Eagle Eye

Dominating fishing tournaments and bringing about a whole new way to find fish and catch them, live-view sonar has moved fishing technology into a whole new era. Seeing what is around the boat in real time and being able to target fish while watching them on a screen has changed the way some anglers now fish.

Lowrance is one manufacturer that has led the popularity of this technology and has now made it available at a cost not seen before with the recent introduction of the Lowrance Eagle Eye with Live View. Live-view fishing still won’t catch the fish for you, but it sure will allow for more fish on the line.

Fishing features

At just under $1,000 for the whole package, Lowrance’s Eagle Eye 9-inch fishfinder/chartplotter with live sonar is inexpensive compared to other live-view sonar systems on the market. Unlike other systems, no module must be added to an existing multifunction display system, nor is there a need to add a specialized transducer; the package has everything you need to see and find fish in real time. This includes a full-featured 9-inch multifunction display with a clear and crisp IPS screen that can be viewed from a very wide angle and is viewable with polarized sunglasses in direct sunlight. The display comes preloaded with C-Map inland chart cartography that covers over 17,000 lakes in the U.S., all with excellent detail and quality bathymetric charting. Using the built-in onboard sonar and Genesis Live software, you can custom-create your very own contour maps with ½-foot contour lines. You can also add cartography through a built-in Micro SD card slot.

The transducer provided in the package is capable of live sonar forward. This gives users a clear view of what is in front of the boat in real time. This mode is excellent for locating fish and casting directly to them as they show on the screen. Just sweep the area in front of you with the transducer to find fish in front of the boat.

The transducer is also able to display live sonar down. This will display your depth and what is directly below your boat in high detail, all in real time. You can watch your lure drop down on the fish and enjoy watching them strike, or (in my case, many times) ignore your lure and swim away. The transducer can also create the more traditional CHIRP sonar and DownScan imaging. Unlike other manufacturers with great down-scanning images, the Lowrance Eagle Eye Live View takes it one step further with what it calls FishReveal. This brings the fish-identifying imagery of the more traditional CHIRP Sonar and blends it with the structure imagery of the DownScan sonar, displaying the best of both worlds.

Game on

The display’s advanced software helps optimize the imagery through autotuning. This means less time fussing with the display, trying to get a better image, and more time fishing. While the resolution isn’t as good as some other live-view sonars (that are also quite a bit more expensive), it is very clear, and the learning curve to use this Lowrance is very quick. Some liken watching the screen and seeing the fish swimming and reacting to your lure to a form of gaming, so much so that some say this technology attracts young anglers to the sport because of its likeness to video games.

Meanwhile, others say it’s a form of cheating because it’s so good at finding and viewing fish in real time. I’m dating myself here, but I can remember excitement and claims of cheating when sonars started using red rectangular pixels to identify fish. We have come a long way since the days of red pixels and paper graphs, but I still don’t catch a fraction of the fish I find on my sonar.

The simple fact is that this new form of fish-finding sonar is another improvement in sonar technology. The capability of the faster internal processors and software now allows a real-time look at what’s going on in front and below your boat. Lowrance has found a way to put together an effective and more affordable way to bring that technology to more anglers. And to be honest, once you use it, the fish may not be hooked, but you might be.