Hummingbird Fish Finders are practical in more than just deep lakes.

Hummingbird Fish Finders

Go to a major bass tournament this year and check out the pro’s boats before takeoff. You’ll see proof of the trend that is changing bass fishing.



That trend is the ever-expanding use of side-viewing sonar technology like Hummingbird Fish Finders Side and Down Imaging



Of course, at the top levels of expert bass fishing, adding one of these simple high-tech fishing tools to a rig is getting to be less of a trend and much more of a necessity. The pros that were among the first to use side-scanning sonar benefitted noticeably, to the point that even shallow-water die-hards have joined the stampede toward the new technology. There have been many professionals which have added a side-viewing unit to his boat for the 2010 season, and it has helped them go from being mainly a skinny-water expert to developing right into a complete fishing package who can compete offshore too.



As experimentation continues and knowledge of side-scan technology of hummingbird Fish Finders progresses, some of those shallow-water aces might also discover another benefit of the newfangled units: Even though it’s a powerful tool for deep water, Side Imaging also opens up shallow patterns that may never have been discovered - and it can help an angler do it faster than another technology in fishing.



The fundamentals of shallow scanning



When you look at Down Imaging using Hummingbird Fish Finders with the very basic view, there are three primary benefits of it for shallow-water fishing, as opposed to traditional sonar:



It can actually be used there - Traditional sonar in shallow water was sometimes a worthless tool. Yes, you could spot a sudden drop in depth if you idled over a ditch. And yes, you could get a reading on below hardness. But that’s about this. Down Imaging, for lack of a better word, “shoots” images off to the side of the boat across shallow flats, under docks and into cover, places you literally could not get above to see with traditional sonar.



The images are much clearer with Hummingbird Fish Finders - This is applicable to Down Imaging in any depth, but it bears repeating: The picture-like images of Down Imaging are far superior than anything traditional sonar could cough up - ever. You are able to identify objects on the screen, rather than wondering when that blob is a rotting stump or perhaps a rusting outboard.



Speed? - Using Down Imaging with Hummingbird Fish Finders actually requires slow boat movements. When done properly, however, its greatest strength is the ability to speed up the search when dealing with miles of shoreline and shallow flats. More about that later.



Find fish, not structure



One famous professional was among the first tour professionals to obtain a Down Imaging unit when they were released in 2009. At first, as he admits, he didn’t always experiment with it in shallow water just like he probably should have. That’s understandable, considering its value to him offshore. That changed one time when he was fishing docks on the small lake.



“I’ve located on my home lake that some of the boat houses that don’t have brush under them attract bass just as well as those that do, so I wasn’t using it to look for the brush,” the pro says. I was actually using it to discover the fish under the docks. You can find them. That really opened my eyes. There’s a lot more to it than just the structure portion of it. House foundations will always be cool to look at, but fish are what we’re after.”



And that's the biggest difference in making use of Side Imaging in the shallows as opposed to offshore, where you don’t always need to find fish with it (although it’s nice whenever you do). In deeper water you can utilize it to find good structure where, once the conditions are right, fish will eventually gather. In the shallows, the pro can easily see if fish are there when he passes by, so he can try to catch those bass and perhaps figure out a pattern. So instead of looking for shallow structure, he searches for shallow fish.



Identifying fish



OK, so what do those individual shallow fish actually seem like? According to him, predator fish appear as elongated white “tubes” on the Side Imaging (see his actual screen capture above). What the Side Imaging can’t always tell an angler is whether the fish is really a largemouth bass or a toothy gar. For those, you need to catch one.



However, presuming the fish is really a bass, an angler can gauge its size by its proximity to shallow cover. The pro makes a fine art of it on his home-lake docks with a simple technique.



“What I actually do is compare the connection of the size of the dock poles on the screen to the size of the fish on screen, and that gives me a mention of the their true size,” The professional says. “That was a good tip to get because I never really thought about it before. If a structure is 30 or 40 feet deep, you won't ever really know how big the fish onto it are until you actually catch one.”



Speed



In order to get the best results with the Side Imaging technology, watching to boat speed is important. If you’re a pro , you simply put the boat in gear but don’t give it any more gas. The pro prefers to idle at a more precise range of about 5 to 6 mph.



Go faster, and also the images are distorted; go slower, and the result is likely to be one continuous blurred picture. Traditional sonar can operate effectively at a much faster speed, but Side Imaging has it beat within the sense that you can locate and identify quality fishing areas much quicker.



Distance and settings



It’s tough to establish a specific distance that you should keep the boat far from a shallow area when utilizing Hummingbird Fish Finders Side Imaging in order to get the best image. It takes some trial and error to find out how close to get to shallow cover to get good readings without spooking fish. The pro loves to stay about 30 feet away from the boat docks on his home lake. He sets his unit to only show images in the dock side from the boat, and he sets the screen’s scale to display out to 80 feet far from the boat. The 80-foot mark also applies for The pro in several other shallow cases, but it’s not a hard rule for him.



What’s interesting is the fact that both The pro and many others admit that they typically don’t adjust every other settings on the unit other than the range shown on screen. They’ve experimented, but neither has found anything better than the “auto” settings in the factory.



That doesn’t mean pro’s don’t still experiment. They are doing, and they suggest others do it as well. If an angler doesn’t experiment with settings and techniques, he’ll never discover the full extent from the benefits Side Imaging technology provides.

Hummingbird Fish Finders