My fishing seems to progress in a series of jumps. I get stuck at a particular level and then a little key comes along and unlocks a whole new level. My FURUNO electronics have opened up a new world for me and have undoubtedly been responsible for the biggest jump in my fishing capability ever. I don't talk enough about my sounders and GPS because they are now just a part of my fishing world and they just keep performing faultlessly. I have used my first FCV 600L for a long time now and it was perched on the bow of my first little boat before making the shift to my latest boat. I fish many days a year and I don't own a shed yet( I do badly need a shed but there is always more fishing gear to buy or another ridiculously expensive trip to fund) so the unit has spent its total time outside in the sun and the rain. I fish in plenty of crap weather so it is also under salt water some of the time. This unit has caught me thousands of fish and it has never been back to FURUNO for repairs or even a service. The thing has been faultless the whole time and it is dead easy to use. I just turn it on and set it to automatic. It is that simple. If fish are under my boat I know about it. If there are no fish under the boat I know about that as well.

The first unit went so well I put another one in the console of my latest boat. Two units might seem a bit excessive but the facts are I need to know what is happening under the boat at a glance and I need one unit for casting on the electric motor and one for looking around when I am driving the main motor.

The GPS is just fantastic and puts me back on the right spot every time. I don't know how I ever fished without one. Again, the famous Furuno reliability has been evident. Not one problem with the GPS. When I first got the GPS I found it a strain to learn the various functions and there are still things on the menu that I haven't got a clue about, but I can mark a spot and get back there which is about all I want to do. According to the book you can navigate to Kyoto if you want to but as I don't have any snapper spots at Kyoto I am not all that interested in learning how to get there.

The use of sophisticated electronics has infiltrated into every form of fishing that I do and my FURUNO gear has played a part in every good session I have enjoyed over the last five or six years.

If I am fishing for bream or perch I am always looking for underwater structure, drop-offs, or actual fish in deeper water. The electronics are vital for snapper to find reefs, gravel beds and increasingly to find the fish themselves. A few times now I have watched the screen on the sounder and suspected the red and green dots were snapper. When you see one of the dots separate from the school and rise steadily under the boat to materialize as a snapper on the end of your line, the penny finally drops. This FURUNO gear is deadly.

On my recent Awonga barra trips the electronics were in constant use feeding me temperatures, depths, locating deep snags and finding concentrations of fish.

It doesn't really matter what the piscatorial quarry is - good electronics will help to catch it.

Maybe I am not the right person to talk scientifically about sounders and GPS units because I don't pretend to know much about how they work. If you want to know about cone angles and mega hertzes and how many pixies are on a pin head - don't ask me because I don't know or even want to know. I am just a diseased fisherman who wants to catch as many fish as possible as easily as possible and I can tell you that I haven't managed to break my FURUNO gear yet and I have caught lots of fish by using it.

If a picture of a fish appears anywhere and I caught it from my boat, you can bet that I was looking at the screen on a FURUNO unit of some sort as I was trying to catch it. I can't say much more than that.

FURUNO = fish.

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