Fish finder basics

Hi all! Well I have had my new fishing boat for about a year and a half now. With it I bought a Fish Easy II fish finder. I know it is not the top of the line but having never used one for anything but checking the depth so I didn’t run a-ground with my pontoon boat I thought I would start small and learn how to really use it and then, if needed, for the fishing I do (strictly recreational)upgrade. Well after one full season of really trying to USE it for information gathering, and having read and re-read the manual several times, I am only a little beyond where I was to begin with. I can tell the depth, see some structure (although I don’t know what it is) and even have spotted a few fish! What I would like to do is be able to tell what kind of bottom I am over (muck, sand, gravel, rock, how to spot bait fish (and know that that is what it is), see a submerged weed line and know what is bottom and what is weeds. I would also like to learn how to use my fish finder in manual mode so I can fine tune the settings to optimize what I can see. I hear so many people talk about doing these things but I have not yet figured it out. If I could look at pictures of a graph identifying what I am looking at that would help me recognize the same type of thing on mine in real life. I have done a search on this sight and came up with alot of discussions about the pro’s and con’s of this graph VS that and opinions as to which one to buy, but nothing to help a novice user know what he is looking at . Any help from some of the many great minds out there wether it be referring me to a web sight or trying to explain it to me would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Welcome to the site. If you turn the ”Fish Id” off you will be in manual mode. A hard bottom will show a wider band at the bottom on your unit. A sand bottom will be not as wide at the bottom of the screen and a soft bottom like mud will be a narrower bottom width at the bottom. Schools of baitfish will show up as a glob on the screen suspended in the water colunm. When you find the bait fish you will find the walleyes. Concerning reading the bottom: take your boat to a point and go from the top of the point to off of the point. You will notice different thickness [widths] of the bottom of your screen. As you go over a bootom thats hard to a softer area you will notice the bottom getting thinner on your screen. Hope this helps. Try it and then come back on the site and tell us how it worked for you. At that time you may have some more questions so please feel free to ask them. Thanks, Bill

Eagle has a website that allows you to download emulators to demonstrate how various settings affect your graph. You may want to give that a try.

http://www.eaglesonar.com