Deep dropping: does your finder show fish at 600ft?

[inicoll]

Hi all, first post here, this seems like a great source of information for me favorite type of fishing.
I am from Scotland, my wife is Philippine and I now live there.
I HAVE to fish at least 450ft deep because the locals have totally destroyed the reefs (up to 300ft deep) with their illegal dynamiting.
So.. I have a Furuno FCV582L finder with bronze 1k TTH ducer, but at 600ft it is no more than a bottom finder, I mean I cannot see any activity from any fish, I know they are there as I catch them but they don't show on the finder till about 300ft.
When you guys drop to the depths are you finding fish on your finder first? or are you fishing blind like me?

One other thing, most of my fishing is at night, at 600ft does the jig HAVE to be luminous? What are your experiences deep jigging at night?

Thanks for your help and thanks for a great site.

Ian.

[Sea Draggin]

I think you should be able to read bottom easily with a 1K transducer and the 582, but don't know what way to tell you to go with fixing it. This is a picture of Zack's Garmin with a 1K transducer in 400'.

[inicoll]

Hello Sea Draggin,

I can see the bottom clearly, no problem seeing the bottom even at 900+ft, problem is I never see any fish activity, I mean even when I'm hooked up I still see no life on the finder (apart from the sea bed) till I pull the fish up to around 300ft then it appears on the finder.
Are you saying you can see fish activity on your finder at 600ft? I mean fish near the bottom.
The fish are by no means monsters but I would have thought I would have seen some sort of mark.
I am talking about fish of about this size..By the way, do you know what kind of grouper this is?

Ian.

[Sea Draggin]

Do you see those fish in that hole? They don't mark like boom-a-rangs that deep. More like straight up down fuzzy's.

Are you using 50kw setting in the deep water?

[inicoll]

Yep, 50kw and no, I see nothing, just the bottom, Guess I will have to play with the unit a bit more, its basically set to factory settings except it is in manual mode, I screw up the gain as much as I can but then from 300ft up to the surface becomes far too cluttered and I still nee no fish marks of any sort near the bottom! But I still catch them! So I know they are there.
I expect the top half of the screen to be more cluttered in the night time due to all the weird night creatures that rise from the deep at night but a unit of this price I am sure should be performing better...Back to the manual I guess!

Ian.

[Sea Draggin]

.By the way, do you know what kind of grouper this is?

Ian.

A tasty one?

Maybe the bottom lock feature would help?

[inicoll]

Very good taste, also a lot of Almaco Jacks in the area, mmm.. they taste good too.

I will be trying the bottom lock feature next time I go home (working abroad)

Thanks for your answers.

Ian.

[Charl]

Inicoll.

Bloke you have one of the best bottom fishing sounders in the world man. I have been using a 582 for 12 year and as far as my likings go there is no better machine for bottom fishing.

I fish at 40 to 140fa(249 >871ft) and sound the shit out of those scaly buggers. But Like Sea Draggin said straight lines mate no arches or funny stuff.

Try setting your machine to these settings and provided your Probe is OK it will reach 900ft with no problems. Although that 1k probe is to big for that machine, the machine can only decipher 600watt and can only deliver a 600wat puls to the transducer. There is an amplifier available fro Furuno but I honestly don’t think is worth the trouble. The 582 is designed for a 600 watt probe. Never the less give it a try.




I have the range setting at 5fa from the bottom. The gain full open, provided there is no interference or strong current. Bottom lock On, sorry man I cant remember the other settings in the digital mode will have to get to my machine to give you that and that will not be before Jan

[inicoll]

Hi Charl,

Perhaps I am asking too much from a complete stranger but I would be greatly appreciated if when you next have time you could take some photo's of your settings screens on your Furuno? It is no problem if it is after the new year, just whenever you have time. I also like the look of the white background instead of the standard blue.
I have had the sounder for 4 or 5 years! But where I am in the Philippines is very remote, there is no persons for me to ask questions or learn from, only the web!
Thanks very very much for your time.
My email address if you wish to send the photo's direct in nicoll55@yahoo.com

Tight Lines.

Ian.

[lawaia]

inicoll - Here in Hawaii we also fish deep, not because of dynamite damage but just because that's where the most desireable bottomfish live. When metering in deep water you must realize that your fishfinder's display screen is made up of discrete transistors (TFT in your unit), commonly referred to as pixels, and that there are only so many of them making up the screen.

As a simple example, let's assume there are 600 of them vertically. That means that in 600 feet of water, each vertical pixel represents one foot of water. Very simplistically that means a fish one foot tall would light up one pixel, so you would only see one dot. In reality the unit is probably better than that and you will see one pixel light up for a fish smaller than a foot. The point is, if you are looking at the entire 600 foot water column, you will only see dots for individual fish. If there is a big closely packed school, you will see a group of dots or if enough fish and closely enough packed, a continuous "cloud".

Thus you hopefully can understand that to better "see" fish you must increase the number of pixels available for a given depth. Since your screen is made up of a fixed number of pizels, the only way to do that is to have the screen represent fewer feet of water.

Your 582L offers several ways to do that. As Sea Draggin has suggested, one way to do that is to set the mode to Zoom and select Bottom Zoom. Bottom Zoom lets you see the contour of the bottom and expands the bottom and maybe 20 feet (not sure what it is for your 582L) above the bottom onto the whole height of the screen, thus effecting more pixels per foot of water and enhancing your chances of "seeing" fish. The Bottom Lock mode does much the same thing except it will not show bottom contour but will automatically track the bottom unlike the Bottom Zoom mode which will require you to change the range to keep the bottom on screen if you change depths. (All this is done in Manual, not Automatic mode.) The problem with both Bottom Zoom and Bottom Lock is that you can only see the bottom and the water 20 feet or so above it, meaning you will not see an expanded view of anything more than 20 feet off the bottom. (The right side of the screen will still show the entire water column but that is where we started out and we're looking for more than just dots, right?)

Marker Zoom allows you to zoom in on any selected piece of the water column but will require a lot of your attention to continually move the zoomed window, and may not include the bottom itself, depending on where you set the variable range marker (VRM).

We find that the best compromise to make the vertical pixels represent less water, while still allowing us to see more of the water column above the bottom without having to continually work the VRM, is to use the Shift function. Simply put, set your range for however much water you want to see above the bottom. Let's say the fish you target are usually within 60 feet of the bottom, then you would set range to 60 or 120 feet (position 3 or 4 on your range knob). Then just hit the + Shift button until you see the bottom. If you go deeper just hit the + Shift button again; shallower, hit the - Shift button.

Of course have your gain set to return a good bottom and a faint false bottom, and for more detail set frquency to 200kHz. We can see bottom using 200kHz with enough gain. Using 50kHz requires less gain but will read a wider area (shoots a wider cone) so is less detailed.

Hope all this helps. Aloha.

p.s. Google Epinephelus quernus - it may be the grouper you're holding.