Alot has changed since I first got into the business of fishing. Electronics have become the most important tool you can have on board your boat. I think of “back in the day” when we had a chart, parallel rule, dividers and a compass to use. The first boat that I ran had a LORAN A on it. The LORAN A would get you within a mile of the destination you were navigating to, but you really couldn’t trust it. Some years later, we purchased the high-tech LORAN C. If you had a LORAN C and a Raytheon 735A fathometer, and a booster on your CB radio, you were one of the boys! The fathometer was a paper graph machine that scrolled and was marked by a stylus needle, which showed the contour of the bottom, and any fish or bait as it scrolled. Actually, it was a pretty amazing machine at the time. Our LORAN C was operated by microwave towers that transmitted signals from shore. This meant your range, or bad weather, limited its accuracy. When we would take our boat to Mexico, The Bahamas or other faraway places, you could forget it because our LORAN C was useless. It was all navigated by charts, parallel rules and dividers, but that’s changed. You can take a boat anywhere now and never be out of touch. You can even see at night. Our satellite systems and technology is pinpoint accurate.
That brings me to the latest and greatest game-changing fish finders— the Furuno Omni Scanner, the Simrad SY 50 series or, if you have the installation, the commercial Simrad S90 series. These are all full-color scanners. They can pulse scan 360 degrees in the blink of an eye. Think about that. These scanners are game changers as far as finding fish, bait or structures. With these tools, fishermen can actually identify the species of a fish. They are able to mark and track a single fish, enabling the anglers to present a bait directly to the fish. These scanners have become so popular here in the northern Gulf that I know of at least a dozen boats that had them installed during the off season. Before, only a handful of boats had them. Now if you want one, from what I understand, you have to wait up to a year because of supply chain and demand. Crazy! Sonar takes the guesswork out of trying to know if there are any fish, bait or structures around the boat with readings from a couple hundred yards from the boat. For instance, you might be heading south but you see something on your sonar screen that is 300 yards to the west. You head over there and you get covered up. The point is, you would never have made the turn to the west without the sonar. It is truly a game changer as far as finding and tracking fish.
However, they are expensive, between $100K and $150K depending on the installation. But if you are throwing down $20,000 to $60,000 a weekend in tournaments, it’s a no brainer. A lot of boats without the scanner are having second thoughts about betting against the sonar boats. You can hardly blame them. Also, there is nothing automatic about this machine. You have to learn how to use it. Constantly panning in and out, up and down, your head is in the sonar all the time. It takes a lot of time to get dialed in on this machine. But when you do, you won’t want to go fishing without it.
A lot has changed over the years in the way we target fish, here in the U.S. and abroad. So much has changed that we can now follow and study currents, water temperatures, salinity and more just by the push of a button from a computer hooked directly to the satellite systems on our boat. Technology has advanced the fishing industry, from pleasure to commercial, so much so that you now need it to stay in the game.
That’s my two-minute warning. -Fraz
