Bud_in_OR

You're absolutely right. I prefer the color, hands down, had to have it Bud

Anything with the Lindners in it.

I have color sonar/GPS (Lowrance) combo at the console and b/w sonar w/color GPS next to it at the bow(PinPoint& Lowrance). If Motorguide/PinPoint come out with a color sonar/GPS combo that interfaces with my trolling motor, this fat boy will own one. I'll have a color GPS for sale(two units in front is one too many). I will never go back to b/w. This is for sonar as well as GPS/chart-plotter....And those Navionics maps...Doggies. Bud

Hey Abelfisher, Who's idea was it to put this on the canoeing and tubing board??? Are they running GPS on tubes now? Anyhow, As in my previously typed and lost post on the equip. board, look at the Eagle FishElite 480. It has a super high pixel count and more bells and whistles than you can imagine for $450 from Cabellas or Bass Pro Shops.. A trolling motor transducer is available. Since WAAS was initiated/invented I use a GPS at both bow and console. The console machine gets me from waypoint to waypoint quickly. The bow WAAS/GPS machine does the serious work used in conjunction with the trolling motor transducer. It puts me within 10 feet of pre-determined cover/structure without having to pass over the fish and spook them. Both my sons use the FE480's and swear by them(one uses the dual fraquency unit). I have played with The 480's and found them to be as good as my LMS332C sans color. You will probably, someday, fish in a friend's boat that has a color machine. It doesn't take long to go bananas with ***. Ask me how I know. Bud

Hey Basskid17, You said you have no problem catching one or two fish but then the bite dries up. If you get a chance watch Glen Lau's 'BigMouth' series of videos. He is the guy that has done most of the underwater stuff that you have seen in commercials on TV. In these tapes it shows, time after time, fish after fish, bass taking lures. More importantly, the tapes show the bass in the background. These fish, sometimes schools of huge bass, watch a couple of their buddies bite and be dragged off. Then they watch, cast after cast, lures being pulled past their faces. They show no response, none, zip. Most fishermen (this time Homer Circle) would think they had caught all the bass. This was clearly not true. What Mr. Circle caught were the ACTIVE bass, at that time. If one were to find a few places where they caught bass and marked the spots, gps, marker buoys, whatever and then did a 'milk run' at time intervals.... Well, these videos and my own underwater camera have proved to me, there ain't no such thing as one or two bass. There definitely can be only one or two active bass in a school that you can't believe. Individual fish in a school can feed/become active at different times according to their digestion rate and how full they were when the lure went past their face. Bud

I accidently learned this 'pattern' about 25 yrs. ago, fishing a pond with a ton of thick coontail about 3 ft under the surface. The water was extremely clear. I was useing a blue-back countdown Rapala. Trying to 'count' it down to tick the weeds, I hung up about every other cast. It was, drag it in to get the crap off the hooks, cast out and load up again....Driving me nuts. After a while I lost it and reefed the sucker out of the weeds, ripped it a couple times to help clear it and burned it back as fast as I could crank...almost. I was bank fishing at the time and, standing in the same tracks, I hooked and landed eleven bass in eleven casts. They were only two to three pounders but it was a super memory builder. I've used this, snag it and rip it, retrieve a thousand times since then. It has worked often. Bud

Hi, A couple times a year I get a wild hair for 'bottom fishing'. The Oregon coast has a wide assortment of fish that live in rocky bottom areas, from shallow to over 300'. I usually get on a head boat at Depoe Bay. They don't need to go far to get fish and it's a short trip back with my, seasick, self. They drift over rocky bottoms and everyone has their heavy gear. We're allowed three hooks, so we run a 4-8 oz. jig with rubber tail above two snelled flies. When the boat starts its drift everyone is at the rail at the ready. Let the WD-40 fly. Everyone is drenching the whole rig with it. I don't know if it helps but we usually limit in very few drifts. My sons use it trolling for salmon and swear by it. It's supposed to have a fish oil base. ???? Bud

