Garmin chart plotter

My primary navigation charts are on a Garmin 740 Chart plotter that’s mounted on my binnacle. I also have Navionics and Active Captain on my iPhone. And, my third set of charts is OpenCPN with the NOAA charts on my Surface and laptop. I also print out the NOAA charts when I enter a new area.

The charts on the Garmin are from 2016 but were good enough for the Great Lakes. On the ICW, I’ve been noticing too many discrepancies so I decided to pay the $50 to upgrade to the 2019 version. Big mistake!

The charts are close to 20 GB and took days to download. I know, at home I would have it done in an hour. On the boat, I rely on marina shared WiFi, or tethering off my cell phone in areas with poor LTE or 3G service.

My first attempt failed and the software couldn’t unlock the maps. I opened a ticket with Garmin and they had me re-download the maps. A couple of days later, I got the maps and they unlocked.

I plugged the SD Card into the Garmin, it detected the new maps, and asked if I wanted to update the chart plotter. I clicked YES and 20 minutes later it was done. It rebooted and the splash screen showed the new version. I pressed the button to see the charts and there was nothing. I HAD NO CHARTS. No errors in the event log. No errors booting up, the unit thought everything was fine.

This time I called Garmin. The tech seemed confident the issue was old firmware. He said I needed to update it to get the new maps to display. The firmware is only 3.3GB, so I was able to download it overnight at the marina.

I put the firmware update on the chart plotter only for it to tell me I already have the latest firmware installed.

On the phone with Garmin again. I finally got a tech who knew what was going on. In 2019, the charts grew too large for their existing format. Garmin changed the chart format and released a firmware update for their current devices. My 740 is “discontinued” so they never updated the firmware.

Fine, I’ll live with the 2018 charts. Still better than the 2016 charts. Nope, they can’t (or won’t) sell or give me old charts.

Ok, refund my money and roll me back to the 2016 charts I had. Can’t, or wont do that either.

Garmin acknowledged they should not have sold me the charts and my chart plotter should not have applied incompatible charts. They said this has only happened a few times and they can’t figure out why.

To “fix” my issue, they are overnighting me a new chart plotter. One equivalent to what I have now, but newer. For free. I only had to pay for the overnight shipping.

Now, the bad side of this… The wiring and mounting base are not the same. It’s not a simple swap. If it was, I would have upgraded before we left.

So, we made reservations at a marina for 2 nights. The GPS is being delivered to the marina and two days should be enough time for me to install it. It’s also time to change the engine oil again. Always something on a boat.