Navico and Navionics

 This is a screen shot that I took while looking for schools of Stripers Thursday morning. On the right half of the split screen is my echo [sonar] page. I am in a 45 foot scale and was running about 20 mph before I saw fish and slowed down to fish them. I actually popped the picture at 3.6 mph as I was coming to a stop. On the left half of the echo screen while I am running the yellowish vertical dots is motor noise. I keep my sensitivity up while running and since I have been doing this for so long I don't even notice the noise. I am concentrating on the yellowish marks below 30 feet where the Stripers were schooling. As I am running at higher speeds the fish appear as a glob on the screen. As I slow down the marks start to form shape and eventually turn into arches. As I run I am looking for color in the marks. The more color, the larger and denser the fish is. I took this pic just to show the difference in the two. These fish were mostly punks with a few nicer fish mixed in. The right side of the echo page looses the motor noise as I slow down and the Stripers start to form arches. The nicer Stripers were relating to the channel when I took this picture.
 The left half of the screen is my Navionic map. When I search for Stripers sometimes I may have to look for a long time to locate what I want to fish, cris-crossing areas numerous times. I am using overlay on my map while I am running to help me know which water I have covered and where to continue to look. The overlayed area is the water shaded in Blue. By doing this I do not waist time searching in water that I have recently covered. I was also using the map to keep near the channels because the fish were relating to the edges at this particular time. When I locate a nice school I hit my waypoint key on my unit so I can go back to the exact area the fish were in. This really helps when it is windy out. By the time I turn around and set out 8 to 10 lines it is easy to get blown off the spot.

This is a screen shot that I took a few minutes before taking the previous shot above this one. The fish were not feeding and were hanging very deep and relating to the bottom of the lake. Here I am in 46 feet of water and all of the fish are hugging the bottom. You can see on the echo page us dropping a bait down [diagonal whitish mark going from upper left to lower right]. On side scan you can see the fish as white dashes hugging the bottom as well. I also took this shot as an example of what not to do. Notice that the upper 40 feet of the water column is completely void of bait and or fish. The Better way to look and search for fish in conditions like this would either be go to view on the echo window and hit bottom lock or zoom and only view the lower third of the water column. The fish would have shown up 3 times the size and you could have distinguished the size of the fish better. These were all non feeding fish though. If the fish were streaking and bait was present I would have put out more than one bait and considered working it more. We dropped the bait to the bottom to see if it would get hit. It got extremely nervous but nothing would touch it. Didn't take me long to get it in and search elsewhere.