Home map research pays off
Last weekend was South Dakotas Largest fishing tournament of the year. It brought 1050 ice anglers to Lake Oahe. With the tournament being near the holidays and having a baby in late fall I wasn't going to be able to prepare for this tournament on the water. Instead I broke down Doctor Sonar map card at home on my Lowrance fish finder. The detail of the map enabled me to narrow down my target area to only a handful of what I felt was high percentage spots. I found one area that had 3 high percentage spots within close proximity of each other so I decided that's where we were going to go tournament day. This was going to be a put all your eggs in one basket strategy due to the location and poor ice conditions.
When we arrived at the location one spot was already taken so we went to the 2nd spot on the list. It was Main lake point next to deep water with a nice deep ledge and feeding shelf. We decided the best way to attack this spot was to get into position with the Lowrance GPS and Docs map card. We then wanted to cover all depths of the point edge so we could find what depth the fish were in. This is critical. We spread lines from 15-55 ft. It didn't take long and the deep tip up got bit. Within 2 hours we had moved the shack and all of our gear out super deep. Once we got the depth right, the point and shelf just funneled the migration of fish right past us. In a short 5 hours of fishing we had caught around 40 walleyes. 5 of those walleyes being weighable fish. We were happy with that because it was our first time ever ice fishing Lake Oahe.
We ended up finishing 19th out of 525 teams. We considered that a great success since we relied purely on our Map Card and a theory. So next time you are thinking about hitting the hard water take your GPS with you and do a little homework. You may surprise yourself on how quick you can put a pattern together.
How to determine how far behind the boat
How to Determine Fish Location
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Learn about recommended freshwater settings for HDS Gen 1 and 2 Keypad models 5, 7, 8 and 10.
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Learn about recommended freshwater settings for HDS Touch Modes 7, 9 and 12.
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Lowrance HDS Gen2 Review Part 1
Lowrance announced the new HDS 2nd generation December 2011. This has been a hot topic on internet marine electronics forums with many questions about how it compares to the 1st generation HDS. For this discussion I will use Gen1 and Gen2 for the 2 generations of HDS models.
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How to take screenshots (screen captures) with your Lowrance HDS Gen 1 and older software for Gen 2. Also read about screenshots for for HDS Touch and Gen 2 with the latest software updates.
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The Lowrance HDS does not have ICON only choice like the LCX/LMS models. The ICON method in previous Lowrance models saved ICONS differently than waypoints, you could identify the ICON only by symbol so you couldn’t find them in a list like waypoints, you couldn’t navigate to them like you can with a waypoint and they couldn’t be used in map software like Google Earth like waypoints are.
You can save waypoints without names by selecting Icon instead of Icon and name when you press the WPT button once.
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If you are using the StructureScan™ the HDS is recording information for playback. If you activate the cursor with the arrow button, you can scroll back in memory of the display that has disappeared (TrackBack). If you used the sonar cursor on LMS/LCX models as demonstrated in this video (link to sonar cursor video), you could stop the screen and move the cursor to a fish and create a waypoint on a fish that is on the display. New for the HDS, you can use the left arrow to view memory that is not on the display.
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HDS Sirius Weather Review
I have the Sirius Weather for my HDS this year. I was pre-fishing for my last tournament and saw a storm to the south.
The storm appeared to be moving west and it looked like it was clearing to my west. I calculated that the storm would miss me.
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