After installing the Lowrance Elite FS 9 unit on his family boat, Deputy Editor Ethan Neville has already seen his catch-rate improve…

The Lowrance Elite FS 9 showed up on my desk at NZ Fishing News at the start of February, and I was understandably excited. Familiar with what this unit was capable of thanks to some excessive googling, I’d already started planning my next trip on our family boat – the 6m Bluefin Barking John– but things grew more complicated when I realised what was coming next. How on earth do I replace our old flush mounted 7-inch unit with my new 9-inch bracket mounted Elite 9?

One Saturday afternoon, Thursday evening, a couple of trips to Bunnings and three or four-ish beers later, I can confirm it wasn’t actually that difficult. I would love to say I had all the necessary tools in my garage to complete the task, but anyone who knows me could immediately tell you this is a flagrant lie. While I know my way around keyboard pretty well these days, power tools pose a risk to both myself and anyone in the vicinity. Jonny Allison – aka builder, fishing buddy and my best mate – was called, and I thankfully was quickly demoted from project manager to ‘tool getter and errand runner’.

Within an hour, we’d ripped out the old unit, including the transducer, and screwed the new Active Imaging 3-in-1 Transducer into the same holes. It was at this point I shot off to buy a sheet of aluminium to fill the hole left by the old Garmin. With the helping hand of some silicon, the alloy was quickly cut to size and screwed onto the dash. The mount for the new unit was then screwed on as well, and things were shaping up nicely. With Jonny’s parenting duties calling, we reconvened Thursday evening, and were joined by my flatmate Jared Letham. Together, we crimped the power cable to the battery terminal under the dash, cable tied all the cords (which run under the starboard gunwale) back together, cleaned up our mess, and then plugged in the unit for the big reveal. As someone who doesn’t usually get practical projects right the first time, I was delightfully surprised when the screen burst into life and asked me what language I wanted to use for the setup process. All in all, the install couldn’t have gone smoother, and it certainly shouldn’t prevent anyone from upgrading their fish finder.

It was well after dark when the guys finally powered up the unit successfully for the first time

After a couple of celebratory beers on the Thursday night, I was off Friday to a stag do in Pauanui – the boat, of course, followed me the whole way down. I woke up before everyone Saturday morning to proudly plug the Lowrance unit in and make sure the settings were right for the day ahead. It was both my first time crossing the Tairua bar and my first time fishing the Alderman Pins, but that hadn’t stopped me running my mouth the night before and talking big about getting the stag onto kingfish. I was putting a lot of faith in my new sounder.

At first, it was the GPS/chartplotter that was of most use, its detail guiding me comfortably through the harbour’s deepest water and out over the 1m swells coming over the bar. I was then impressed by the high resolution display. On my old unit, I’d inevitably use one hand to shade the glare and the other to actually operate the sounder, but the resolution and brightness of the Lowrance was clear even in the morning sun, allowing me to focus on navigating. Fishing came next, and this was when the real test presented itself. Unfortunately, due to the place we had positioned the transducer, I could only read the depth while travelling under 7-8 knots, which meant I was heavily relying on the charts. With both the C-Map Enhanced Embedded and Navionics charts pre-installed, this didn’t actually hinder my fishing that much. When we arrived at the first pin and marked some bait, a couple of the guys started jigging immediately, but after a few drifts over the same pin, we had only landed one small rat. With the next pin calling, we moved on.

It was in the slightly deeper water at our next destination that I got to see what this sounder looks like all lit up. On my previous unit, I could mark schools of fish and I could tell the density of the school, but I never accurately marked individual fish. At this pin, I could clearly see kingfish hovering above the bait ball (something that was missing at the first spot), and quickly told the stag to drop his jig. He hooked up immediately, lost it, hooked up again, and fought the not massive, but comfortably legal kingfish to the boat. The touchscreen display enabled me to quickly mark the coordinates (something which was considerably more painstaking on my previous unit), and the drift was repeated. While the bait was moving quickly and the fish went off the chew as quickly as they came on, I was still stoked with my new tech – and that I hadn’t let the stag’s kingfish hopes down.

The first fish caught with the help of the new unit - that's one happy stag!

A couple of weeks later, now back in my home waters of the northern Hauraki Gulf, I set out for an afternoon fish to a reef off Little Barrier. As I know exactly what this terrain looked like on my old unit, this was going to be the true test of the upgrade – how big of an impact would the new Lowrance have on my normal day to day fishing?

The answer: a lot.

The afternoon started with a bait catching session, but as has been the case this season (at least for me), the jack macks were slow on the bite and not in their usually large balls. Under the hot summer sun, we toiled for more than an hour for only four or five small jacks. We were marking bait, and the times we did hook up were when the bait was at its thickest, but not even a brand new sounder could convince the bigger jacks to bite our sabikis in the warm, still water. As we were fishing close to structure, I took a bit of time to try out the Side Scan feature. I could immediately see how beneficial this view is going to be when soft-baiting in the shallows as it allowed me to mark and then cast at fish beside the boat – however, the reef was calling, so I stopped mucking about and set off to Five Mile Reef.

The more detailed charts proved immediately helpful. I used to work out my drift with my phone GPS, and only use my chartplotter as a general guide – but with the high resolution bathymetry enabled, which provides a higher concentration of contour lines, I had more detail than ever right in front of me. The reef was soon located, and I started scanning the sonar to find the bait. My favoured view is the dual screen of sonar and chartplotter, as it allows me to see the fish and quickly mark on the chart where they’re holding. I did exactly this, but the bait was low in the water column, and while there were a few kingfish marks hovering around (mostly below) it, these were few and far between. As expected, then, our first two livebaits were taken by snapper. Around the 50cm mark, they were both great eating but not what we’d come to the reef to target.

Over the next hour, however, I watched as something interesting happened. The sun and fish were in some wonderful asymmetric relationship: as the sun went down, the bait schools came up through the water column. I could clearly see the kingfish marks getting thicker around the bait and pushing the school higher, and the kingfish themselves were also moving up the water column. Eventually, we heard the telling splash of a kingfish breaching. At around 6pm, I cast my first stickbait. It was smashed as soon as it hit the water, and for the next hour, we had a frenetic topwater session with multiple fish hooked. I simply waited until I saw kingfish ‘eyebrows’ high in the water column on the Elite 9, and then cast towards them. It was fishing at its most simple and most effective.

And then Level 3 lockdown hit in Auckland.

I had planned to test out a few more of the Lowrance’s features before writing this review, but that’s the way things go sometimes. Still worth mentioning, however, is that it’s possible to modify the depth, zoom, frequency, sensitivity and colour line when using sonar, as well as filter out unnecessary surface noise, which are all things I know will be of value. The DownScan mode, which uses sonar to provide detailed images of the structure and fish below the boat, is another feature I’m looking forward to trying out. If I kept my boat at my place, I also would’ve spent time customising the home and ‘favourite’ pages. As our boat is used by my brother when I’m not around, it’d be great to have my favoured pages saved and ready to go every time I head out. But all of this will have to wait!

What I can confirm in the meantime is that the Lowrance Elite 9 has already changed my fishing for the better. You’d be hard pressed to find a better value for money unit on the market, or one that is simpler to install. While I’ve still yet to familiarise myself and have a play with some of the more technical features, I will confidently be recommending the Elite 9 to anyone due an upgrade.

April 2021 - Ethan Neville
New Zealand Fishing News Magazine.
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