Hi, I screwed up in the first paragraph of the post above. What I should have said is; As you are driving, looking out the left, drivers' window, what you see at the right side of the window is what is happenning NOW, under your transom. As you drive, what was,'NOW' is passed over and behind your transom. Only things/data seen at the absolute, right edge is real time. The screen is registering things that you are moving away from. It shows past history (an Iovinoism). While I'm at it, be aware that useing 'fish symbol' or ASP(Lowrance) de-tunes your machine. You'll likely not see baitfish, unless they are huge, with these operational. Also, unless fish are stationary as you go over them, you wont see arches or hooks. A fish moving with the boat will be a straight level line on the screen. One moving up or down, trying to get away from the boat, or moving in and out of bait will show a short diagonal line. This is good. It shows activity (also an Iovinoism). If you do see arches, do not worry about length of arch for reading size. Thickness of arch is what shows respective size. If the fish is run over fast, the arch will be high and narrow. If it is on one side of the boat/cone or the other it will have a tail, one side pointing down farther than the other. Left or right side of boat? You don't need 'fish symbols' to tell you. Read the 'tail' on the arch. If the 'tail' is on the right side of the arch, the fish is on the left side of the cone. A fish arch in the cone center will have no long side/tail. Tail on the left, fish is on right side of cone. Look at www.iovino.com and get his video. You wont be sorry. I'm gone. Bud

Hey Wargofcac, Think of your screen as the left window of your truck as you drive down the road (safely, we hope). Everything that is visible behind the right side of the window is stuff you have already passed. If you are going real slow, what you see at the right side of the window is just behind your transom. If you are going fast, what you see is a long way back. Something that is extremely important is understandind 'dead zones'. The machine sends down an inverted cone. It gets wider as it goes deeper. Say the center of the cone is exactly 20', transducer to bottom. On a flat bottom, the distance at the edges of the cone will be 22', transducer to bottom. The machine will NOT read farther than the closest thing that enters the cone,...the bottom at center. The edge, from 20' to 22' will NOT be read. It is a dead zone, a 2' thick black line. By the same token, If you are running your boat parrallel to and over a sloping bottom, the machine will read NOTHING below the closest point that the beam touches. So... If the bottom slopes downward, from 20' to 30' as you travel along the slope, you will see a ten foot thick black bottom line from 20' to 30'. This is a dead zone. Everything deeper than the closest cone, contact point at 20' will be blacked out. To read the slope you must run UP or DOWN it. As you travel up the slope the front of the beam 'reads' and what you see will be at the front of the cone(perhaps at the center of your boat in 30' of water). Every thing behind the front edge of the cone is in a dead zone. As you travel forward the front and back cone edges will , eventually, both be over the slope edge at equal depths and the bottom band will be very thin (remember the original scenario). If you travel down the slope, only the back edge of the cone will 'read'. As you progress past the edge of the slope with the back cone edge at 20', all things in the cone angle AHEAD of the back edge is in a dead zone and the back edge(what is being read) is ten or so feet behind your boat. Again, there will be a ,10' thick, black bottom band that gets progressively narrower as the back and front of the cone get closer to touching the bottom at the same depth, 30'. If this doesn't make sense, get a chalk board and draw the bottom configuration on it that I've talked about. Also draw the surface. Get a piece of cardboard and cut out a 20 deg. cone and a little, teensy-tinesey boat. Lay the boat/cone on the chalk board and it should become clear. Remember, nothing, in the cone angle, that is below the closest contact to the transducer will be read. All machines, regardless of make or model,work in this manner Oh. Oh. By all means order Iovino's book and, FOR SURE, his tape. Any one who buys a sonar should get these as a freebie. Hope this helps Bud

Hi, Interesting that no-one has mentioned the Motorguide PTSv series, positioning motor. It's the one they came out with after they bought out Pin Point. About three years ago a buddy took me fishing so I could see his new trolling motor.It didn't take more than a couple hours on the water until I wanted to get the hell home so I could order mine. I have never had any problems with my Pin Point trolling motor. When I purchased it I also bought the sonar, a TDP7500, that plugs into it. The sonar was/is a piece of trash if you compare it to a Lowrance. All things considered, I've been in heaven since I bought the motor. If/when it goes belly-up I will get the Motor Guide knock-off. Nothing I've tried matches it. The thing tracks depth, channel edge and shoreline. It aint 'RonCo", but you still 'Set it and forget it'. Ok. pile on. Bud