nathanhooper

I'll have to look at it again, but I am thinking that I do not have that feature on my unit. Oh well, this works, except I use the bottom color tracking chart mode. It is nice because it keeps the bottom, and anything really hard like a rock, a brownish color in different shades. Then anything else is the normal colored shades.

Honestly I couldn't tell you on this picture. I know I was at one point, but I think this was when I was still in my searching mode. I could be wrong though. I'll post a picture of when I did have my bait out for sure. Bottom depth actually showed up on this one. Long blue line is my bait. 1oz sinker, 6' leader after with bait hooked through nose. On the right of the screen you can see the bait come up I am assuming because of whatever it was that was checking it out.

I like your topic here about bottom structure/fish. It is one key benefit to having a color unit. The grey scale will sometimes show these things well, but not like a color one will. I'd love to hear thoughts on this. The only way to get the actual pictures from this card is to use lowrance's program, then take a screen shot, put it in paint, then save it to file. Works, but man I wish there was an easier way. It also does not show depth unless you put the cursor over it, but it does not show up on the screen. Whenever I post a pic I will label the depth to hopefully get a better idea of the picture. Depth is 32' What are they? I would love to know if there is a way of determining the size of the fish based on the arches. I know it varies for a given depth, and then it would also vary based on screen size. But surely there is a way? I know these fish did not seem to want any baby bluegills I had dangling down there for them.

How do you pull pictures off a lowrance card after you saved to it?

Hey, i got a question. Is it common practice to offset your sonar depth? I guess I have never thought of it, but it cannot be more than a foot or two off while sitting still or trolling right? Opinions?

Yea, I don't want to drag it out anymore, but I guess I'm still not coming across clearly in what I have in-visioned. It would not be like a google earth view, it would be completely sonar imaging, which is under water, but stationary. It would be more like the batho, but real time and not based on GPS. But anyways. If I ever get smart enough to take the thoughts from my head and put them into a computer then maybe I'll buy everyone one of these new fish finders and then no fish in the lake will be safe...

I was just thinking more along the lines of taking the data from the sonar(2d, SI, and DI, and doing some programing, and then out comes a 3d representation. Not so much a map to download, but realtime data that would also show fish. The technology is there. I know it is. Not sure why its not being developed more finely than it is. It really is just like a camera, then taking those photo's and putting them together to make a virtual 3d picture. My wife has this app that she can take panoramic photos with by simply taking a photo, moving a little to the right, up, down, or left and taking another photo. The app takes the "image" looks it over and puts it together. There is some times that it gets the picture a little off, but what can you say for a cheap app. Now take that, add some real tech geeks, and start making some true fish finders. Keep us up to date if you hear anymore on that map.

Yea, that's what I have always seen in doing research(docs pic). But I guess if you crank up the sensitivity you would darken the area below that temp change? Try it sometime doc, see what happens.

I just thought about it, and figured out that the best way to know for sure if your seeing bait fish or not is to go over deeper water. If the line stays horizontal all the way then its the thermocline, if not then it would be bait fish? Of course, I guess if you were to also go a little ways on flat ground surely bait fish would not stretch for hundreds of yards at the same thickness.

I wish they would hurry up and take the 360 imaging, combine it with 2d sonar, and have a virtual 3d baby with it. Makes sense to me. lol I did see where humminbird had 3d graphs before, actually it was not true 3d but close too it. The rep I talked to said people did not like it well enough over the 2d stuff. As far as seeing how the bottom is laid out, I just cannot see how it would not be useful. I think with today's technology it should be fairly easy to take all the stuff and have a 3d virtual world that you could twist around with a joystick or something. I've got it all in my head, lol. Anyways, enough of my rant on wishes. I guess I have just not ever seen, myself, or looking through videos and pictures, of a thermocline like that. But I'm glad you posted it BW for us to see. I work in the water industry so I know the principle behind the thermocline pretty well. Sonar is another thing. I could tell you exactly where it was at with other instruments, but I don't see me ever taking them out on the boat just for that. I would love to see some more pictures of the thermocline on different sonars. I would be guessing its setting up right now so we should be getting good view of it in the coming weeks.

I didnt know if I should double them up, seeing how you provided the link to that other discussion. But I'll throw them in here for discussion sake. Still not sure exactly what this is. It was not there, as in I mean the clutter started getting more and more as the sun set and darkness came in. Whats interesting is that the fish we were seeing also took a hike. Here is where it started, you can see some small fish in there. This is one of the favorites of the night. We came back over this ball again and the next time over it looked like a chunk was missing and there were arches up in the ball. I got so excited I forgot to take a picture. These are pictures from earlier in the day. Not sure, I'll let people elaborate on them. We never caught any of what we saw here. When we finally caught it was the ones in a little shallower water and they were directly on the bottom. Hybrids. It was my first long troll session with the down riggers and it took me a while to figure it out. You'll see lines in the photo's of my down rigger balls. I'll have more tonight. I found a 1gig card to use and I'm taking a friend who says he cannot catch a fish out. I'm sure I'll have some more good photo's to show, hopefully of some fish also.

