Humminbird Side Imaging and the fall sauger run

I made a quick trip through Red Wing yesterday on my way home from Mille Lacs to check on the progress of the fall sauger run. As others have described here recently, the bite is on!

I’ll talk about the fishing elsewhere, but I wanted to share with the Humminbird forum guests some screen captures from yesterday. These show the power of Humminbird Fishing Systems at identifying typical river structures, as well as the fish that relate to them.

In this first screen capture from my 1197, I had just passed over the deep tip of a wingdam. This dam is clearly shown on the right hand side of the split screen as a dark line extending from shore. I was running the new Lakemaster for Humminbird map chip, which (like the other Lakemaster products) includes the wingdams on Pool 4. The main body of the dam is to the left of the boat, and you can see the dam rising from the bottom on the left hand side of the Side Image (with just its tip on the right).

This next screen capture shows the target for yesterday’s fishing time: saugers. These fish were stacked up in small depressions in the sand….smaller versions of the typical washboard bottom that forms in many sandy areas. You can see these depressions on the right hand side of the Side Image, with most of the depressions filled with fish (brighter marks against the blue bottom). If you’re having trouble, mouse over the second picture….the depressions that are filled with fish are forward of the red lines, and the (few) empty depressions are forward of the green lines. The third picture shows these depressions in more detail.

Here’s another that shows a PILE of suspended fish (a mixture of crappies, white bass, and sheephead….as we found out by swimming some small jigs through them) in a slack water area. That the fish are suspended is obvious by looking at the 2D sonar (left side of the split screen), but what isn’t obvious is the sheer number of fish and the fact that they blanket this area. The Side Image (right side of the split screen) does a great job of revealing that fact to us…all in one upstream pass covering 250 feet of water from side to side.

Even though we were focusing on saugers this day, I made several trolling passes through this area, just so that we could enjoy the show provided by Humminbird’s Side Imaging.

And this, of course, is what we were looking for. Now’s the time to catch and release a few of these “fat-bottomed girls” as they work their way upstream through the fall.

Great info once again Were you able to pickup those depression saugers with your 2D?

Here and there, I could see them with 2d sonar. But all of those fish that I showed above were identified by Humminbird’s Side Imaging in one upstream trolling pass. How many fish are present in that image? Dozens? Hundreds?

Thanks for the tutorial. I learn something new everytime. I love my 997!

Very nice! How about a hands on tutorial some day?

We made the run yesterday and I took a number of SI images from a number of spots. Instead of sorting through the images, I’ll just post all 45 here. Fun to look at, anyway!

A few disclaimers… 1) These images have been converted, transfered, uploaded and downloaded a few times already (more than I normally do – sorry), so there might be a slight loss of quality. 2) Our speed and direction was constatly changing with current and trolling conditions. Some of the images might appear streaked due to boat turns and slow speeds. Even with a speed setting of “1” it was difficult at times to get the perfect reading, simply because our speed over ground was often just too slow. 0.0 to 1.5mph was our general range, but anything slower than 0.3 mph didn’t give the best images. I think you get the idea, though, after looking at the images.

You can see the fish suspended like Jason posted. Also, you can see saugers just LINED UP waiting for your jig or crank. LOL They were so thick and tight to the bottom they almost look like some sort of rock formation… SI helped us sort em out, though.

More…

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More pics……

Many of those are hard to see when the image is so small… I’ll post a few more larger sized pics, hopefully you can pic out more detail (and see how many fish are stacked!!)

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