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I bought a fish finder because I had reached the stage of fishing where you start blaming equipment. I had tried blaming the weather, the moon, the barometric pressure, and a specific pelican, and none of them had improved my catch rate, which hovered somewhere around “legally considered zero.”
So: sonar. Science. A little screen that would show me where the fish were hiding, so I could stop guessing and start harvesting.
First cast
I lowered the transducer off the side of the kayak, opened the app, and watched the screen fill with a beautiful, high-resolution image of absolutely nothing. Flat bottom, 22 feet, 61 degrees. Scientific confirmation that this specific patch of water was empty.
I paddled. The bottom rose. The screen lit up with structure: a big, angular shape with hard edges.
“Rock pile,” I thought. “Bass city.”
It was a shopping cart. I know this because I snagged it on the third cast, and after ten minutes of heroic effort, I landed it. It was a Smith’s cart. It had been down there long enough to grow a beard.
The submerged road
Reservoirs are built by flooding valleys, and the old roads are still down there. The finder showed me one in gorgeous detail: a crisp line across the bottom, perfectly straight, with what might have been a culvert. I spent an hour fishing the “road,” on the theory that fish like edges. The fish, if they exist, do not use roads.
The school
Mid-afternoon, redemption. A dense cloud of arches on the screen, right under the boat. A school. I’d found them. I dropped a jig straight down, heart pounding, and felt a hit on the first bounce.
It was my anchor rope. The “school” was the rope swaying in the current. I had been sonar-imaging my own boat for about twenty minutes.
What I learned
The finder is a great tool. It really does show structure, depth, and temperature, and I now know more about the bottom of that reservoir than the people who built it. But it answers the question “what’s down there?” and not “why won’t they bite?” The answer to the second question was: I was fishing in the wrong place, with the wrong lure, at the wrong speed, and no amount of sonar fixes that.
I went back the next weekend with a white swimbait, no finder, and fished the shady side of the dock. I caught three bass. Small ones. Real ones.
Soft Plastic Swimbait Kit
What the guy with the stringer full of bass was using. I asked. He told me. I bought them the next day.
The finder is still great for finding drop-offs and the right depth. I’ll keep using it. I’ll just stop treating it like a treasure map.
Portable Castable Fish Finder (Wi-Fi, phone app)
Genuinely cool tech. Shows depth, structure, and temperature on your phone. Does not, as it turns out, make you a better angler. Does make you a better finder of shopping carts.
