Trav Please

[Trav]

I have noticed a disturbing trend, the phasing out of actual decent electronics to force anglers into complexity. A perfect example being Lowrance discontinuing the production of the 510 c from their line up and even Hummingbird has rumored a limit to their counterpart of their 2400 watt series.

(of course I am sure EBay will have plenty in the near future due to this trend.)

I am certain the rational of discontinuing certain graphs are going to turn such items into the “Atari” of fishing but it will hurt the accessibility of the average angler.

Not all of us are willing to put in a sonar unit which makes us think harder than a weatherman, yet alone one that costs as much as an entire weeks pay. Let’s be real here, unless you are making money off your tools you can’t exactly write them off on your taxes.

After all…it is a hobby related to humble folk who if they were taught even a bit of the salt by their family they can catch fish without it. Who is going to pay a grand when it takes them a week to earn it when they have mouths to feed??

The idea of sonar for most of us includes only the basics. We want water temp, depth, bait fish, structure, contour, bottom texture, and for us Ozarkers who love the dropshot, the ability to see our line under the boat. All of which can be properly utilized with a 2400 watt transducer. All of which is being negated to sell higher tech.

Granted, I have to admit the 4000 watt radar with fancy side viewing and GPS options can be tempting but as cool as it is to see the old bridges or road beds from 1940, you still have to keep in mind that what you are looking for is fish.

Even with the advancements, the new radars continue to show the typical arches when displaying fish no matter how high tech it is. Think about this…unless they can tell you the fish are green or rainbow it is still radar.

My grandfather could tell you every crappie spot with an old flasher. So I know electronics don’t make the man.

I only write this because I feel there is too much hype and intimidation/competitiveness lately when it comes to fishing. I feel the majority of us think boat gas is more important than the hype portrayed by electronics and 15 dollar crankbaits. Who wants to pay 6 dollars for gulp minnows when you can pay 4 dollars for twice as many flukes? It is skill not trademarks that succeed. And as much as I detest live bait fishermen they still reign as the obvious rulers.

Sucks…but it is true.

When it comes to electronics…..I do fall under the demographic of using it more than I should but those who know the water and have spent the time to learn it will continue to out fish me. It takes time and years to be a master of a particular body of water and we should never underestimate knowledge passed down from generation to generation.

Everything I know is an accumulation of experience and I am very content with my discontinued 510 c Lowrance with 2400 watts. It’s a shame fishing is getting too expensive for the average Joe.

I grew up on lower Taney and spent my formative years fishing Iowa and Ontario. I have guided Canada and spent four years as a guide on Lake Gatun in Panama, even spent a year in Honduras. I have history doing dozens of bass tourneys in the south, the Carolinas, Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama. Also do a spring trip annually to Texas.

…I have fly fished much of the north in Montana and Wyoming and even did a summer as a guide in Estes park in Colorado.. .

I did every moment without a single bit of electronics. It wasn’t until 1991 until I bought a 400 hummingbird and I admit knowing the depth helped me but it was no substitute to knowledge.

I guess what I am saying.. you don’t have to spend money to catch fish. Anyone who has followed my posts here on OzarkAnglers can confirm I am low budget. And I do very well. You don’t need to hire a guide either. Learn your own patterns and seek knowledge here from guys like me, Phil, Bill, Tom, Brian, Leonard, Jim, John, ….the list is long.

Just don't buy into the bull that it is going to cost you too much money. Don’t let society force you into buying the newest stuff when a simple 2400 watt graph will serve you good. Don’t buy Gulp when flukes will serve you. Don’t buy a 15 dollar Mcstick when a 7 dollar rogue does the same thing. Truth known…a simple 3 inch grub with a ¼ ounce darter jig head will be the best and it is so cheap to fish that way.

I am used to this forum negating my crazy outspoken opinions. Those who can see through my bull and see the truth always benefit the most.…"wink"

Who made fun of me because I typed “wink”…??? …..I forget.

Doesn't matter…..just fish to have fun……….If you make it serious you lose.

[BolivarBasser]

Remember the scene in "A Few Good Men" where Jack Nicholson is on the witness stand and goes postal on the prosecutor "Tom Cruise" and completely puts him in his place? I feel like I just read such a moment.

You can't handle the truth!!!

