I bought my first GPS this summer, right after buying my first boat and I
was in the same quandry you are. The short answer is I put a lot of thought
into it and settled on a Garmin GPS 72. The long answer follows:

It's a high quality unit but low cost because it's stripped of all but the
essential technology.

Here's how I arrived at that conclusion.

It's a solid 12 channel GPS, WAAS and DGPS capable if you want to go there.
It doesn't have a lot of extra fancy bits but what it does have is high
quality and won't be eclipsed by technological advances for a while. If the
WAAS signal is encoded "do not use" then this unit will not use it (my
understanding is that all Garmins are like that). If you don't understand
that then you should read up on WAAS, it's a developing technology and a bad
signal or a test signal can decrease your accuracy.

I wasn't in the mood to spend hundreds for something that "sorta worked" or
was "pretty good", I wanted to be able to tell exactly where I was exactly
when I wanted to know it. Clear readout, customizable information, big
enough to see at a glance, no screwing around. And I didn't want to have to
upgrade it in the next couple of years. I don't *need* WAAS accuracy but
when it comes online I'll gladly accept an extremely accurate fix on my
position.

I looked at the fancier ones but they either sacrificed quality to add less
useful (to me) features or were terrifically expensive if they maintained
the quality. They're also very small and for me too confusing to read
easily. If you don't spend the big bucks you get those tiny little greyscale
maps that I can't make heads or tails of.

I'm going to have a laptop with digital charts on board anyway. I'll also
use the laptop to work and watch DVDs (laptops can be DC friendly), and this
GPS unit can feed its data into my computer and voila, big ass colour chart
plotter for the price of a cable. For those more rare times I actually need
a real-time chart plotted course.

Also I bought a full set of paper charts, which you should have too, so
until next year and the laptop I can just navigate the semi-old fashioned
way.

So it all depends on your needs and your budget. If you have money then get
the GPS Map 176C, it's way cool. My friend has one and I navigated us
through some shallows outside the channel, it was quite the nifty little
deal.

In my case all I really needed was a solid GPS receiver to feed my computer
and so I spent my money on the best one I could get and minimized my
expenditures on the extras.

Here is a link to the Canadian site where I bought mine. If anyone is
interested their service was fantastic. I wish they sold more stuff I needed
because I was very impressed with them. I had questions that weren't covered
in their ad copy so I e-mailed and they e-mailed me right back with the
answers. Very impressed.

http://www.gpscentral.ca/products/garmin/72.htm