School of Stripers

I had the day off so I called a couple of friends and went to the lake looking for fish for my clients that I will take out later in the week. I found this school and thought it might be of some interest to some of my journal followers that want to learn how to locate Stripers on their own. The depth finder is a Lowrance HDS-8 with Structure Scan. I am looking at 3 different screens on the unit which I utilize most of the time while I am fishing. The left part of the screen is Bottom Lock, it is showing the bottom 2', 4', 6' etc. up off the bottom. It is always locked on the bottom whatever depth I am in and is set at 3x zoom so that I can see the fish better in the lower water column where most of the Stripers are hanging out now. The numbers on the Screen show the depth at 46', Water Temperature of 90, my speed was 1/2 a mph at 10 o'clock in the morning. The small middle screen is traditional sonar set in a 0 to 45 foot scale, showing Stripers stacked from 19' to 40'. The right half of my screen is Structure Scan which is set on left and right side scan on a 80 foot range. The boat is actually at the top of the screen at 0 and as the boat moves forward the history scrolls downward on the screen. The numbers 20, 40 and 80 are how many feet to the sides of the boat the scan is recording. I took this picture at the end of the school so there are not many fish showing up on the side scan. The fish show up at vertical dashes. Note there were more fish to the right of the boat than to the left of the boat at the moment I snapped the picture. This school of Stripers was not very large, it was only about 100 feet wide by 200 feet long [maybe a third of an acre at the most]. I did not bother to fish the school because the fish on the screen were not active fish. Certainly if you see this on your Lowrance I would suggest you fishing it but in my experience when I see the Stripers not streaking [arches moving quickly up and or down on the screen] I pass them up and continue to look for more aggressive feeding fish. Also I noticed some smaller Stripers in the school mixed in with the larger Stripers which usually means to me the fish are not feeding. When the larger Stripers want to eat normally they will not allow the smaller Stripers to feed along side of them. When they are aggressively feeding the sizes of fish will be more segregated.
You can click on the picture of my Lowrance to enlarge the picture.