Select from 16 colors to highlight as many as 10 customized depth ranges on both Social Map charts and private Genesis Edge maps. You can set two separate custom-color depth palettes for every map and easily highlight the fish-holding areas. Humps and holes, reefs and shoals, drains and ditches, ledges and breaklines will all be much more visible when set apart with custom-color depth shading.

Pro Tip: Synch a Lowrance HDS unit with Motorguide’s xi5 Pinpoint Lowrance Gateway, and you can easily set your trolling motor to autopilot your boat to follow your custom-color-shaded depth contours.

Many fisherman “beat the bank” because they have more confidence targeting visible shoreline cover than offshore bottom structure. Those shallow fish get pounded hard, making them harder to catch. With a Genesis Edge bottom-hardness map you can fish the bottom as confidently as you do the bank, targeting the most productive places: offshore structures like ledges, sunken islands, saddles and more.

It overlays onto your contour lines a color-coded representation of the size, shape and location of areas of different bottom hardness: dark orange areas show the hardest bottom; a lighter orange indicates the next-hardest bottom; tan is the next-hardest bottom; and pale yellow shows the softest-bottom areas.

It’s no secret that big fish ambush baitfish in submerged vegetation. What’s not always known is where the good green stuff is and what areas within it likely hold the most fish. In most weather and water conditions, submerged vegetation is not visible to the naked eye, so you have to go searching for it. And even when you see a patch on your sonar screen, you won’t know its full size, shape or thickness.

Genesis Edge’s vegetation layer shows fish-holding holes in vast grass flats, depicts fish-populated points and inside-turns on deep weedlines and more. It places bright-green overlays the size and shape of areas of submerged vegetation atop your blue contour map, making it as easy to see the best places to cast as when you’re throwing to visible cover like docks and laydowns.

See how to create a vegetation map

C-MAP Genesis not only creates maps with 1-foot contours and a bottom-hardness layer for your favorite waterbodies, it literally records your dynamic 200hz sonar screen, creating, essentially, a video replay of every fish, bait ball, rock, hump or hard spot you drove over. This gives you a second chance to waypoint fish or structure after the fact, back at home, if you missed them while on the water. You can then export those "2nd chance waypoints" back to your compatible Lowrance, Simrad or B&G sonar/GPS unit and then pilot your boat directly to the areas they mark and get on a bite.

Social Map is a free, global, online collection of inland and coastal C-MAP Genesis charts generated by the Lowrance, Simrad Yachting and B&G communities of fishing, cruising, and sailing enthusiasts. Anyone with an account can download free Social Map charts to an SD card for use on the water in a compatible chartplotter.

To make the best maps, only (non-private) trips that meet the high standards of the GIS professionals on our Quality Control team are included in Social Map.

Blue water drops represent locations where sonar data has been voluntarily contributed by C-MAP Genesis users. Sonar data marked “private” is not aggregated in Social Map. Users with an Edge account can also see bottom hardness of the voluntarily contributed data. Click on the "Composition" icon found in the upper right corner in the Social Map page. Gray-shaded contours in Social Map represent legacy base-map data.

See Social Map

If there’s currently no map of your favorite waterbodies, the benefits are immediately apparent. If there IS an existing map of your favorite waterbody, how accurate is it? To get “1-foot contours” for maps of such lakes, companies can run a computer program to estimate depths between government-drawn contours lines and just fill in the blanks.

With C-MAP Genesis you can create 1-foot contours you can trust .You can discover and dissect “spot-on-the-spot” areas unknown to other anglers.

Blue-shaded depth gradations on your Genesis maps will make the structure you discover more apparent at a glance: darker blue indicates deeper water and lighter blue indicates shallower water.