Post up your Kayaks!

Started by coastal_dan, September 08, 2014, 04:25:59 PM

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Gfish

 Thanks for the input. I be lookin mostly to find Akule bait balls up to 300 ft.deep and deep underwater structure. The water's pretty clear here, maybe that'll help it work better...
Fishing tackle is an art form and all fish caught on the right tackle are"Gfish"!

Three se7ens

Quote from: Gfish on October 11, 2018, 03:26:13 AM
Thanks for the input. I be lookin mostly to find Akule bait balls up to 300 ft.deep and deep underwater structure. The water's pretty clear here, maybe that'll help it work better...

It can get a complicated as you like, but you should be well served by a unit with good traditional sonar and down imaging might be a welcome addition.  Transmit power and frequency will be the important factors, and you will want to do some research to see which will best suit your needs.  In general, higher frequencies produce a sharper picture, but dont have as much range as lower frequencies.  Salt water requires more power to read at any given depth too, so be sure the max depth references you use are for salt water, and not fresh water. 

As for brands, I really like my garmin.  The humminbird helix is a good unit too, but the brand in general is aimed more towards freshwater fisherman.  No experience with how it handles deep salt water.  Lowrance is often considered the standard for salt water, but I havent been very impressed with their lower cost offerings.   

Specific to garmin, the echomap series has very good hardware, the maps are better than most anything you will find, and the sonar performance is very good.  There are multiple transducers available(none are cheap) that give options in frequency and transmit power.  The Striker series has much of the same, but it does not have charting.  It has gps, and you can save/load coordinates, and save tracks, but it wont show those in relation to a map.  Whether that matters is a personal choice. 

Having used an echomap, I dont know that Id be happy with losing the maps, because the Garmin maps are so good.  All the NOAA published reefs, obstructions, channels, etc are already on the maps.  Everything else Ive used didnt include any of that, just the depth lines.  And I still think Garmin is better with those than anyone else too.