Interesting tidbit Trav. Enjoyed it.

[tippet7]

…I have fly fished much of the north in Montana and Wyoming and even did a summer as a guide in Estes park in Colorado.. .

I did every moment without a single bit of electronics

That is refreshing to know that a fly fishing guide is not using electronics. I cant stand seeing those guys carrying a battery on their back and a 12 foot cable floating downstream. Hmmm...on second thought, maybe that is how a certain guarantee to catch fish outfit does it. i'm just sayin.....

[Kayser]

I don't use electronics for the most part, but then again, I mainly fish small ponds and lakes that I know extremely well, and where dipping your rod is all you need to figure out water depth and bottom composition. When making short day trips to bigger water, I admit, electronics help me a lot (my friend has a basic one on his boat), but I mainly just cruise around looking for the right depth on points and ledges, or if I'm lucky enough, some form of structure in the depth I'm after.

But an example- last time I was at Bull Shoals, I was able to rent a boat for an hour, and hooked a 3-4lb kentucky on a jigging spoon (spit the hook at the boat). There were seats and motor on this boat, nothing fancy, but I had a lake contour map I had looked at, and found a spot that looked decent, so that's where we fished. No electronics, just educated guessing.

[Bird Watcher]

I just put the Structure Scan on my Lowrance 1 1/2 weeks ago. All I can say is this...it's a game changer and if you haven't ridden around your home lake looking at it, you won't understand. If you have, then you already know what I mean.

Look, it still takes woodmanship to be a successful hunter and it still takes fishing savvy to be a successful fisherman, but if you put a state of the art tool in the hands of a savvy fisherman he is going to have more success as a result.

That is all. carry on.

[crappiefisherman]

My newest electronic fish and structure finding device was manufactured in 1991 and got at a garage sale for pennies.I get to see all the latest and greatest at work.There is a lot out there, but even a flasher will help you find fish and structure(right Dustin?) The best fish finding devise is in your head, past trips and common sense will help you find them.Use your geology class teachers advice and look at your surroundings. I can tell you even my old unit seems to draw my attention more then it should, I always seem to miss things while playing with the darn thing.see you on the lake............

[Trav]

I have seen the StructureScan demo.....it is very impressive.

Don't get me wrong. I am not anti-tech. I just had to vent a bit. I think it is wrong to phase out practicality. You have to forgive me sometimes. I like to rant.

I find it amusing how much conversation is focused toward the most expensive products on the market. I realize a majority of it is bragging (Boys and their toys syndrome) but it does start to feel like people have some vested interest in the companies who overprice their wares. I am sure it is also a form of peer pressure to buy the latest and greatest. Dare I say a bit of it might even be justification to ease some buyer’s remorse?

I do admit some of the stuff is pretty nifty even if it isn’t very thrifty. You don’t always get what you pay for though. I have learned the hard way myself.

Maybe we should have some conversations about comparison shopping? It might prove to be quite beneficial instead of Name-brand competitive shopping.

I know I sound like a doting housewife with a fistful of coupons while talking to a teenager at the mall. Look at it this way though. Gas is supposed to be almost three bucks a gallon this summer and not saving some extra cash for that reality only means you have fancy toys and no money left to actually use them.

Trav is just thinking out loud here.

[Al Agnew]

Lot's of food for thought, Trav.

Fishing is many things, but it is first of all finding fish. If you're not fishing where fish are, you absolutely, tee-totally won't catch fish. Sure, finding arches on your graph doesn't mean you'll catch those fish, or even if they are the right kind of fish. Finding neat pieces of structure and cover on your graph doesn't mean there are catchable fish there. But those things give you toehold, anyway.

Finding fish is pretty simple on small bodies of water. Chances are that with any knowledge at all, you'll be fishing in the right places. But when it comes to bigger bodies of water, that ain't necessarily so, not only because of the area you have to evaluate, but also because the third dimension, depth, becomes so much more important as well.

When I was a kid, pre-depth finder era (kinda like the Jurassic Era), my dad and I fished Wappapello Reservoir every weekend. From many years of being on the lake, learning from an angler who had many MORE years on the lake, "feeling" the bottom with deep-diving crankbaits and a 15 ft. cane pole, cruising the lake in the winter when the water level was quite low, even talking to even older old timers who had known the river valley before the lake was built, Dad knew the lake about as well as anybody. We knew where the river channel was, we knew where all the stump fields were, we even knew where a lot of individual stumps and logs and sunken duck blinds were. We could tell you how deep the water was within at least a foot or two at just about any spot on the lake.

