Locating structure / fish

[Will C]

GPS is pretty dang accurate. That link crappie pappy shared kind of proved us both right. Fortunately, my unit has WAAS, and I'll be trying it out for the first time tomorrow. I'm not sure about other units. But this explains it.

Garmin | What is WAAS?

[Will C]

Will C, I'll be expecting a thorough review on CDC!

This won't be too in depth, but here are my initial thoughts. I went out last night and used the Garmin EchoMAP 73SV for the first time. It's my first modern day color unit with all the bells and whistles. I stepped up from an old Lowrance X91 that didn't work half the time. That was after stepping up from the Elite 4 that didn't work half the time either. So this is all new to me.

This unit is amazing. I pretty much had every combo of screens right at my fingertips with the push of a couple buttons. It's my understanding Garmin prides itself on simplicity and ease of use. I see why, because I jumped back and forth between the preset combos several times, which worked great for me since I was jumping lights looking for stripers (primarily) and crappie (secondarily).

GPS: The gps on this unit is great! It was about as dark as a night can get on the lake and I went about ten miles up the lake to parts that I've never been to without fear of getting lost. I could see on the unit when I was getting a little to close to shore. Also, amazingly, I even knew when I was getting too close to boat docks because they were on the screen as well. I knew it shows 1' contours, but I didn't know it would show boat docks. It automatically tracks back too, leaving a trail of bread crumbs without having to push any buttons. We only found one light with stripers on it. My buddy hooked one but it broke him off and somehow they got spooked. So we went searching for other lights and I used the track back to go find that light again later but the stripers had moved on.

SideVu: It was painfully cold, in the 30's, and it was about 11pm when my buddy couldn't take it anymore. So we started heading back checking old lights I know about on the way. I was only able to scam them with SideVu, and you'll see why later, but based on SideVu, none of them had stripers on them yet. SideVu is so great that I saw a sunken boat off the corner of this double decker dock I'd never have known about. It was plain as day. Wish I knew how to do a screen shot of it. Maybe I can figure that out and share it on a later trip. Can't wait to get the SideVu on the river!

DownVu: There was a LOT of noise. I mean it was nothing but noise.

2D: It was the same way, nothing but noise.

Flasher: It was the same way. I didn't start using those scenes until we got to our second light. We pulled up on it using SideVu from about fifty feet away and there was some structure off of the dock and it was near deep water so I felt it was a promising light for crappie. We trolled over to the light and that's when I turned on the all three of those features. Trying to get a decent reading, I turned down the contrast and turned up the brightness. Still, it was incredibly noisy. I mean unbelievably noisy. Couldn't see squat but noise. I thought something was wrong with the unit. Then, after we pulled off the light about twenty feet I tried the SideVu again and it was NOT noisy. I noticed later on that when we got too close to the lights with SideVu it'd get really really bright and noisy just like the other scenes did. So I'm thinking the lights must have been the problem, not operator error.

I took some pics with my phone of the unit marking stripers, but they don't do it justice.