Electro-Fishing

GLANCING AT THAT headline you might guess we’re about to get into an ill-fated conversation about batteries, jumper cables, and fish floating belly-up.

You’d be wrong.

Not only because the practice of zapping fish into submission is both unsportsmanlike and illegal, but also because there’s a better way to use electricity to catch more fish from your boat.

Learning How To Fully Utilize Your Electronics

The fishfinder and chartplotter tend to be the only pieces of electronics fully harnessed by the average boat-owning angler. They use GPS to get to the hotspot, and the fishfinder to peer beneath the water. That’s fine. It’s also just the beginning of how you can utilize marine electronics as fish-catching tools.

AIS is thought of by most people as a safety feature, but it can come in handy to anglers as well. Commercial boats have it, and that includes shrimpers. Just about everyone knows that shrimp boats attract predators—everything from king mackerel to blackfin tunas—but finding those boats offshore can be a challenge sometimes. If, that is, you don’t have AIS. If you do have it, you’ll not only know where they’re located, but also where concentrations of multiple shrimpers are, which way they’re heading, and at what speed.

Anchor Alarms are one thing most of us rarely use. These are just for overnight cruisers, afraid they may drag anchor… right? Wrong. Anchor alarms are also useful to fishermen, especially when you’re not anchored.

Drift fishing is actually an ideal time to apply anchor alarm tech to enhance your angling prowess.

Stop thinking of it as it relates to anchoring, and instead, simply look at it as a way of keeping track of your boat’s position. Boat positioning is key when it comes to drift fishing. In most common scenarios, you’ll be positioning your boat over a wreck, reef, or some other form of structure or live bottom that attracts fish.

These features are nearly always limited in size, whether the productive spot is just 50 yards long or it stretches for half a mile. Either way, when you have your boat properly positioned for a drift you can set an anchor alarm to go off when your boat’s traveled outside of that productive area.

Once you familiarize yourself with the basic mechanics of an anchor alarm you’ll be able to set one at whatever distance you choose in a matter of seconds with a couple of keystrokes or taps on the LCD screen, so the time investment is minimal. But it will save you time at the end of each drift, as compared to the usual practice of just going for a while without any bites until you figure it must be time to reposition.

Autopilot is another vastly under-utilized fish-catching tool. Obviously, these can make life easier while trolling by allowing you to leave the helm and help with tasks such as setting the spread or cranking in fish. But their value goes well beyond that. Autopilot can also be used to return to exact spots where you got a hit (assuming you were fast enough to press the MOB button), Many have settings for clover-leaf or spiral patterns which allow you to work the water immediately around a spot where you got a hit so you can relocate a moving school of fish. Finally, when you’re working with a thick spread, which is sensitive to sharp turns (read: mass tangles ensue) autopilot can help smooth out the bumps by allowing you to dial in smooth, steady turns in increments down to one degree.

Digital Chartography exists in, or can be added to, almost every GPS/chartplotter, and today’s digital charts offer stellar detail. In many cases, you can set your chartplotter to display contour lines down to one-foot intervals and in most cases, at least to three-foot intervals.

Although no digital charts are error-free, they can prove invaluable when you’re out on the water looking for drop-offs and structure. A less-often utilized ability, however, is to study up on new destinations before you go there.

Taking your time and zooming in on all different features, contours, channels, and structure allows you to build a mental picture of an area prior to arrival. Many of us already do this while pondering over a paper map or chartbook, but doing so on your chartplotter will provide vastly more detail and definition than any paper chart can provide.

Radar can be used to find flocks of birds, but it takes a fairly thick flock to be picked up by old-tech units. Modern solid-state and “broadband” units work much better for this purpose. In either case, many anglers who try to use radar to find birds, get burned a time or two by mis-identifications and ghost returns, and shelve the idea.

The trick to using radar to find birds successfully? Stop trying to spot a seagull from a million miles away and zoom down to a one-mile range. Then try moving range out a half-mile at a time and watch the screen for a minute or two at each range, out to five miles (or farther with some units).

You’ll be amazed at how much easier it is to see a cluster of five or 10 birds a few miles off, which probably disappear into nothingness at a 15 or 20-mile range. Although five miles may not seem like a huge distance, that’s significantly farther than people can commonly spot birds with binoculars, much less the naked eye.

Learn to use your boat’s entire electronics suite in your angling pursuits, and you absolutely, positively will catch more fish. And you can leave those jumper cables sitting back on land in the truck, where they belong.

 

Email Lenny Rudow at ContactUs@fishgame.com

 

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