Home Forums Fishing Freshwater Side Scan depth finder

I fish lake trout a lot and use rather low end depth finders. Would the side scan models help me find fish in deeper water like 50 feet?

Side imaging is great for locating structure and fish on structure. Lots of images to be seen on the web.

For Humminbird
http://www.bbcboards.net/forumdisplay.php?f=131

For Lowrance
http://www.bbcboards.net/forumdisplay.php?f=175

For Garmin
http://www.bbcboards.net/forumdisplay.php?f=209

Yup!

Vern you can adjust the range of the side scan. The fish show as little white dots on the side scan image....at least it does on mine. I have Lowrance.

That Humminbird does have some good reviews and is affordable......may have to try it.

Hummingbird is good too. This stuff has come a long ways.

I fish bass mostly,so don't look for fish so much as structure with mine. It's pretty neat seeing what the bottom looks like. This makes the lake "bigger" somehow as you see structure you didn't know existed before.

Thanks Bob & RNF!

It should help me troll along the ridges and drop-offs.

Vern you will be surprised what's down there.

Can I mount it on stern like my down image rigs.....off to side of outboard motor?

Yes you can mount it on the stern off to the side of the outboard. If you have a jack plate mounted it will cause some distortion near the surface. You can see it in the images below.

Here is a few images that I have captured. Found these crappie after bass fishing all morning and was headed back to the ramp. Caught a limit on a tube jig in less than a hour.


Here is a school of fish near a fish attractor bouy. You can see the bottom of the bouy and the cable going down.


A tree that was cut and pushed into the edge of the channel when the lake was built in the 1960's This one is from the bow mounted unit.


A old road bed on the left and some tire tracks on the right from when the lake got 20 ft low 2 years ago and someone drove across the mud flat.

RNF: Very neat pictures!

Last year I turned a couple of slow bite days into good ones by cruising structure and finding individual fish (bass) relating tight to structure. These bass tend to be biters,but sort of neutral and i would pick them off in 18-20 feet by backing off and fishing them with a 3/4 oz foot ball jig.

These are fish I likely never would have caught without a tight presentation. These fish were not inclined to chase...you had to get close in deep water.

Lesson for me was that, not only can you use the electronics to locate fish and structure, but how they relate to the structure tells you something about their mood,and whether the fish will be biters or not.

Thanks guys!

It will be July before I can really put this to the test but I'm anxious to try it. It should be a real asset for subtle structure that I fish. I'm trying to find depressions of about one foot on a sloped bottom.....should be fun.

Bob good info. One of our best days on Falcon was to locate the fish suspended in tree tops and back off with 1 OZ, Carolina rigs an yo-yo them in the tree tops

That is the new chirp sonar .. The pictures that is.

Garmin has also come a long way with thier gear, I went with Huminbird for mine.. Side radar was a must.

RNF: That's pretty neat! I have not had the chance to fish lakes with much submerged timber up here...unless we locate a sunken tree. We do get trees in water falling from shore and those will hold fish, but tend to be a shallow bite.

I imagine that Carolina rig slides down through those branches pretty well. Neat idea!

On one southern Maine lake we have a sunken boat house and dock in about 30 feet. We fish it in November and it holds slab crappies and bass.

I have the humminbird model. It's interesting to see some of the things in the river.

One of the best things I learned with it is to freeze the picture you are looking at and then dial in the best " focus" to see it clearly. Then un-freeze the picture and that "focus" setting stays until you change it again.

The water differences and depth seem to make a difference in the picture you see in different places. It's much more difficult to adjust the settings while you're moving or the picture is scrolling. Just stop the scrolling to adjust and then let it run again.

All White spots should be fish, if in doubt look for the dark spots under them which is a shadow of that fish. The greater the distance between them the more shallow they are.

I am running the Garmin 7610xsv and it is everything you can hope for....just like above and then some.