04-29-2003, 07:16 AM
Hi there TubeDude,
Steal my wife (ain't got one), kick my dog (no don't! miss him more than the ex), just don't talk in an unflattering way about my BOTTOMLINE, sidefinder, Buddy III, fishfinder. Whew!
It, as you know, has a bottom contour, directional compass, water temprature and lots of fish locating functions. Big deal you say?! Read on.....
The buddy III has an excellent feature that many earlier fishfinders did not have. SIDE SCANNING ability. I can locate a fish horizontally and vertically at the same time. I can scan for fish 360 degrees around my tube with a simple rotation of the unit.
With the refresh, I can see fish 120 feet away and to 180 feet in depth and then 100 feet away then 80...... thus I can plan on casting (possible to cast a number of times) to fish that would not even be in the cone of a conventional sonar device. For some fish, it's no good casting to them if they are fast and they are already under your tube. You can also follow fish that were on your finder but you'd have to move to keep the fish in the cone if you wanted to do the same with a conventional unit.
Did your (our) buddy have the model III and or did they learn how to use it's full functions? There's a lot there to tweak performance.
On the depth thing, I still love my finder because I rarely fish depths of more than 80 or 90 feet, fresh or saltwater, here in southern California and don't need that kind of punch nor do I wish to see if a fish is wearing a fresh coat of slime or not.
Some of the features of the newer, low and or mid-priced models have tons of features..... features I would use like the ones on my state of the art, leading edge VCR.
Did a baseball player say something like 'you scan the fish, you cast to the fish, you catch the fish'? ha ha
JapanRon
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