Hummingbird Fish Finders
Join a major bass tournament this season and check out the pro’s boats before takeoff. You’ll see evidence of the trend that is changing bass fishing.
That trend may be the ever-expanding use of side-viewing sonar technology such as Hummingbird Fish Finders Side and Down Imaging
Of course, at the top levels of professional bass fishing, adding one of these simple high-tech fishing tools to a rig is getting to become less of a trend and more of a necessity. The professionals that were among the first to make use of side-scanning sonar benefitted noticeably, to the stage that even shallow-water die-hards have joined the stampede toward the brand new technology. There have been many professionals that have added a side-viewing unit to his boat in the 2010 season, and contains helped them go from being mainly a skinny-water expert to developing into a complete fishing package who are able to compete offshore as well.
As experimentation continues and data of side-scan technology of hummingbird Fish Finders progresses, a few of those shallow-water aces might also discover another benefit of the newfangled units: Even though it’s a powerful tool for deep water, Side Imaging also reveals shallow patterns that might never have been discovered - and it can help an angler do it faster than another technology in fishing.
The basics of shallow scanning
If you look at Down Imaging using Hummingbird Fish Finders with the very basic view, there're three primary advantages of it for shallow-water fishing, as opposed to traditional sonar:
It can really be used there - Traditional sonar in shallow water was sometimes a worthless tool. Yes, you could spot a sudden drop in depth if you idled over a ditch. And yes, you could get a reading on below hardness. But that’s about it. Down Imaging, for insufficient a better word, “shoots” images off to the side of the boat across shallow flats, under docks and into cover, places you literally couldn't get above to see with traditional sonar.
The images are much clearer with Hummingbird Fish Finders - This is applicable to Down Imaging in any depth, but it bears repeating: The picture-like images of Down Imaging are far superior than anything traditional sonar could cough up - ever. You can actually identify objects on the screen, rather than wondering if that blob is a rotting stump or a rusting outboard.
Speed? - Using Down Imaging with Hummingbird Fish Finders actually requires slow boat movements. When done right, however, its greatest strength is its ability to speed up the search when dealing with miles of shoreline and shallow flats. More about that later.
Find fish, not structure
One famous professional was one of the first tour professionals to obtain a Down Imaging unit when they were released in 2009. At first, as he admits, he didn’t always experiment with it in shallow water as much as he probably should have. That’s understandable, considering its value to him offshore. That changed one day when he was fishing docks on the small lake.
“I’ve located on my home lake that some of the boat houses that don’t have any brush under them attract bass just as well as those that do, so I wasn’t using it to look for the brush,” the pro says. I was actually using it to look for the fish under the docks. You can see them. That really opened my eyes. There’s a lot more to it than just the structure portion of it. House foundations are always cool to look at, but fish are what we’re after.”
And that's the biggest difference in making use of Side Imaging in the shallows instead of offshore, where you don’t always need to find fish with it (although it’s nice whenever you do). In deeper water you can utilize it to find good structure where, when the conditions are right, fish will eventually gather. In the shallows, the pro can easily see if fish are there when he goes by, so he can try to catch those bass and perhaps figure out a pattern. So instead of looking for shallow structure, he looks for shallow fish.
Identifying fish
OK, so what exactly do those individual shallow fish actually seem like? According to him, predator fish appear as elongated white “tubes” on the Side Imaging (see his actual screen capture above). Exactly what the Side Imaging can’t always tell an angler is if the fish is really a largemouth bass or a toothy gar. For those, you need to catch one.
However, presuming the fish is really a bass, an angler can gauge its size by its proximity to shallow cover. The pro makes a fine art of it on his home-lake docks with a simple technique.
“What I actually do is compare the connection of the size of the dock poles on screen to the size of the fish on screen, and that gives me a reference to their true size,” The pro says. “That was a good tip to get because I never really considered it before. If the structure is 30 or 40 feet deep, you won't ever really know how big the fish on it are until you actually catch one.”
Speed
In order to get the best results with the Side Imaging technology, paying attention to boat speed is essential. If you’re a pro , you just put the boat in gear but don’t provide it with any more gas. The pro would rather to idle at a more precise around of about 5 to 6 mph.
Go faster, and also the images are distorted; go slower, and the result is likely to be one continuous blurred picture. Traditional sonar can operate effectively at a much faster speed, but Side Imaging has it beat in the sense that you can locate and identify quality fishing areas much quicker.
Distance and settings
It’s tough to establish a specific distance that you should keep the boat far from a shallow area when using Hummingbird Fish Finders Side Imaging to get the best image. It takes some trial and error to determine how close to get to shallow cover to obtain good readings without spooking fish. The pro loves to stay about 30 feet away from the boat docks on his home lake. He sets his unit to simply show images from the dock side from the boat, and he sets the screen’s scale to show out to 80 feet far from the boat. The 80-foot mark also applies for The pro in many other shallow cases, but it’s not a hard rule for him.
What’s interesting is the fact that both The pro and many more admit that they typically don’t adjust every other settings on the unit apart from the range shown on the screen. They’ve experimented, but neither finds anything better than the “auto” settings in the factory.
That doesn’t mean pro’s don’t still experiment. They are doing, and they suggest others do it as well. If an angler doesn’t experience with settings and techniques, he’ll never find the full extent from the benefits Side Imaging technology provides.
Hummingbird
