Quote:
Originally Posted by ProfessorLongArms
Just got to this one in my watch queue. Way to make it look easy! 
Here's a question-
I follow you and Nakada to the letter when I'm targeting (mostly) WSB and (less so since I'm further north) YT....
I've noted there's a lot of watching for marks and dropping on them, be it either a bait ball or a mark that actually looks like a big fish.
How often would you say you end up *seeing* those marks on a given trip?
Bait balls I see all the time, but I feel like I'll go a number of trips without seeing big slugs in my meter.
Sometimes I wonder if it's a matter of being more attentive to the depth finder?
Or would you say finding those marks can be a bit of a longer waiting game? |
Good question. I hope to go into more detail about this in a future video. The first point is, being able to be sure about what is actually a good mark/marks. There are so many aspects to this. Obviously you need to be on the right frequency and have the settings dialed in pretty well. We've covered that in some other videos and threads, and it can vary between units, but generally speaking you are on the lowest frequency you have and you have the gain/sensitivity turned up enough that the bottom marks very hard on the "hottest" color in you palate. The biggest indicators of a fish are:
1. Thick and solid mark with definitive boarders, with the thickness being relative to the depth scale you are in. In 20 feet of water a big greenback looks like a yellowtail in 100', and in 180' of water a yellowtail looks like a greenback in 50'. The screen only has so many pixels, and the scale of the mark is relative to the depth and resolution of the display.
2. Fast moving fish look like "arches" slower moving fish look like "worms". But they will rarely mark as a straight boomerang, unless the fish is way out on the perimeter of the cone. The boomerang shape is caused by the doppler effect. So keeping that in mind you can apply that to the behavior of predatory game fish. These fish are very seldom sitting still. So, as you are bobbing up and down in the swell, your depth is constantly changing by a few feet which results in the "waviness" of the bottom on your screen. If the worm you are looking at follows the bottom contour, that means it is sitting stationary relative to the bottom, that means it is pretty much just hovering in place and a gamefish will rarely do this. The right kind of marks change in depth independently of the bottom contour wave action.
3. Fish in a school will usually change depths independently of each other. So instead of a bunch of parallel worms stacked on top of each other neatly, a school of fish will look all tangled like spaghetti. A big school will rarely look like parallel stacked marks, especially if they are also parallel with the bottom.