Fish Finder Tips Catching Bass

[LWD]

Hi, I'm a recently acquired owner of a downimage sidefinder. Problem is I get alot of fish showing up on the down imager, not so much with the sidefinder. With sidefinder I know where to cast to because it tells me the location and distance in ft to the fish, I caught two today using that method. However when using the downimager the finder detects are located directly beneath my boat, so in essence, to catch those fish even if they are bass or not, I'd have to float over them to detect, then float back about 15ft and make a cast to that spot? I tried that didn't get nothing, most likely they were not even bass, the big ones I did detect were sitting close to the bottom, and I was using a 1-5ft crankbait. So there is no way I'm getting to them unless I t-rigged a worm or something. Thanks.

[Wayne P.]

First of all there is no such thing as "downimage sidefinder" and you do not have any imaging capability.

You have a regular sonar unit with two sonar crystals. One of the crystals transmits a vertical pulse and the other crystal transmits a horizontal pulse.

You either have a Bottomline Side Finder or a Humminbird Fishin' Buddy with SideFinding (sonar on a stick).

The simple answer is you have to use whatever presentation gets to the depth that the fish are or close to it. If the water is 15' deep, with the fish close to the bottom and all you are using is a crankbait that dives to 5', your chance of a catch is very low.

This is what Down Imaging looks like:

[moguy1973]

First of all there is no such thing as "downimage sidefinder" and you do not have any imaging capability.

You have a regular sonar unit with two sonar crystals. One of the crystals transmits a vertical pulse and the other crystal transmits a horizontal pulse.

You either have a Bottomline Side Finder or a Humminbird Fishin' Buddy with SideFinding (sonar on a stick).

Huh?

Both humminbird and lowrance have down imaging sonars that have side scanning capabilities. The HB finders are actually called Side Imaging and the lowrance are called StructureScan.

LWD, what kind of fish finder is this that you have? (Brand,model)