Depth - Metres or Fathoms??????

[1rabbit]

I'm a bit like most of you, fathoms for describing reefs, meters on the sounder when you are there, miles on the gps, inches or feet when looking at a fish,

everything metric when talking to the kids.

Muzz

[Black_Rat]

When you talk about, say a reef being the 24's or 50's etc, are you talking 50 fathoms or 50 metres? 24 fathoms or 24 meters?

I imagine different boaties use different terminology. I always assume someone means fathoms when calling a reef by a number -24's, 50's, 36's etc.

What do you use?


Mike

1 Fathom = 1.8288 Metres

24s = 43.8912 metres
36s = 65.8368 metres
50s = 91.44 metres

A mate of mine found out the hard way when we fished the 24s it's long way to retrive the anchor by hand :eek: especially when you have 95m of rope out, 4 metres of short link chain and an anchor :rolleyes:

[bluefin59]

We use fathoms outside but sound in meters in the bay and esturys i use feet confused ???? no its just the way i do it

[charleville]

Just to confuse things ...hehehe :D :D ...

In the bay, I set the sounder to show metres, BUT...

My old sounder has a minimum depth alarm that may be set at 1, one anything, that is.

SO when I am deliberately drifting across very shallow sand banks such as around the easten entrance to Cobby Passage at the 'Pin, I set it to feet, so that I know when I am in danger of running aground and having to get out and put the boat off the sandbank, often against a fairly fast moving current. :eek:

I know that this answer won't help you at all but it is what I do. :)

[Luc]

I'm a metric person so metres it is.

Although I'm happy to use feet if my boating partner prefers.

Luc

[rick k]

might have missed the point. But. Did read an article that said that pixels in feet were finer resolution on the sounder than pixels in metres.

Sounds like crap to me, but, since then I've kept my sounder in feet. As a child of the 60's I savvy both. Mind you, tradies would laugh as I try to cope with centimetres to mms.

[Poseidon]

Meter's all the way.

[lee8sec]

Charts in metres so i use metres on the sounder. Leigh

[Marlin_Mike]

I was more trying to interpret fishing reports etc.
If someone or a report said heaps where caught onn the 36's east of the seaway, automatically you would know its roughly 72mts on the chart, not 36 metres, give or take a little for conversion.

Of course the charts are in metres, but i think tradionally people call the reefs by their depth in fathoms.

Mike

[lee8sec]

My old school visual marks are in fathoms, i just do rough conversion when finding with sounder. Would be hard when looking at an area that you dont know surounding depths to start with to get an idea what they are measured with. Leigh

[warrior]

i fished of the tassie peninsular a few years back and the captain went over the major drop off out there (cant remember its name) it read 700 fathoms on his sounder nearly 4000 ft deep ,thats scary.

[seatime]

i fished of the tassie peninsular a few years back and the captain went over the major drop off out there (cant remember its name) it read 700 fathoms on his sounder nearly 4000 ft deep ,thats scary.

Wow, were you fishing in 700 fathoms?? what's the bottom bashing like at that depth. :o ;)

[warrior]

sorry mate we didnt fish that depth,we went over it to establish where the drop off was so we could fish the high section of the reef before the drop off,i wouldnt like to know what ooglies live down the bottom of the continentel shelf(just remembered the name of it).

[seatime]

gotcha, it'd be nearly impossible to fish that depth with standard rigs, even the continental shelf would be hard going, was that 200metres/100fathoms?
what do you catch around there?

cheers

[warrior]

main fish were the big tassie trumpeter,similar to the red throut emperer up here but a real good table fish.