatible with either an SD card or a microSD card.
The customizable nature of all the data layers adds to your ability to explore without ever moving the boat because the transparency mix of aerial imagery, bottom composition, and shaded relief can all be customized on the fly. Different structure may be visible in different forms, so dropping the shaded relief while boosting aerial imagery, or vise-versa, can expose things like sandbars, coral, rocks, or weed beds. Anglers with a Minn Kota electric trolling motor that’s integrated with the chartplotter via the OneBoat network can set the motor to follow the path of contour lines on the chartplotter.
For a closer look, step aboard with James Kerr, a fishing guide on Florida’s Crystal River, who demonstrates how he gets the most from his Humminbird CoastMaster Premium Florida v2 chart card:
Coastmaster Premium Digital Charts are region-specific but cover relatively large areas (the Northeast Coastal chip we tested covers Virginia to Maine including coastal bays out to offshore canyons) and are compatible with Humminbird Apex, Solix, and Xplore models.
$299 to $599 depending on region | humminbird.johnsonoutdoors.com