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Hi PitchPolehobie!

I hear ya!

But the aspect of 8 band clamps with clear vinyl tubing that’s 20+ years old in a difficult to access location at or below the waterline just sorta annoys me on some nagging primordial level….

I’ve checked on it whenever I find myself back in there…like durning our annual spring cleaning and wipe down…. But it still bothers….

Like you I don’t want to over think it but the approach taken, while it works reasonably well given I haven’t heard of any issues, it’s not an approach I would have ever taken in the design of a consumer product. It’s just so awkward…..

Best Regards,
Over Easy

Had my sonar and depth guage lines cut thru. I have a garmin sonar on left that is a bottom mapper, depth guage and fish finder. The right is an older paddle wheeler speed and depth guage. The lines were irregularly cut and frayed. Initially I thought by an errant fishing lure but the marina thinks an otter was munching on zebra mussels that had attached. Tbd either way Ill be replacing the sonar on the left only. Not what I thought would be a winter project!

Hi Pitchpolephobie!

I hear ya!
What we did was a roundabout trip to “Tiparari” as it were. Started with the depth sounder transducer mounted to the ballast valve exit tube with a band clamp. Didn’t like that for road travel.

That led me to screw it to the ballast valve tube to be more secure. Still didn’t like that so much…

Then I mounted it as a through the hull amidship under the aft bench of the dinette. Good for depth but zip for any side scan
An idea was to make a “water box” through the hull. A good bit of work went into two iterations but still not good for side scan function.

That brought me back to stern mounting but this time on a slide plate that allows us to pull the transducer when it’s not in use. This eliminated the issues with marine growth entirely and with road transit having the transducer hanging off the back end. Pretty happy with this approach! It’s not perfect but it’s working pretty good!
When the fancy side scan transducer went irrational (wire & plug corrosion that I haven’t fixed as yet this current arrangement allowed us to easily swap over to our backup chart plotter and transducer from our runabout. (Same type of slide plate arrangement will eventually be setup on the runabout).

The aspects I don’t like are it limits the side scan to basically the starboard side as the engine lower unit shadows the port side aspects. I can compensate for the shadowing in two ways… First by simply raising the engine lower unit out of the water …or secondly by reversing course over the same area if something on the bottom interests us like an old wreck or other features. The other aspect is the stern mounting but only lets me look down at the stern…basically bottom terrain that we’ve already travelled over …. Ideally we’d prefer to know what we’re approaching rather than what we just rubbed into

An ideal for our uses would be a setup with a forward looking through the hull warning transducer in the base of the bow to supplement the primary pullable one mounted on the stern.

Getting around to figuring out and setting up a bow transducer just isn’t high on the To Do List right now…. Other fish to fry first

Best Regards,
Over Easy