How to Find Bait Fish Using a Fish Finder On August 24, 2013
Everybody wants to know what a fish looks like with their sonar. The next question is, how am I to find baitfish using a fish finder? Bait is important for finding fish that bite and other times it makes no difference. I have fished some lakes where you must find the bait to catch fish and on other lakes the bait location does not matter. When I can't figure it out, I believe we just have to wait until we receive enough information on fish and bait to solve the problem but in 20 years someone may have studied the prey-predator relationship in detail on the lakes and we will have the information to make educated decisions.
Bait can be tightly packed schools, tiny fry or finger size minnows of all species.
This example demonstrates what I call larger baitfish in a loose school, it should help show you how to find bait fish using a fish finder. This photo is from Chris Meyer’s collection. Notice how the DownScan and side scan separates the targets better than the traditional sonar even with the Broadband technology Lowrance uses. Also note how small the fish are on the side scan, this is because the range 80 feet across the screen compared to 18 feet on the DownScan.
