nah, your ol man would've been so worn out from reeling fish in that morning he would welcome the rest period that evening lol. I bet you miss the complaining every time you turn the graph on .Originally Posted by Moveon
Years ago when I first started learning about sonar units I gave a speech in HS about how the Lowrance Little Green Box worked. When my dad bought the very first retail fish flasher I studied the manual and learned how it worked. This unit ran on two 6 volt dry cell batteries and was actually a good unit for finding structure and you had to learn how the flasher worked to use it properly. I wanted to spend the day using the fish flasher on the lake but my father wanted to fish. As he had been fishing this area of KY lake and catching huge bass for years before I was in HS. I think I was a sophmore when he got the Little Green box. He got really mad at me when I just wanted to run the boat back and forth over some drop offs to learn the lay of the land. So we didn't get to use the little green box much. After I got my own boat I bought the Humminbird 60 flasher and used it a lot. Finally I got the Humminbird LCR8000 which was a liquid crystal graph recorder type sonar unit. I still have this unit on the front of my boat in good working condition. It's was new in 1986 when I got it. A few years ago I added side scanning sonar to my boat. So I've been using sonar units for many years. Over 40 years now. There was a really good article in Fishing Facts Magazine back in the 1980's and I read that 6 page article over and over. Most sonar units used a single frequency to send and received sound waves from the transducer. Now we have multi frequency sonars that can send the signals faster and longer and give us a better picture of the bottom 6". The ping rate has changed so that we can now see things closer to the bottom. Now frequency changes help us see the fish better too. It's called CHIRP now.
If you want to better understand what the sonar is showing you get some topographic maps and learn to read the contours on the map. Drive around the roads and look at the land along the road way. Noticed the high and low areas. Check out the steep areas and the flat areas. Make a not of any creeks you see and how they twist and turn as they meander though a woods or meadow. Then pretend that the land has water on it and you are in a boat 30 ft above the land. Imagine what the sonar would show you below? Keep this in mind when you are fishing and using sonar. Think about what the land looked like before the lake was flooded. The most important thing it to see in your minds eye what the bottom of the lake looks like and then learn what type of fish use different types of strcture at different times of the years. Throw in some objects like underwater ledges or stumps or even submergent vegetation and the end of the weed line.
I use to scuba dive and every time I was diving I'd check out the schools of fish. My dive buddies didn't fish like me so they didn't pay that much attention to the fish. I did pay attention and wondered why the fish were where they were. I found many fish in the 3 to 4 lb range swimming together in big schools. But they were hanging around structure. There was a building that was flooded and the fish were hanging around inside the building. The water was 40 ft deep and the house or building was completely under water. It was a rock quarry in Western KY called Celurian Springs. It's used to this day as a diving center. It was closed to the public when I was diving that day. Yea we went diving anyway. There were huge bluegills nesting on a sloped area with a sandy bottom. It was an old ramp road that allowed the equipment to drive into the rock quarry. It was fairly steep at about 30 deg slope and went all the way down to the bottom of the quarry. The bluegill were in 15 ft of water nesting. They were huge. And the water was crystal clear. It was a scene that I will never forget.
When I was in college I took a course in Physical Geology at the Universty of Southern Indiana. Back then it was called ISUE. In that class the professor introduced me to topographical maps. That was back in 1973/74. I had to learn to draw a topo map from data points that included the depth reading and the long and lat of each data point. We learned to draw lines of equal depth using the data points. And yes the more data points you have the more accurate the topo map will be.
Learn to your your depth finder and you will catch more fish in the long run. Just don't take my dad fishing with you if all you are going to do is ride around the lake without any fishing poles. LOL He would not like that. Dad passed in 2001 and now I can do all the scouting around on the lake that I want without having to listen to him complaining about us not fishing.
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