So I bought a
Garmin 66i last fall, it was spendy, +$500. Right away I bought Garmin LakeVu Maps which are lake depth maps that are better than navionics in my opinion. It was $145 for the Lake Vu Maps but I like that it's the whole country, not just a region. And it includes a lot of lakes in the BWCA that I have noticed do not usually have depth maps, for example Lac La Croix, and other border lakes. After that I downloaded (for free) all the high definition satellite maps of the route I knew we were going to. Right before the trip I went on Garmin's website and paid for a month to month "freedom" (cancel at any time) plan which included 40 texts and use of SOS, for $35/mo. Right after the trip I canceled it, took 10 seconds on the website.
Anyways, real quick. Texting anywhere on the planet is a huge deal. I only sent out a text every other day or so, but it's nice to be able to say hello to your loved ones. It doesn't have "bad service", it just que's the text up for when the next satellite passes over your head, no more than 5 minutes I noticed. It's texting anywhere on the planet...what more can you say about that.
Weather app on the garmin....this suprised the hell out of me, I didn't really think about this until I was actually playing with the garmin on the trip. You just send a text (it costs a text) to the network, and it texts you back the weather, and it's all the same info you can get on a detailed report. Humidity, chance of precip, wind speed and direction, it shows you hour by hour break down of each day for the next 3 days, all the info you want. And it was spot FREAKING on. Like I was pleasantly surprised how locked in we were to the weather.
The LakeVu Maps didn't really do anything for me, if I were recommending a garmin to someone I'd say they should pass this up.
The Satellite birds eye view of the maps were awesome. I was locating rocks and reefs, fishing points, drop offs, right in my tent at the end of the night then the next day we'd go check em out. It was great. You can find portages, campsites, really great images.
Battery life was fine, I bring a power pack to charge things here and there, I ended up charging it once on a 6 day trip. I also had the screen on higher brightness than I needed, and for a couple days I had the screen on non stop as we poked around the lakes.
On the next "What would you leave behind?" topic I think I might say Map, compass, and weather radio.