I fish with a friend in his boat and he has a Garmin EchoMap 73sv depthfinder on the console. It came pre-loaded with the locations of brush piles that have been put out by the Conservation Dept. in our favorite crappie lake, and in the summer and fall crappie are to be found pretty much exclusively in those brush piles. There are hundreds, or maybe even more, brush piles marked in that lake on the navigation chart - and on any given trip we'll be within easy range of 40 or 50 of them depending on where we launched that day.

On the chart the brush piles appear as tiny black squares and our boat as a boat-shaped cartoon about six times the size of a brush pile square. That means, as great as the brush pile locating feature is on the Garmin, it's very approximate. There's a satellite delay so the boat cartoon doesn't move exactly in real time, and once the boat cartoon on the chart covers the brush pile square symbol it can no longer be seen. Also, Garmin has marked these chart locations based on GPS coordinates supplied by the Conservation Dept., and while they get you in the ballpark you just know you're close.

What we do is when my partner is driving and is about to run over a brush pile symbol, I get in the front fishing seat, put down the trolling motor, and watch the front scope. The transducer of that second scope is on the trolling motor and it's set on sonar. When the brush pile appears on that scope I throw a marker buoy upwind - or just as often we miss it and have to go around again. Lots of times we end up searching further with the trolling motor until we finally find the brush pile, and this can take up a lot of fishing time.

My question - it isn't my Garmin scope but I've downloaded the owner's manual to read up on "waypoints". Next time we're directly over brush piles, couldn't I press the "MARK" button to save and name those waypoints? Then it looks like on a later trip USER DATA > WAYPOINTS would get me to a list of waypoints with the names and comments I've added, then NAVIGATE TO > GO TO lays out a route on the chart to take us to a brush pile.

How close do you think this method would get us to the actual brush pile? The way we're doing it now gets us within maybe 30 or 40 feet, and if we could improve on that it sure would help. THANKS!