I think this is going to be good discussion. I am new to the sonar game myself, but learning every day. One thing that strikes me odd is that one picture you show BW of the thermocline. Like I said, I am new, but that does not look like it to me unless you were zoomed in and there was clarity below that. The thermocline is a layer of water between two layers. Its like a sandwich, not just two pieces of bread. I may be wrong, and so I cannot state for fact. However, I am a video nut when it comes to learning and I have seen videos that show what you were seeing and they state that that thick mat is actually baitfish.

Here is something for discussion. I have always said, I am a visual person. lol This is how Humminbird does their DI. I believe SI is the same thing, just turned sideways. Its nice because the other day we were seeing a lot of arches, small ones, on the bottom and stacked. I could not tell if it was tree's or fish so I turned on the Humminbird. You could clearly see that it was fish not trees because the arches were reduced to little dots. It has its place, DI & SI, but for discussion sake I would take SI over DI now, as long as I got to have regular sonar also.

You got to know where they are at... side scan is the key here... I guess you could vary the fuse length for the distance from boat.

Well, a little text would not hurt if you find a group.... Will they be on top water in the early mornings?

I hear you. I'll be out there tomorrow(I'm sure I mentioned that before...), and I think that some others are coming out also. They might not if they think that its just hybrids, but I like to stick close to home and hybrids are fine with me.

Yep, just heavy enough to pull from the DR clip. They would be fun to catch on light tackle. Makes me wonder if thats just not what the majority of them are.

Thanks for the feedback. I too thought that some of the lines I was seeing were pretty thin to be stripers. I'm wondering if it couldnt be some hybrids as that is what we caught, and we were fishing with the downriggers at the 30' mark. Some of those photo's show my rigger up shallow, but we let it down lower later on and thats when we started catching. Caught the hybrids on flicker shads, #7. Going back out tomorrow. Live bait this time. Hopefully I'll have a card by then. I'd just be as happy to reel in a boat load of them hybrids. Love to hook into the stripes, but fish are fish.

Thanks for the feed back. Yea, I wish I had a camera last night. At one point we came over a spot where there were literally arches stacked upon arches, maybe 15 lines that I could count on the screen at one time? We stopped and jigged at one point too. Bucktail and fluke, and then I just had a fluke on jig head. I could see the jig on sonar, then I saw a line come up to the jig depth and then go back down. Not sure if it was just coincidence, but I think it was for sure checking it out. I hope to get a small card for tomorrows fishing. I would like to record some of this and play it back to see what all was going on, not to mention just having a record of it. I like to see others pictures also. It helps to see the differences and such. I should have taken a picture of the smaller hybrids we were seeing, then catching. They were significantly smaller arches, but piled up none the less like the others we were seeing.

So all of that was interesting, then we got into some hybrids that were shallower than that. Then, my learning curve with the downrigger quickly sharpened when I was making a turn and decided to go over a couple of huge tree's. Note to self and others...when the line on the downrigger tightens - stop the boat -. Lost a ball and clip, but luckly they were homemade and I'm not out a tremendous amount. Just hurt the pride some because of the stupidity of it. The next couple of pictures I would love to hear thoughts on. After we messed around with the downrigger in tree and so on, it started to get dark. At this point, according to what the generation schedule was, they would have stopped running as hard if not all together. But all of a sudden my screen started to have this happen. Then, just a little bit later it looked like this. I thought it was my sonar, so I turned on the humminbird in DI mode and got the same thing. What is it? Just crud suspending that was previously being pulled down stream? So, I learned a lot last night. These pictures do not do justice to what we were seeing. At one point we saw this bait ball, then we passed over it again after turning around just a min later and saw part of it being demolished with big arches right under the part that was being demolished. What I would have given for some live bait.

Here are a some pictures of what I was seeing last night. I wish I could have made my ff work with the card, but its too big of a card. I need like a 512mb card I think. The first pictures are of what I was seeing Saturday, and then on Sunday when we caught that striper. Now here, man oh man, was I looking like a kid in a candy store...except I was the kid without any money... Could not get them to bite anything. Of course, I likened it to a dog with a plate of ribs and me trying to get him to eat a plate full of sticks that look like ribs...just aint going to happen. To your point f&f, live bait would have made all the difference in the world last night.

Interesting. Yea, no numbers or specific info needed. I completely understand. I could see how it would work out keeping track of things, but it does seem like a daunting task. I could see putting together something for a limited area, like Indian Creek/Dam area, but you seem to have a knowledge of the entire lake. How much time would you say you spend on the water? That has to be the number one thing when it comes to getting to know something, time. Which makes me wonder if it would even be productive if someone only fished once a week or so.

Or as my friend would say, "you want my hunting spot too???". Lol. No, you said they were in Excel, I thought maybe just one line or something. I know, that would give up the one line of information. But maybe I am not understanding it correctly on how your doing it? I figured you might have a column that you label "Temp", then one labeled "elevation", so on and so forth. I was just curious how you had it set up to see how you could see trends. No, if I were trying to see all your good stuff I'd just beg you to take me to all your honey holes in person. Much better that way.

Would you care to go into any more detail in regards to generating schedule and how it influences the fishing? I know you touched on it a little.

So the obvious question I see here is if you could show us an example of how you do a log. What information and such you put in to be able to go back and see these patterns.