Re: What is a good fishfinder for a decent price? What do you run?
Boatist ... sorry about the delayed reply but I was away for Easter.<br /><br />"Structure" takes on a different meaning when comparing blue-water fishing on Australia's Great Barrier Reef to hunting down Barramundi and Mangrove Jack hiding amoung logs and mangrove tree roots in a shallow creek.<br /><br />On the ocean the bottom is well defined and seeing fish (usually BIG fish!) with a quality sounder is not too difficut, once you find them. Structure can be a coral bombie, a wreck, weed bed, rubble, etc. A colour sounder (from my experience using my friend's expensive Furuno) shows that subtle bumpy line on the bottom with smatterings of red denoting fish which are hard to define on my mono X135. Generally I'm looking for bait balls with "arches" in the area showing the larger predators. The X135 does a great job for this. It is also very good at showing fish stacked over rubble.<br /><br />In creeks I tend to sight fish and the best summer fishing here is around low tide when most of the snags are exposed. I use the sounder at these times as a guide but I'm not glued to the screen as I am when on the ocean. I understand how a sounder works so I'm not always fooled into thinking each snag is holding fish. Experience of the conditions comes into play at these times.<br /><br />I don't fish freshwater dams where the snags are usually a lot deeper so I have to bow to your experience in this area. And as jtexas points out, there is no substitute to local knowledge, the sounder is simply an important tool of our trade.
