Garmin vs Navionics beware

That is scary! My understanding is that Garmin uses Navionics data for their charting, so would think the latest Navionics branded chart would have the same information.

That's scary. It doesn't even look like the same area. A good lesson about charts being a "Guide" not gospel and the dangers of running at night or during reduced visibility. Nothing beats a good set of eyes. When was that Navionics chart updated?

From my CMap mobile app. I'm assuming the CMap aboard is similar...

I've seen the new Garmins I have been dealing with still have the good Garmin charts. I did have a recent Navionics chip in a Simrad and it was so bad in the Bahamas that I took it out of the machine and replaced it with a C-Map. I did see some of the new style charts in the latest Garmin and they sucked, had a bunch of depth lines in them like a fishing chart and very hard to read. I don't know why everyone has to change the look of the charts when it was perfect and had the perfect shading like the Aquamap shown above where the channel is white and the rest blue.

I think if I came across that intersection late at night after a long run I'd pull over, drop a hook, pour a rum, and call it a day...

It's not as difficult as it looks if you simply look at the markers. They're close enough together that there's no guessing. Unless you're a new boater and don't know to follow the markers 1st, and your chartplotter 2nd.

I installed a Garmin and a Raymarine on a small cruising boat I had and found it really handy to see two different looks in tricky areas.

Once the Garmin went blank in a narrow, complex channel on the west coast of FL that was new to me -- if I hadn't had the Raymarine fallback it would have been very uncomfortable to say the least. It turned out I had exceeded the boundary of an installed Garmin chart chip, but the unit started working again a mile or two later.

On another boat I had the Garmin was utterly wrong almost all the time cruising the Erie canal -- it usually showed the boat cruising 40 or 50 feet inland. Not a problem except in some larger waterways and lakes where the channel was not so easy to eyeball.

Sounds more like a receiver/processor/map shift issue than a charting issue.

It is quite common for electronic charts (which are scanned from paper charts) to be off in the chip like that. That is why one can never 100% trust an electronic chart, that shift is throughout that entire chart in the electronic chartplotter.

The Erie Canal chart problem happened quite a few years ago. The Garmin was only off badly in or near the Erie Canal -- it seemed accurate on Lake Erie and accurate in the Hudson River, Long Island Sound and Narragansett Bay.

Are you talking electronic raster charts? Don't believe vector charts are scanned. They are data bases.

Vector charts are still taken from paper charts, so they're only as good as the data that is put into it. I see more distance/location issues from the Vector charts. I can't tell you how many times I've run yachts right across land with them!