Ok i have a pirhanna2
fishfinder sounder, shooting
thru hull, been mounted for a while since well before I bought the
boat
it was working aok when I bought the
boat but this year has been acting up. I figured it was slime on the bottom (mostly freshwater at the docks) so I grabbed the brush and scrubbed down there where the
transducer was and viola it worked and started reading 18ft.
A few days later it was reading spotty, still is. I looked up the hummingbird site for help and figured out that if I take it off of auto and set it to the right range it will better aquire a lock on the bottom, which is true. Still spotty though, there are times it jumps in 20 ft of
water to 215ft, 150ft, 0ft, then back to 20ft, hairbrained to say the least when I have a 5 ft draught.
I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed down there so much that I noticed I was starting to take
paint off and stopped but the problem prevails. No serious issues with
water where the
transducer is mounted its almost always dry as a bone, maybe some moisture at best. The
epoxy its mounted to the
hull on has never been bothered since I got the boat, no accidental kicks or anything, its underneath the
companionway stairs going down so nothing has whacked it. (hummingbird says this problem can result from bubbles in the
epoxy sealing it to the hull).
Do transducers eventually just fail like this? I doubt it's the
electronics in the display as they seem to
work just fine (theres no
electronics other than the tranducer and the display). There's already an old
school transducer mounted down there plus the one that's hooked up, I dont want to end up with three widgets expoxied to the
hull that I cant remove.
Maybe there's a way to fix it? I havent hauled out since I got the boat over a year ago but I've seen other guys at the YC go on the grid and other than a bit of slime the bottom of the
boats were clean from a foot below the water so its not
barnacles or anything serious.
Suggestions welcome. Im in a channel with some nutty dry
parts and I dont want to run aground. Plus having an accurate sounding makes it easier to drop crab traps without guessing. Scrub some more?