Hawaiibassfishing Forum

Wow,,,,,, I think I finally figured them out somewhat... Its still tough, but We caught multiple fish today with one pattern.. A fellow Pennsylvanian is here and I am showing him the lake, Fred fishes with Bucks County Bass Chasers, a local Bass club close to my parents house in PA... We caught 10 Plus Bass today and some Tucs..... Yesterday I headed out and landed a monster too.... I'll put Full reports on my website... Don't just look for the top schooling action!!! Use it to spot a basic area, then troll over to it, by the time you get there it will be done,,,,,,, on the surface..... Using your sonar find the areas most consintrated with fish.. Everything is happening under the schooling, and they are moving. Really get to know your sonar. The arch's are big fish, the black dots and mesh are bait,, the mass of black are mostly a lot of bass... Happy hunting!!!!

Jeff, what kind of sonar are you using?

Lowerance X-4 is all I am using!!! I have a hummingbird Down Imaging that I haven't hooked up yet..... But really, $150-$200 unit should be all you need for a decent sonar that you can find fish with... The X-4 isn't that much differnet compared to my Hummingbird DI,,,, The DI really can pick up the structure on the bottom.. But the X-4 picks up the same bait and schooling fish......
Lowrance, Eagle, Hummingbird stay away from Garmins.

Sonar has changed my life! When i was in hawaii all i had were two lowend regular old sonar units. They worked well for depth, temp and sometimes they would show bait and fish but i never really trusted them. Whyn i got to geoargia and started fishing clarks hill, which fishes a lot like the ocean due to the blueback herring, i imediately realized that i needed to upgrade my electronics. I went ahead and got the humminbird 898 side imaging unit. Also has the down imaging and the regular down looking sonar. I immediately thought how awesome this would have been to use at wilson.

Im still not anywhere close to being an expert with my sonar but one of the biggest things ive learned is color units are the way to go. The color will show differently depending on the type of suface the sonar is reflecting off of. With just the black and white display it was hard/impossible for me to tell the difference between the top of a brush pile and a school of bait. But the color units has really helped me distinguish what im looking at. The best thing though is to have bring up the screen that has the DL, DI and SI showing at the sametime. It is really easy to differentiate what im looking at with all three displays going at once. The issue i had initially with no color was it would show arches but they often were brush/trees not fish. The color shows fish in a brights yellow color which makes it easy to tell them apart.

The SI is so cool. still figuring out how to best utilize the SI though. Baitfish show up really well on the SI view, that is what ive used it the most for. With di or dl you essentially have to be right on top of a school of bait to see it on your display.