Graphing your way to more fish

 

We could hear the small motor winding down and in dismay the screen going black. Working a drop-off for walleyes is never easy and it just became harder. We were using the old Green Box graph from Lowrance and unless you carried another small battery once the power dies you are in the dark.

I depend on my graph more than any other piece of equipment. I would much rather fish from my canoe with a graph and a cane pole than from my walleye boat with graphite rods and no graph.

Summer bluegill fishing rarely starts until a school of the suspended fish appears on the graph. This is a great location to try the Whip R Snaps from Stopper Lures. Deep water walleye are often found in sand grass or along the old river bed. You need eyes to find fish once they vacate the shallows. Drifting or trolling a Stopper Lure spinner rig is deadly along an old riverbed.

 The least expensive unit is far superior to the best unit of 20 years ago, let alone compared to what I started with.

Do you need a color fish finder or is monochrome just as good? The key advantage of modern color units is the different colors differentiate strength of returns much better than monochrome units. If for example you are in an area where there is grass. On the monochrome units the grass will show up as one shade of gray and the bottom will show up as another shade of gray. With a color unit the grass would likely be green or blue as it is a weaker return and the bottom would be red. It would be easy to differentiate this.

Another example is if you are trying to determine if the bottom is a hard bottom or a soft bottom. With a monochrome unit it could be difficult to detect the difference in the shade of gray. Bass love working these nearly invisible edges.

Perch fishing this feature is of great importance. We often fish small clay sections of the bottom and the change from sand to clay stands out with a color unit quickly. We often see the schools of perch moving towards our Perch Flies before the strike. Often a subtle change from marl to rock or sand to mud is exactly where the feeding walleye will be. The mayfly hatch is an example of when a mud flat becomes hot.

Mounting the transducer is critical. Do you want to mount the transducer on the transom of the boat or shot through the hull? If the angler is using an aluminum boat they must install the transducer on the back of the boat as sonar will not effectively shot through aluminum. 

When running at top speed you want a nice smooth flow of water running under the transducer. The brackets are adjustable up and down so before filling in the screw holes with silicone make a rest run.

 If the boat is a single hull fiberglass boat with no wood or foam filler in the hull, shooting through the hull is great for obtaining good high speed readings. If the transducer is mounted on the transom this is the area where you get turbulence coming off of the back of the boat at high speeds and these bubbles can affect the sonar. Most experts recommend using an in hull installation on fiberglass boats.

If you install a transducer in the hull what should you do to make sure that you get a good installation? A common mistake people make when installing a transducer is the hull surface is not prepared properly. After the boats are built there are generally a lot of fiberglass “fingers” protruding from the hull surface in the bilge area where the transducer will be located.

 In general you always want to locate the transducer as far back as possible and as close to the centerline of the boat as possible. Once you have located this area use either sandpaper of a sandpaper disc on the end of a drill to smooth out the surface of the fiberglass in this area. By smoothing out this surface you will prevent bubbles from being trapped under the transducer when the epoxy is installed.

The other consideration is that you should use slower curing two part epoxy. You shouldn’t use an epoxy that has a curing time of less than one hour.

The #1 thing to look for in a fish finder is the unit with the most # of vertical pixels that you can afford. Horizontal pixels only show more history where vertical displays allow the fish finder to show more detail.

 Is there an advantage to dual beam sonar over single beam sonar? Dual beam sonar provides any angler with a great advantage over single beam sonar. Single beam sonar is typically 20 degrees wide regardless of the brand. The geometry of a 20 degree beam means that the beam diameter is roughly 1/3 of the depth of water.

 For example in 10 feet of water, which is a common fishing depth, the single beam 20 degree beam only covers about 3 feet of the bottom. Dual beam offers 2 beams for the angler to view. The narrow 20 degree beam that provides great detail of the bottom but doesn’t cover a lot of the bottom at one time and a wider 60 degree beam (the diameter of a 60 degree beam is the same as the bottom depth. In 10 foot of water a 60 degree beam covers 10 foot of water) that covers far more bottom but doesn’t offer as good of detail as a narrow beam. In summary, with a dual beam sonar product you get the best of both worlds (great coverage and great detail).

Power as in watts is nice. Most units have at least 2000 watts of peak to peak with the medium and higher priced units offering 4000 watts.

I would like to thank Mark Gibson from Hummingbird on answering my many questions and explaining it in simple terms where even I can understand. Most of the units on the market allow downloading to a computer, up-loading of maps and special map cards.

Story by:
Jack Payne

Photo support:
John Huyser with a canoe bass 
Sarah Payne with a bluegill

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K&E TACKLE, INC.
2530 BARBER ROAD
HASTINGS, MI 49058
(269) 945-4496 - FAX (269) 945-4951