Help on reading a fish finder?

[genEus]

How does one become good at this? The little boat I bought came with an Eagle Fisheasy 245. I've read the manual for it but I still have no confidence that I really know how to read what I see on the screen. I don't use the dummy Fish Track mode, since I'm trying to learn "the real way." Are there any good tutorials online or anything that would make me better at this?

Thanks!

[skipper19]

It actually is a learning process in itself by using it and getting familiar with its functions, settings, and its capabilities. I'm not familiar with that one you have but some are easy and some are complicated. If you can spend some time in the water with it and do some experimentation with what it sees below by sending down some different objects on a line and mess with the sensitivity and range zoom settings, you will become familiar with what the return in the screen looks like in correlation with the object you are presenting. I agree that you should use the echo function and not the fish id because everything shows up the same on fish id. Schools of bait are a different return than a single fish and a thermocline will appear as a thin line faintly revealing a temp break if sensitive enough. Fish id shows all these things as fish. Arches are fish, bait shows up as clouds or looks like a false bottom return. Transducer signal frequency has a lot to do with definition higher frequency is more defined but less area covered. Hope this helps

Mark

[ Post made via Android ]

[Mortigan]

I still had this bookmarked from the reading I was doing last season. It's pretty informative: http://www.lowrance.com/Support/Tips-an ... -Tutorial/

[Mickey Finn]

I still had this bookmarked from the reading I was doing last season. It's pretty informative: http://www.lowrance.com/Support/Tips-an ... -Tutorial/

Was just going to post that one. Beat me to it.

[Mortigan]

[genEus]

So... I am chuckling a little to myself re-reading this post. After the recent trip to Keuka Lake I verified that neither the fishfinder nor my eyes (or brain) were broken. It's just that it's kind of hard to try to make out fish hooks or bait clouds when they ain't there! Turns out I just had to get out on a lake where there is some good activity, is all. But, that tutorial is definitely great, nevertheless!

[Mortigan]

It's just as frustrating to see ton of good marks if you can't get one to bite. At least without a ff, you could say to yourself "Maybe there just aren't any fish."

[Big Dave]

Turn the fish ID off. If you want to see the bait and hooks.

[steelfire]

Make sure your sensitivity is turned way up. I was taught by a lowrance tech that if you turn the sensitivity way down to loose the clutter, you will miss a lot of fish and bait on the screen.