Friday, May 24, 2013

Lowrance HDS Technology

 This is a picture off of a HDS-12 with traditional sonar on the upper half of the screen and Side Scan on the bottom half. DP was collecting bait for a trip early in the morning. In the sonar portion of the picture the boat is over 35 feet of water and shows some small Stripers in the upper water column with plankton stratified between 20 to 25 feet on the left side and on the bottom on the right side of the sonar screen. Very little bait is showing up on the sonar. The bottom half of the picture shows Side scan in a 60 foot scale [looking out 60 feet to the right and left side of the boat]. It clearly shows bait to  the left of the boat. It also shows very clearly DP's 10 foot net and rope sinking into the bait. At this point there was one bait in the net but after letting it fall he caught about 2 dozen baits. We use this technology daily not only catching bait but also while we are on fish to track the direction the schools are moving.
 This is a cropped view of the picture above showing the net falling into the bait.

 This screen shot shows traditional sonar on the left side of the screen, side scan on the upper right and bottom scan on the bottom right of the screen. The Stripers are suspended between 22 to 35 feet. The line in the middle of the pic is us dropping our bait down through the Stripers. On the side scan  you can see Stripers not only under our boat but more Stripers to the left side of the boat. Down scan is simply is confirming the fish under the boat. We caught about 15 fish in just a few minutes while fishing this school. If you look at the upper portion of my sonar it shows my history of the previous few minutes. The purplish square is the same as the current sonar and the further you look back to the left  the further back in time we go. With the touch screen I can simply touch any area in the history, it pulls the screens back to that moment so I can view what I previously went over and if I wish I could touch that area again and way-point it to return to the exact spot.
This shot of my Lowrance shows the boat in 16 feet of water. This is a massive school of bait.
We threw the net and caught about 60 beautiful baits.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Is the bottom picture herring or gizzards? I am guessing gizzards. Great pictures and teaching.