[chris138]

Also, regarding the bait balls. You can infer a lot about what's going on from the bait balls as well. When the gamefish are really feeding aggressively, chasing that bait, they don't linger as long and sometimes don't even show up on the sonar. The behavior of the bait can be just as important. So if you have these big columns of bait, and instead of slowly dissipating they "wall off" sharply, that means something was chasing them. If its a huge wad of bait, the edge of the wad wont be on your screen. So the bait that is on your screen is reacting to the behavior of the school, not necessarily the gamefish... hence the reason you don't see the slug on the meter. It's pretty obvious what mode the bait is in, whether it's comfortably shoaling, feeding, or being chased. Try to get the bait wads to react to your bait on the meter and pay attention to how its behaving.