Skinny water and SI

I was just curious if anyone has used their Birds in skinny water…ie Small rivers, large creeks. I fish a river thats at the widest 40 yards and the deepest I found is about 10 feet.

There is alot of trees in the water and current breaks everywhere. That being said the Smallies and Eyes are downright ferocious. The walleyes always relate to deep holes close to shore or in the current. The small mouth tight to structure.

I’m wondering is the SI gonna be able to see through the current and downed trees to help me spot more deep holes and openings in structure. This is skinny water and boats cant make it up this far meaning more n bigger fish
Ill be in a canoe or kayak and id like to hear it might work before i take the risk.

When humminbird says waterproof do they mean upside down in the water with the power on and still work???

http://www.idofishing.com/forum/showflat.php/Number/786503/fpart/1/si-and-shallow-water

Skinny water??? no problem at all. In fact, it excells in the shallows!

The one problem you might have, though, is using it from a kayak or canoe. You really need to keep a fairly constant speed to get a good reading. SI doesn’t do much good at all at a stand still. Need to be moving a few miles per hour to get the reading, and there are setting adjustments to be made every so often. Not saying it won’t work for you, but keeping a constant speed will be critical for the best results. If you can do that, fish look out!!!!

Kirt and Mike are shooting bulls-eyes as usual. SI works just fine in shallow water.

Here’s an image from my library that you may have seen before. It was taken in a creek arm on Lake Wissota. The creek is perhaps 50 feet wide and 8-10 feet deep in this portion. The definition of the objects in the water is outstanding, in my opinion. Note the rocks on the right, and the lilypads (marked with the red arrow) on the left.

Thanks for the quick response guys. My only other concern would be how well will the SI scan through sharp current and associated debris. Im sure the current is nowhere near the flow of larger rivers, just seems to make quick shifts. Does this blur the images? Jason your image is extremely detailed I hope I have as much luck.

Say I was to float this section and record while making the adjustments for best visibility, How much memory would it consume to record 3 hours of floating for review later. Is this efficient? Can i mark points on a recorded scan after the fact or will I have to find it again to mark it?

The amount of data you can record is only limited by the size of the SD Card you load into the unit. I think it would be unrealistic to record 3 straight hours of data, especially if your river is like most small ones in our area….90% dead water and 10% interesting stuff. I’d just screen capture anything that looks potentially interesting for review later. The places that you take a screen capture will get marked with a camera icon (S00005), like in the capture below.

As always Jason is right. You COULD record that much, no problem. They make HUGE cards out there (8-16 gig cards are relatively cheap and will hold many hours of footage), but the question might be if you a really going to paddle/row/travel at a constant speed for 3 hours to get good images for that whole length of time.

Yes, you can go back at screen shots and mark locations, review images, pull up locales on google earth, etc… I believe you can also do that with the video images, but I have yet to get into using that function.

I don’t think current will effect the SI reading at all, and debris might give very minimal interference, if any. (Depending on the size and amount of debris, I suppose).

Mike

Heres some “skinny water” shots I have taken.

This is a shot where the fish are between me and the shoreline on the right.

Another:

Right on into 2.9 fow, it still gives excellent detail!

Here is just one of many pictures of fish I have taken while tied up and not moving at all. There are more on the Yahoo group as well.
bob1197