Taking Mr NJ Out to La Jolla

[Latimeria]

I heard of the yellow and white bite at Ja Lolla and knew it would be a cluster f@ck out there.  My plan was to get Eric out and on a yellow, white or possibly a halibut.  My new HDS fish finder arrived and I installed it starting with swithching out the transducer with the expensive Totalscan transducer.



I got the unit hooked up and power on!



The FF wouldn't work in the driveway, but I figured it would be fine out in the water.  The overlay of the depths to the 3-d topography were great though!



We head to Ja Lolla first thing in the morning and everything looks great... except my sonar wasn't working!  WTF!?!?!  No signal to the depth finder at all.  I tried everything I could out there, but no luck.  Finally I just had to figure we were going old school.  The problem was La Jolla had hundreds of boats and kayaks all over out there.  Besides tons of red crab and mackerel, and sardine, and round herring... How the hell was a fish going to find your bait in this cluster?!?

Well, a couple of boats got some nice yellows, but the majority struck out.  It was even hard finding any willing rockfish to bite as they were all stuffed with crab.  The few we got were puking up all crab.



We slow trolled macks... Trolled Rapalas, drifted macks, casted irons.... everything and had a hard day.  It only made it hard as I never knew what was exactly below us and the depth on the finder since it was not working.  We had one thrill as we thought Eric hooked up!  As we got it close, we felt the pain.





We decided to make a long run to look for halibut and ran into a buddy on his boat.  He clued me in to some problems about my FF since he has the same exact one.  It might be very helpful, but wouldn't be helpful on this day.

So for bait, we caught Green Macks, Spanish Macks, Sardine, Round Herring, Smelt and some other brown baits...  The only real fish we caught were some Calico Rockfish and Sculpin.  Nothing really decent.  I will say after cleaning the rockfish, the meat smelled sweet as the crabs came pouring out and the meat was as white as I have ever seen!



Well, hopefully I find the issue and get the fish finder back up and running.  It always seems like something when I try to work on the boat.

Thanks for reading.

[1morecast]

At least you got on the water. Sorry to hear about the FF issues, I'm sure you will get it resolved by the next trip.

[Latimeria]

I think I figured it out. This is not your plug-n-play sonar unit

[spideyjg]

Make sure you go into the menu and choose the right transducer. Mine wasn't at first.

There were a crap load of settings to check.

Jim

[Latimeria]

Make sure you go into the menu and choose the right transducer. Mine wasn't at first.

There were a crap load of settings to check.

Jim

I just finished going over everything.  The temperature gauge was buried deep inside the system...  I think I have it all set now though.
Thanks Jim.

[spideyjg]

Still trying to find an easy quick odometer reset for a trip on mine. 

[vdisney]

Bummer about the FF problems, BUT..................it beats getting towed in like the "old days"