To be on the water it's very handy if you have GPS navigation on board, on the greater lakes I think it’s a must because fog can come quickly. If you are fishing at sea, the best GPS are those with up to date charts. Never go out and trust on the working of your equipment and bring paper charts as well, a compass and off course you need to know how to navigate on paper and a compass. Make sure you make the right set-up and choose the WGS-84 setting I choose for hddd, mm, 'mm.m" .

I am using a small handheld without a proper map but use paper maps for navigation, I only use the GPS so I know for sure where I am.

When we go out at sea, we never go alone and one of the boats do have mapping GPS with a plotter therefore I don’t need one. To be on the safe side, let the family know where you are going to and what time you expect to be back.

Great maps for the North sea and lots of wrecks you will find here.

http://users.pandora.be/tree/wrecksite/_en/home/home.html

Take the advantage of tracking and make a track of your direction. It’s easier to turn the boat after a bite and set course to the same spot or return later on the day to see if there are more fish on the spot.

Save waypoints on locations where you catch fish, after some time you will see that all the bites come from the same spots especially when you put your coordinates on a paper map and use different colors for different species. After some time you will get a map with hotspots.

Best Regards

Bert.