Pics of last night's arches!!

[Tackleberry]

You're running 200khz, you won't get arches, you'll get lines and blobs. 50/83khz will give arches. I don't know what colour scheme you're running but something doesn't look right as its all in only 2 colours. When at anchor you probably could slow down your ping speed a bit. It is possible that your transducer is looking too far forward or backward (angle). One tip for getting the gain setup correctly as a starting point is to set your depth to at least double the actual depth, then turn up the gain till you see a double bottom ( this happens because the sonar bounces of the bottom, then off the water surface then off the bottom again and hits your transducer. Once you can see a double bottom you are in the right territory. If you get a hard signal on the double bottom then your gain is too high, if you can't see the double bottom then your gain is too low. Find the double bottom, set your depth back to to auto or whatever depth you're in and then turn it up till you just get a bit of clutter on screen, then drop it back one or 2%. As for colour line, you want a thin line 5-10mm of hard return colour as your bottom contour. This will give you close to good settings, then you can just play with the adjustments a bit till you like what you see.

Often when you get a solid line on the sounder half way or near the bottom, its weed caught around the anchor rope, burely cage rope or your fishing line and your sounder is seeing it. Maybe your transducer is pointing too far forward.

You could also start by setting your sounder back to factory defaults, be sure your correct transducer is setup in the settings and double check that your transducer is parrallel with the waterline when at rest, or ever so slightly facing forward. Also be sure it's fully submerged. All the best mate, good luck.

skronkman is the line just under the 10 the double bottom you are talking about

[skronkman]

Hey tack, no that doesn't look like it to me. It looks like you are actually in 20' of water there. If it was a double bottom it would appear at double the depth (40' in this case), not half the depth (10'). You would have to manually adjust your sounders depth to at least 40' to see it and then turn up the gain till it appears. I'm not sure what the solid line is, possibly a thermocline but I haven't really seen one in my own personal experience and at 8 degrees I would say unlikely. Depending on where you were it could also be the point where the fresh water is separated from the salt water, around river mouths this can happen or in saltwater lakes after rains. You didn't by chance have a jig hanging over the side at 10' ? At the bottom of the screen that looks like a school of fish to me. Bream in the lakes up your way can look like that when they school up but again your water temp is only 8 degrees, so I'm not sure.

When and where is that sounding from?
Did you catch any fish on that sounding? What species?

As an aside, I that was a sounder on my boat, you would be looking at weed on the surface, weed wrapped around my burely cage rope and lots of weed on the bottom! Haha.

Edit. I just noticed you're in feet not meters, modified the original text to reflect this. Old Skool.

[Tackleberry]

nope not a jig and with the time of year it would be salt fresh line and the fish were perch

it has been the best year on them for a loooooong time .