NAIFC

Brian Gaber

The NAIFC season is in the books. All the drama, competition, and camaraderie are packaged up with your ice gear for another off season. Some are heading to the spring Walleye Rivers, while others are turning their sights to Steelhead. There are some of us, though, that are getting the boats rigged up for the open water season of data collection. I am assembling all my favorite electronics, clearing data cards, and gathering up the maps necessary to unlock next year’s hot ice spots.

Waiting until there is ice on the lake to look for a good ice fishing spot, means only one thing, work. If you are in to drilling holes, this is how you operate. Winter lake exploration is possible, but it’s a vertical affair. The advent of the underwater camera makes this a bit easier, but you are still drilling down to move forward. This is the time to sharpen your skills searching, interpreting, and documenting. Get your boat out, clear out your GPS unit, and utilize your sonar unit.

The sonar unit lets you cover water. This is the horizontal component of your investigation. Eliminating unproductive water and really honing in on the “spots”. Understanding and interpreting your sonar unit is critical to efficiently picking apart a lake. Many people don’t understand the basics of the sonar, and therefore, have trouble using them. Let’s shed some light on this mystery.

The sonar is basically a computer device that utilizes a transducer to emit a pulsating sound wave at regular intervals. It hits objects in the water, analyzes them, and returns a signal. The way it works is it measures the length of time it takes for each signal to return. We already know how fast the signal travels through the water, so the time it takes to return a signal tell us how far away we are from the object. Bottom separation and picture detail are a function of the frequency and the number of pixels in the screen, or resolution. In both cases above, the higher the value the better the separation and picture.

There are also a couple of key interpretations that, when mastered, will help you a great deal. The hardness and softness of the bottom are interpreted by the unit. The thickness of the bottom return line will tell the relative harness. A thick line will represent a hard bottom, while a thin line will represent a soft bottom. An easy way to think about it is by imagining the strength of the signal. Take a golf ball and drop it on concrete, and then drop it on grass. The concrete will result in a stronger return, thus thicker. Look for the transitions. Another key interpretation element is judging the size of what you are looking at. A long line on the return does not necessarily indicate a large fish. The horizontal component of the return only represents the length of time the fish remains in the cone, or below the boat. You can have a bluegill below the boat for a long time, and the return will be a long thin line across the screen. The thickness determines the size of the fish. The thicker the return is, the bigger the fish is. The last thing to note, is that the first one eighth of an inch of the scrolling return picture is the current return, the rest is historical data.

One way to master these interpretations is to take out your underwater camera out and drop it down to look at the fish that you’re are marking, the bottom type you are looking at, or other items on the bottom. Make mental notes of what they looked like on your sonar return. Soon you will be on your way to maximizing time, in the exploration of the lake. Some of the very best anglers that I have fished with spent a great deal of their scouting time riding around the lake graphing or viewing their sonar units. Record coordinates of key structural elements and transitions. Take notes about them. You’ll thank yourself when the water is hard and the search slows.