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bottom was 75-feet deep. i turned the boat and we dropped our baits down to these fish. We had a limit of spotted bass in as many drops, but as we caught fish there were less and less arches as we caught bass. after the fifth bass, the school was gone. Without my HdS unit we wouldn’t have caught those bass. anyone can do this. The arches aren’t bass every time and sometimes, even if they are bass, they don’t bite; but these are additional fish to be caught, if you at least try. With the advent of Structure Scan, i am able to see structure off to the side of the boat as i fish. i have a lSS-1 on my trolling motor matched up with an HdS 10 Gen 1 and the lSS-2 Hd and an HdS 10 Gen 2 at my console with the transducers mounted at the stern. The “structure” i see is “home” to fish as far as i’m concerned. i can’t tell you how many times i have seen a bottom contour change on my sonar, didn’t see any fish, but fished the structure anyway and caught fish. You don’t need to see the fish to catch them. Just fish where they live, in and around structure. i have another tournament example. While fishing at lake San antonio in May of this year i was working down a bank and noticed on my HdS 10 on the left and right scan screen, off to the right side of the boat which was the deep water side of the boat a submerged tree in about 25-feet of water that did not emerge out of the water. i hit my arrow keys and
moved the cursor over to the top of the tree to find that it was 12-feet away from the transducer. i pitched a YUM dinger out to where the tree should be and let the dinger sink to the bottom. i caught an 8-pound largemouth on that cast that won the tournament. i not only needed Structure Scan on the front of my boat to see structure no one else could see and fish; but i needed to pay attention to the screen, trust what i saw and actually fish the structure. if you see a tree, rock, brush or a drop-off you need to fish that structure to see if there are any feeding fish at home. These units are your eyes to see the underwater world that harbors your quarry.
wPT
Waypoint and trail management is very underutilized. There is so much you can do with these features to manage your tournament fishing time more efficiently allowing you to catch more fish. i have a spot on the delta where there is a submerged peat mound that doesn’t show above the water even on the lowest tides. Because of the location of this feature, the current has created a deep hole on one side of the peat mound. This deeper hole holds fish consistently while the current is flowing. i have a couple waypoints on each end of this hole so i can find it quickly on any tide. But the hole still being relatively shallow, i don’t want to drive over the hole disturbing the fish located there, so i have three boat position waypoints located where i need the boat to be to cast and hit the correct angles for bait presentations. i have this same scenario at Clear lake for some isolated rock piles that not many fishermen know about. Pay attention to your sonar screen while you are on pad between fishing spots. You will inevitably drive over some off shore structure that you didn’t previously know about that can add to your spots you fish. i have one long underwater point that extends 150-yards off shore that has a very rocky area on the tip of the point that drops into 35-feet of water. i found this long underwater ridge while traveling between fishing spots one day. i was going along and the bottom was consistently 35- to 40-feet deep. i looked down at the sonar screen and was just about to leave the screen when i saw a hump that came up to 15-feet and then back down to 35-feet. i immediately let off and turned around. i hit the arrow keys on my
The same three way split on my hDS unit is displayed. This time going over the same bridge but in line with it instead of at an angle you can see how it shows up. This is also a good depiction of how the transducer signal is hitting the guardrail on the side of the bridge therefore not hitting the bottom of the lake. This is the black “shadow” look on the bottom. The signal does go between the slats on the guardrail so the bot- tom shows up because the unit is receiving a signal.
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