Electronic Epitome
7/27/2006 5:17:11 PM by Jason Sealock
To get the most out of your depth finder, you don’t have to spend insane amounts of money — you just have to learn how to use the built-in features to your advantage.
Photos by Doug DuKane
The modern age of electronic gadgets and gizmos covers every aspect of daily life. Heck, they even have computerized water bowls for your cat so you don’t have to spend your well-deserved free time refilling the dish. How much help does someone really need from modern-day electronics? Well, if you’re a professional bass angler, you can’t live without them. And if you’re interested in catching more and bigger bass on your local high-pressured lake, then you not only need good electronics, but you need to maximize your equipment’s capabilities.
So what’s the first step in maximizing your potential with modern electronics? Well, according to National Guard pro Jonathan Newton of Rogersville, Alabama, it’s to shift your unit into manual mode. “The first thing I do when I get a new unit is turn off all the automatic settings,” Newton says. “Then I go back in and start setting everything up manually to maximize the unit’s potential to fit my style of fishing.”
Newton starts by adjusting the sensitivity as strong as he can until he starts seeing a lot of “clutter” on the screen and then backs off just a bit from that. “I want as much visibility and sensitivity as I can get without having too much clutter,” he says. The next thing he does is adjust his split screens. “I run a Lowrance LCX-26C HD, and you can resize the screens however you like. For me, when I’m scouting out areas, I like to set my GPS and map to take up two-thirds of the screen and the depth finder to be a third of the screen.”
The LCX-26C HD comes standard with a 20GB hard drive that has more than 2,100 inland bodies of water loaded into it with contour maps. This allows an angler to drive right up on a spot on his map and study it for the minute details that concentrate bass on an offshore hotspot.
“I give all the credit to my electronics for my Stren Series win on Kentucky Lake in 2004,” Newton says. “I basically found a community hole that everyone knew about. But what I fished was a small stretch that I otherwise would not have fished if I hadn’t seen a huge school of baitfish piled up on it. I couldn’t really tell what was down there because the screen was just covered in this one small spot, but after a few casts, I knew I was on to something.”
And that’s how it goes with using your electronics. Newton will idle around in a spot on the map focusing on the depth finder looking for cover or structure on the spot. Whether it is rocks, brush or baitfish, he’s looking for a “sweet spot” on each area he probes. Sometimes he actually sees bass, but oftentimes, he just marks something interesting and gets out his rods and fishes it to find out. Sometimes, if the spot looks good on his map but he doesn’t see any good cover, he’ll just go on without even making a cast.
When he finds a brush pile or other obvious pieces of cover, he stops and fishes it regardless. “I never pass up a piece of brush that I find with my electronics,” he says. “Sometimes you can see the fish actually holding in the brush, but most of the time you won’t see them. So, you have to fish it a bit to see if it’s holding bass or not.”
Many times on lakes like Kentucky Lake, Newton will hit a spot once when he finds some good-looking cover then mark it and hit it three or four more times throughout the day. “Sometimes it’s a great-looking spot, but the fish aren’t using it then because of river currents not being right or the sun shining too brightly or wind blowing too hard. But then you’ll come back later and there are bass all over it.”
Another clue he tries to unearth with his depth finders is actual feeding activity. On a graph, when fish are actively feeding, they will appear as diagonal lines or intertwined “spaghetti strands.” You may see what appears as a cloud or lots of scattered specs with diagonal lines going up and down through it. Sometimes you’ll see several lines zigzagging over one another in a horizontal fashion. “When you see those lines going all across the screen, that’s when it gets really exciting, and you know you’re going to catch them.
“I’m really in tune with what my depth finder is showing,” Newton says. “Color is a key. It helps me see things more clearly. In fact, I learned what I know about using my depth finders from fishing up north in very clear water. I could see the bottom with my own eyes and then look at the screen and see that red was a rock bottom and lighter colors were softer bottoms. Larger fish appeared yellow and smaller fish were darker and had more red to them.”
Another critical piece of Newton’s electronics is the water temperature gauge. “I determine a game plan based on what I find and mark on my graph, along with the seasonal patterns and water temperature,” he says. “Having that on my graph is critical because most of the time I can know immediately why the fish were or weren’t on a spot by glancing at the water temperature.”
Newton also recommends networking trolling motor and console-mounted units. Having all your information on each graph keeps you from hopping back and forth to see if you’re on a spot while trying to stay on a piece of deep cover. Sometimes running to the console to check a waypoint can steer you off course even more, especially when you’re fighting the wind and current, not to mention it makes your time on the water increasingly frustrating.
Bass boat electronics can make your life a lot easier and your fishing a lot more enjoyable if you’ll spend the time to learn the capabilities of your unit. Even for the novice gadget-geek, a little time spent “playing” with your unit can go a long way. Lowrance has an interesting feature which lets you download a sample unit to your home PC and actually navigate all the menus and use test maps and depth finder demonstrations to learn the unit and its features before you even look at one in a showroom. Just go to lowrance.com and search for product emulators.
Going Super Deep with Depth Finders
Suave for Men pro Art Berry of Hemet, California, knows a thing or two about going deep to find unpressured bass. In California, where he guides, deep, clear lakes are the norm and catching giant bass in 50 feet of water is not uncommon. Berry treks around the lake at a pretty quick clip watching his graph to see where the fish are positioned. He’s looking for the bigger arches.
“It’s more like playing a video game really,” Berry says. “We see those yellow bellies down there on the graph and you drop your lure down and count three...two...one. The next thing you know, you’re reeling a big bass up out of 50 feet of water on your little drop-shot worm.” Berry and other color-graph aficionados refer to larger bass on the depth finder as “yellow bellies” because the graph returns bright yellow arches rather than the standard red arches for smaller fish.
“The number one key to fishing deep and catching those fish you see on your graph is turning your ping speed to 100 percent,” Berry says. “You need to know that when it sees something, it’s actually there, and you’ll have more opportunities to get a bait down quickly to the bass.”
While Berry leaves the rest of his options set to automatic, some anglers, like Newton, prefer to increase the sensitivity on their graph to be sure they see those bottom hugging signatures. “I zoom in quite a bit because I’m looking for bass hugging the bottom,” Berry says. “Those Lowrance graphs are so good you can see your weight and worm separately on the graph in 50 feet of water. But I like to really study the bottom and try to find those bass other people might miss. You’ll be dropping your bait down and watching it on the screen, and you’ll see this line just come screaming up off the bottom. That’s when you know you’re going to get bit.”
Berry employs an X-26 Lowrance on both his console and his bow with Gimble mounts. The large screen makes finding and catching deep bass much easier. One other thing that Berry loves and discovered with his graph is the difference between tungsten and lead weights. “You can see a fish on the graph and drop a tungsten weight down and a lead weight down at the same time. The tungsten weight will get down there in half the time and show up twice as well on your graph because it’s denser.”
Some say it’s like playing a video game, while others say it’s like watching a cartoon. Some people look at the screen and see symbols, letters and numbers, while the trained person sees rocks, baitfish and bass.