Episode 1292 32 Feet of Confusion

0:00I'm not going to apologize, I have more to share about forward-facing sonar. If you're still on the fence about owning forward-facing sonar, let me share something that happened the last couple of trips I took out on the ice. We're in 11 feet of water looking for panfish, bigger croppy, perch, and a few bluegill. Something different this time. Of course every time I go out, I make sure I bring along my Garmin life scope. Pinging it with me has become a necessary part of my trip. We always look for fish and it's a great tool to help climb them as we've all been told. But sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Here's the interesting thing about live sonar. It is noisy, there's a ton of pinging going on. A transducer works by pinging sound off the bottom or whatever passes through it. Well the more experience we have with live sonar, the more we are learning that fish are affected by that increased pinging of live sonar. A Vexlar or 2D sonar doesn't seem to have that much of a deterrent going on, but there is some that say it does.

1:01In the last two trips we took out, I started tracking fish coming forward into my live sonar transducer. Fish would come from 65, 55, 45 feet out making their way toward us. And interestingly enough, those marks would get to 32 feet and then disappear. It didn't happen once or twice, but many times. I should have kept track, I guarantee it was at least 10 to 12 times. Once or twice is a coincidence, anything more than that is cause for concern. I turned the live scope off and finally after 5 hours we marked fish on the Vexlar. Uh oh, live sonar may be doing more harm than good. I'm Chase and Walter and that's in through the outdoors. Find more Chase and Walter.com, be safe and thanks for listening. You'll find over 1200 ITTO episodes with every topic about walleye archived on my YouTube channel at Chase and Walter's in through the outdoors and check out between hook sets Wednesday nights at 7 p.m. Central.