GraphiteZen

I just got an Eagle SeaFinder 500C DF with 4000 Watts peak to peak power, 50/200 khz transducer, and 1500 feet depth capacity.

Today was my first day using it. I was fishing a lake that at max was 11 feet deep. For 3 hours I messed with the sensitivity settings, made sure my transducer was level and away from turbulent water, the color line, all the filtering settings and there was still so much clutter I couldn't find anything. The manual claimed that at a sensitivity setting under 50 I might not see fish but they didn't say at what depth or environment. If I turned it down to like 20 it started to clear up but I couldn't find anything still.
What speed to I need to be traveling at to see the "fish arch" because there were things that looked like arches but they were either distorted or broken up. And I had to pick those out from all the clutter.
I have no idea and I really need some help figuring this thing out. Let me just say that on the water things didn't look ANYTHING like the simulation run. Ideas?

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When I die, screw some hooks into my spine and head for the deep water.

Troutski

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Teach a man to fish and he will steal your secret fishing hole...

trollin4trout

A couple things:

When you're traveling in shallow water:

The "cone" emitted by the transducer may be VERY small- so you would have to have the beam hit a fish exactly overhead for it to return an echo. Think upsidedown snowcone- that's the shape of the beam. You can see that way up near the "point" of the snowcone- the angle/distance across the beam is VERY small.

In shallow clear water - all the fish probably move away from the boat as you go over- so NO FISH will show on the screen!

And yes, you will see a LOT of "garbage" on the screen if you have the sensitivity high in shallow water- turn it way down- but don't expect to see many fish anyway for the above reasons.

Try out in deeper water with the sensitivity up high (not so high that the first 0-10ft has a bunch of garbage) You'll see more fish and the arches should be more defined. If the arches are only partial "arches"- either cutoff in the front or the back- this just means the transducer is not aimed down correctly- try rotating it one way or the other until the arches are more uniform. Hope this helps- it takes awhile to figure out what you're seeing when you first get one of these!

Slow speed is best- sometimes depending on the placement of the transducer, you will lose the signal altogether at high speeds.

On mine, under 10ft seems to be about the dividing line where I stop seeing fish on the screen. I just use it to keep from running aground at that point! At Devil's Saturday- fish would clearly show up at 12ft, but only occassionally at 10ft.- I think they may be more used to boats going over them all the time there.