This past Tuesday afternoon, March 3rd, I met Mr. James Caddell of Morgan’s Point Resort, TX, for an on-the-water “Sonar Session”.
Whenever weather conditions allow, I like to work in a “practical exercise” by actually having my “sonar student” catch at least one fish by using sonar after all the adjustments and training is complete. James brought in this Belton hybrid just before dark.
James owns a bass boat and has recently upgraded his sonar, placing one Lowrance Elite 7 HDI unit on the bow and another identical unit on the console (non-networked).
James actually had a pretty good grasp on sonar already, so we were able to breeze through the basics and get right to several issues he wanted to address.
The first issue was that of the chart plotter (map) screen being cluttered with trail markings from previous trips. We worked through the “trails” menu to resolve this issue, eliminate all historic trails, and place one fresh, new trail of a different color on the map screen.
The second issue was that of interference on his front unit. We resolved that by tracing the interference to the console unit and using one of the unit’s built-in features to overcome that issue.
The third thing we looked at was manually controlling the sensitivity on the traditional colored sonar view to maximize the targets detected while avoiding undue clutter.
Next, we changed the color palette of the down imaging to one more well suited for Belton instead of the “sepia” palette he had defaulted to.
After that, we chased fish so we could being using the units in “real world” scenarios. This allowed James to adjust his colored sonar sensitivity “on the fly” as depth changed, and to use the scroll back feature combined with placing waypoints to mark items of interest on the bottom.
As we did this, we discovered the trolling motor shaft was actually angled back towards the boat somewhat instead of being plumb. Normally, just manually adjusting the transducer by angling it forward would overcome this, but James had installed a transducer protector on the trolling motor which prevented such adjustment. James put removal of the protective cover on his “to do” list so a manual adjustment can be made. I also suspect James put “get a new trolling motor” on his “to do” list as well, but, I cannot confirm that 😉
Towards sunset we observed a small, loose flock of terns working over a patch of water, so, we idled around, found some loosely schooled white bass and hybrid stripers along with shad in 30-40 feet of water and used the bow-mounted electronics to precisely present our slabs to these fish. James pulled a short hybrid out of the mix, and I boated an average white bass. With that mission accomplished, we headed back to the dock.