How do you find the fish?

[Captain PartyMarty]

So I was wondering when fishing an area like the hump which is fairly large how do you know if you’re in the right area? In shallow water I know to look for bait on my sounder and if I do find some I try and circle back (Has yet to be effective for me). Out on the hump in 400ft of water my sounder (lowrance elite 7) doesn't track bottom in automatic mode so I have to manually set the depth to 500ft and it does show the bottom. But then the scale on the sounder is large and pretty noisy which makes marking fish hard and I can't find anything on the screen that looks like bait. So what’s the trick do I have the sounder setup wrong, should I change frequency/sensitivity? Or is it just plain old fisherman’s instinct which gets people on the fish?

 

[Seafever]

For starters I think your fishfinder needs a couple of adjustments and "tweaks"........if yours is anything like the one I just bought (Elite 4X) I would advise turning off the "autosensitivity" and setting it to manual at about 87 to 90%. Otherwise it tries too hard by sending out more "pings" and creates havoc in murky saltwater. Was told this by a Lowrance pro. I use 200kz for shallow water (under 300ft) and 83kz for over 300ft. Does yours have "Setup Wizard" on it? If I use that I still have to go in and tweak a couple of things. The menu array is a bit confusing.....take some getting used to.(At least on mine). Are you talking about Kitty Coleman Hump?

 

[Seafever]

"Electrical" noise shows up on a screen as jittery pulsing bars.......means electrical interference from adjoining wires, non-insulated spark plugs/wires, transducer too close to engine etc.etc.etc. If you don't have that then it must be your settings probably. Half the fish I catch are never seen on the fishfinder. When I see a baitball, by the time I get turned around and set up for it, it's moved on or I can't find it again. I go more by local knowledge and looking at charts to see where fish could be holing up. Also go by time of day and what tide is doing. I read fish reports on fish sites like it's going out of style too. You can never get enough info. That said, most places the fish go the same place,same route ,same depth every year although there are exceptions now and again. The only thing I use my finder for is to know depth. Other than that I never look at it much. At times it will suddenly show me a lot of fish in a place and it will aso show the baitballs too. I can get an idea of how deep the fish are. But......you can' t tell exactly what the specie is by looking at a symbol on a finder. Could be dogfish,hake, pacific cod, coho, shakers etc.etc. Every year it's usually the same lures as always that catch salmon in a given area. Such things as leader length on a hoochy could spell the difference between success and failure. Such things as lure depth could make a difference. When you go fishing bring your "A" game....but if it doesn't work don't be afraid to try "B" game, "C' game and "D" game. Fishing isn't about luck or instinct.......it's about knowledge. If for example you read that right now the fish are 120ft down in 500ft of water in an area...and you are in that area on the right tide, then don't worry about marking fish and bait.....just put the gear down to 120ft-ish and start fishing. A lot of fish approach from beyond the scope of a fishfinder....so don't think you are going to see every single fish on it.... You can't possibly know where all the fish are all the time.....unless you are working as a "fleet" with other guys in other boats and you all have radios. It's a pretty big ocean out there. Read up on as much as you can about an area......even if you have to go back through the archives. Like I said, it's usually the same game basically every year but there are good years and bad years.

 

[Seafever]

You still didn't say which "hump". The other thing is, feeding migratory salmon will move around.(chasing the bait). A spot could be hot for a couple of days then it slows down because the bait has moved. Or the fish have moved......because they are "migratory" and headed for points elsewhere. So you could be "between fish" so to speak until some more show up. Up to an hour and a half either side of a slacktide works best for me. I find the low slack outproduces the high off mid island. The "bite" may only come on for a short time sometimes......after that you could be towing gear without much happening in the "dead zone " time between tides. Some guys will use the "stick and stay" method", where they just keep fishing the same spot in the hope of something hitting. In my experience if I don't get hits within 45 minutes of dropping the tackle, it's time to start changing up the game by:- moving to the next likeliest location (which may not be all that far away) where they will be, keep an eye open for baitfish, or change the lure or lure depth.. Since there are at least a dozen hoochies and spoons that are all "goto's" it can be a bit of a guessing game as to which one is going to hammer them. I usually run either spoons or hoochies on each side but not both at the same time, because they both have different speed characteristics and your either going too fast for one or too slow for the other. I find that having the same flashers on both sides seems to work better than mixing up flasher colors. Real bait will often outfish everything else. Good to get your "chovy roll" down right. Many say that in the bright daylight the fish will be in the lower third of the water column. So if the water was 200ft deep...you would start off at about 130ft. (This has been working off F.C. lately) If you went out to much deeper water , the fish would probably still be in the 130 to 160ft zone often but they might be harder to find out in the open because they are moving around instead of poking around structure. When salmon get in tight to structure, often they will be much shallower. I've had them hit in 50ft of water around certain reefs and rocky islets. The drawback is that few people want to get in that "tight' while running downriggers because it means lost lead and grief. I just use a thick boat rod with tuffline and 32 oz lead ball/small home-made spreader bar and the spoon trailing about 6ft off that with no flasher. If you lose anything it isn't the end of the world.

 

[Seafever]

Electronics does give a person the upper hand. I use the one I have simply because there is no room on my boat dash for a larger unit. That said, given my 'druthers' I would go for the biggest, baddest, best chartplotter/finder I could find. It will show where you are to the pinpoint, what structure is down there and much much better fish identification and you can mark the hotspots with a waypoint(fish symbol I.D. units are kind of like "training wheels".....reading the actual sonar graph is much better once you know how to do it).