Many of the natural rivers, especially the smaller ones like the flint, are not graphed in their database. You're not doing anything wrong though.

 

crap. looks like I might need to look into chart plotters then? Or are rivers not recognized on those either?

 

A lot of times if you go to their websites it will give you a list of mapped waters. Most chart plotters don't come pre loaded with maps. (some do). You have to buy a 100$ or more card to put in them. These cards are created by navionics, hummingbird, navnet etc. From there there are a lot of options, specific areas lake etc. I personally went with the garmin because it was preloaded with basic maps. I also have navionics on my phone. In heavy fog (when I cant see) or smaller rivers or areas not on the garmin ill use my phone and vise versa. There have been instances where neither were mapped. My recommendation would be go to navionics website and see if you lake or river is listed. If not your more than likely s.o.l.

 

We use navionics on our lowrance hds5. We have a 7 also but one of our favorite lakes isn't on the newer chip so we run GPS on the 5 then downscan and sonar on the 7, mostay useless when bowfishing to have sonar but we use it all the time when we catfish, none of the rivers we fish here in nc are on the navionics chip, other than a blue outline

 

thanks for the input. looks like navionics is useless to me. From what I can tell, the only body of water it has is about 1.5 hrs away from me (blackshear). The way they advertise, theres thousands of users downloading (mapping) stuff daily. I find it hard to believe no one has done the flint yet. Hell, even Luke Bryant or whatever his name is sings about it. Its a pretty decent body of water that has dams and lakes.

 

We've also found that main waters and main channels on rivers are mapped but any backwaters or smaller rivers are not, I think when they change often it just not worth then doing like on the Mississippi. I've also found that you can't alway trust the GPS stuff even on the main channels especially the buoy markers.

 

guess safest bet is go out there and do it yer self..

 

I love mine driving the same path that I have traveled several times big bonus at night.