I love mine for sockeye fishing, the sidescan is so clear you can actually count how many fish are in that school and see the size difference of the fish.Move your cursor on it and push enter and a waypoint goes up on your chart,turn the boat around and go get em
X2!!! Very cool piece of electronics.
And as long as you are not fishing over 150' deep it also works well for locating Chins and Ho's.
Obviously if you are fishing the bottom in 250' of water this feature will not give such great results.
As Sculpin suggests, it is very effective for locating bait balls that may not be running on the surface, we all know that with traditional fish finders, unless the fish is directly under the boat (within the transducer "cone") you will not see the fish or bait, so with the "side scan" you get a better field of view and thus get a better chance to find em.
All this being said, you still have to "catch" them
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One more really cool benefit is the ability to follow contours when using the structure scan and the charts, you can keep your gear closer to the structure by seeing what the actual structure looks like instead of just following the contour lines on the charts.
I would recommend that anyone that puts one of these units on their boat,,, remember to look up once in a while to see where you are going
, you will find that some of the images that you see on the screen are so cool that you often catch yourself looking at the "screen" more than the surroundings above the water. As you can tell I think that these units are really cool and I would definitely recommend one if it is within your budget.
Cheers,
FH