If you’ve been following some of the Humminbird Side Imaging threads here in our forum, you’ve seen many examples of how Humminbird’s proven Side Imaging technology can identify any number of different types of underwater structure. Here’s an example of how this technology can directly contribute to putting more fish in your boat….by identifying fish, and how they are relating to structure.
While trying to piece together a bite under difficult weather conditions, my father-in-law Tim and I were scouting some deep weed beds with my Humminbird 1197c. In “scout” mode, I typically motor along between 4 and 5 mph, looking for promising structure and/or fish. As you can see in the first screen capture, I was moving along in about 20 feet of water, with weed beds to port (and open basin to starboard). While scouting this weed edge, I noticed a cloud of returns directly under the boat. Thinking that they might be crappies, I quickly switched into a split-screen mode, allowing me to see the down-looking returns (on the left) at the same time as the Side Imaging returns. Sure enough, the cloud of returns that I saw with Side Imaging certainly appears to be a school of fish.
Knowing that summer crappies will set up off the deep edges of weedbeds, I stopped the boat and suggested to Tim that he toss a jig/minnow in the direction of the school we had passed over. One cast later…an 11.5″ crappie was flopping around in the boat. We spent long enough on this school to augment our pre-holiday fish fry, before moving on in search of weed edge walleyes.
Humminbird’s Side Imaging technology will do more than show structure. It will show you the fish as well….but the rest is up to you.