But knowing the lake that well HAD taken a lot of time and observation. And it was a shallow lake...the third dimension wasn't as crucial as it can be on deeper lakes. It was a whole lot easier to find a big cypress stump in 7 feet of water than it is to find a ledge with a sunken cedar tree on it in 30 feet of water. On the rare times when we traveled to a lake like Bull Shoals, we were almost clueless, and it was only because it was so difficult for ANYBODY to learn such lakes well that we still caught fish--there were simply more fish that were easier to catch back then. On Wappapello we were fish gods, probably catching as many or more big bass as anybody else on the lake.

Then, depth finders appeared on the scene and bass fishing got a lot more popular. We got a depth finder. It helped us stay on the edge of the river channel fishing those good stumps in open water a little better, but that's about it. But now we were seeing a lot of other guys fishing the stumps that few but us had known about before. Those danged depth finders were allowing them to find spots that had once been exclusively ours. And it's no coincidence that the fishing rapidly got tougher for us--while probably getting easier for the newbies. If there is one constant in fishing, it is that the more fishing pressure there is, especially effective fishing pressure, the harder it becomes to catch fish, whether that's because there are fewer fish or because the existing fish get more sophisticated.

So...technology, while not guaranteeing success, is a great equalizer. It allows the angler who is less experienced on a particular body of water to find and catch fish quicker and easier, narrowing the difference between them and the guy who's spent a lifetime on the lake.

The question is, is this entirely a good thing? Fishing has become almost like an arms race. The better the technology, the greater the numbers of anglers that are able to fish effectively. The more anglers fishing effectively, the more pressure is put on the fish and the tougher fishing gets. The tougher fishing gets, the more technology and/or knowledge it takes to catch fish. Back in those antediluvian times when we fished Wappapello, everybody caught some fish but we caught a LOT of them. There were simply more stupid fish back then and fewer good anglers to beat on them, so even though catch and release was practically unheard of, the fishing was good. Now, there are a lot more effective anglers, who are fishing for more sophisticated and probably less numerous fish and probably catching just about as many overall because their knowledge and technology is so much better.

So it's hard to say if we're really better off. If we DON'T have the knowledge of specific waters and at least SOME of the technology that others have, we're probably a lot worse off. So, while we NEED some level of technology to catch a lot of fish from big, heavily pressured lakes, if the technology didn't exist we probably wouldn't need it nearly as much.

And, at what point does the technology get so good that there is simply TOO much pressure put on the fish? We all want to catch fish every time we go out, but if everybody did catch them like that, how long would the resource last? At the very least, the better the technology gets, the more likely it is that more restrictions are put on keeping fish. But even if we made bass fishing purely catch and release in response to nearly foolproof technology, it would still mean tougher and tougher fishing due to the fact that some fish will always die after being caught, and the more times they are caught the more likely they are to eventually die from it. And, fish are just "intelligent" enough to learn from bad experiences, and the more times they are caught and released, the tougher they get to fool. So, as technology gets better and better, it gets more and more necessary to have it in order to catch fish, and the poor sucker who can't afford the technology catches fewer and fewer.

[rps]

Trav:

Thanks for starting a good thread. Knowledge and time invested versus money and technology. How can one decide? BTW I hated paper graphs when they came out. Then I learned how to use them.

[Justin Spencer]

For no frills fishing where technology does you little or no good grab a canoe and head to one of the float streams. Whether a fly fisherman or spin fisherman smallmouth, goggleye, trout, white bass, even stripers, hybirds and walleye in some streams are all available within an hour of most of us. No gas bill, no fish finder, no noise, only advise and experience can help you when you are river fishing. If you know what you are doing you can even catch big fish that seem even bigger when you catch them in moving water. I enjoy fishing lakes as well, but when I want a relaxing day back to nature, nothing beats floating down an Ozark stream catching fish along the way. As the water warms every species of river fish is starting to bite, now is the time! Stream fishing levels the playing field for everyone, and a person on any budget can do it.