Anglers who run their own boat work a depth problem first: the flats skiff on a tide window, the bass boat on a lake point, the center console on a channel edge at first light. Helm is built around depth, so the chart that keeps you off a bar is the same chart that shows you where the bottom falls away.
Drop a marker anywhere on the chart, name it, and it stays. With your devices signed in to the same account, saved spots sync along with your routes and recorded trips, so a mark you set with wet hands at 6am is on the iPad when you plan the next trip.
A saved spot in Helm sits on real data: the depth shading around it, the contour it sits on, and what the tide is doing to that number at the hour you plan to fish.
Fish hold on edges, and edges show up on a chart that has enough depth behind it. Helm draws its shading and contours from NOAA electronic navigational charts on the coast and the Great Lakes and from US Army Corps of Engineers charts on the rivers, and adds the NOAA CO-OPS predicted tide to the depth where a station is close enough. The state lake packs carry no depth, so a lake that only they cover has no shading.
Three things anglers look for read straight off the chart. The break where four feet becomes fourteen along a channel edge. The point that tapers out and drops into deeper water. The spoil bank beside a dredged cut.
The measure tool gives you distance and bearing along the line you draw, and in the coastal and Great Lakes packs that carry routing data, a depth profile along it, including where the shallowest point falls. Run a line from the grass edge out across the drop and you see how far off the bank the break sits and how steeply it goes.
Enter your draft once. Helm shades the water that is too thin for your hull and plans routes around it instead of drawing a straight line through a two foot shoal. On a back country flat, that is the difference between a route you can run and a route you have to pole.
Press Go on a route and Helm records the trip to the logbook. You found fish in a bend with no name and it was too good to stop and tap the screen. Open the logbook afterward, bring the trip back up on the chart, and put the mark on the exact water you were over. Next season you go back to a spot instead of a general area.
Helm shows NOAA CO-OPS tide predictions against the MLLW datum, and tidal current arrows that rotate as you scrub forward in time. Scrub to the hour you plan to fish and watch which way the water will move through a creek mouth. This is how you plan an inlet on a falling tide, or a bar that fishes for the two hours of outgoing water.
Animated wind, wave and current overlays run over the chart, and a multi-day strip breaks the forecast into three hour columns for wind, gusts, air temperature and rain, with water temperature alongside them. Read the strip the night before and pick your morning.
| What you want to know | Where Helm gets it |
|---|---|
| Depth under the keel right now | NOAA ENC on the coast and the Great Lakes, USACE Inland ENC on the rivers, plus the NOAA CO-OPS predicted tide where a station is close enough |
| What kind of number it is | The depth card says whether it is a charted sounding, a depth band from the chart, or water with no soundings |
| High water, low water and which way the current sets | NOAA CO-OPS predictions against MLLW, with current arrows tied to the time you scrub to |
Marsh fifteen miles behind the ramp, a reservoir down in a canyon, an offshore run past the last tower. Helm has 161 downloadable chart packs. With the pack for your water on the device, charts, depth where the chart carries it, routing in the coastal and Great Lakes packs that carry it, the measure tool and the anchor alarm all work with no cell service.
Depth, speed over ground and course over ground sit on one strip, so you can hold a contour by watching a single line. The anchor alarm wakes you if the boat drags off the hole you anchored on. A night chart style keeps a pre-dawn run readable, and satellite imagery shows the shape of a flat and the shoreline behind it.
The AIS layer puts live vessel traffic on the chart you are navigating with. Vessels that carry an AIS transponder show with their position, their vessel type from the ITU-R M.1371 type codes and their movement status, so an anchored tanker reads differently from one under way. The visible area refreshes about every ten seconds while the layer is on, so you can tell the shrimp boat crossing your drift from the tug that wants the channel.
Helm also runs on CarPlay and puts the chart on the vehicle's built-in screen on the tow to the ramp.
Yes. Drop a marker anywhere on the chart, name it, and it stays. Signed in to the same account on both, saved spots sync across your iPhone and iPad along with your routes and recorded trips.
Read the depth contours and shading, then draw a line across the area with the measure tool. In the coastal and Great Lakes packs that carry routing data, Helm returns a depth profile along that line, so a break or a ledge shows up as a step with the shallowest point marked.
Yes. Download the chart pack for your area first. After that, charts, depth where the chart carries it, routing in the coastal and Great Lakes packs that carry it, the measure tool and the anchor alarm all work with no cell service.
Yes. Save the spot as a marker and you can navigate back to it. Trips you run with Go on a route are also recorded to the logbook, so you can bring an old trip back up on the chart, mark the exact water you were over, and navigate back to it.
Only partly. The state lake packs draw lake shorelines and carry no depth, so there are no contours to fish to, except in Minnesota, where state contour lines are drawn on the lakes. The Great Lakes are on NOAA charts with charted depth and contours.
Scrub the timeline to the hour you are thinking about. Helm shows the NOAA CO-OPS tide prediction for that moment and rotates the tidal current arrows to match.
Free to download. Free trial included.
Helm Boating