Ray Matine Dragonfly

[rb85]

starting to grow very tired of my raymarine Dragonfly. Find it picks up an extreme amount of clutter or nothing in WesternPort tried both Auto and Manual. Does anyone have any experience with these?

[rodderslw]

I have one. ..no probs so far. Have you tried adjusting the position of the sounder? Does the clutter depend on how fast you go?

[rb85]

Rod der thanks for the response even when travelling slow it seems to pick up a lot of WesternPort weed when I drop the sensitivity it seems to pick up nothing.

Do you run yours in auto or manual how do you find sounding up fish and finding bait?

[rodderslw]

Most of the time I leave mine in auto. It's pretty sensitive. I can see my jig or bait going down to the bottom if I drop it straight down. If I do play with it I go to manual mode for the depth and zoom into the bottom half of the water. Yesterday I found a school of salmon busting up and was interested to see how they looked on the sounder. I could see the clouds of bait fish and the more solid signatures of the salmon. Because the boat and the fish were moving they appeared as long streaks in the water column. Other types of situations I get the classic fish arch shape. I don't fish WP much but do remember seeing lots of drifting weed on the sounder. On a colour display it tends to be blue and not solid red...so you just have to sort through it rather than reducing the sensitivity and miss fish. Mainly I use the sounder to see the bottom structure and look for reef, rubble and weed beds. I hardly ever use the CHIRP display because it does not show fish well but shows structure very well. I normally view the map and the normal sounder at the same time. Sometimes I view the CHIRP and normal sounder together. I fish mainly shallow water btw 2 and 12 metres mostly. At this depth the sounder is only showing you a very small slice/cone of view so seeing one or two arches probably means theres a few fish about outside of the cone.

[rb85]

Had a bit more of a play last night whilst fishing shallow for whiting with mates. Dropped the sensitivity a little and it helped could see my mate moving his sinker. Managed to locate bait offshore while having a drive and play. Auto works ok in cleaner water. Didn't throw any rods at it.

Thanks for the feedback mate

[rb85]

Still not 100% sold on the dragonfly. Picked up a bait school but it also shows weed as big arches over clutters the screen. The other issue I have is losing soundings at any speed above 10 knots