Why you need Humminbird Side Imaging…
As a charter captain, my clients depend on me to find the fish. The Humminbird 1197c SI makes my life a lot easier by taking all of the guesswork out of finding fish, bait and structure. It easily eliminates water and bottom structure that are not likely to hold the fish we are targeting, allowing us to quickly move on to waters that are. It saved several charters for clients this season by locating fish and structure that no other unit could. While fishing on the reefs with live bait, structure is everything. On one particular trip, we were catching fish but not the sizes we were hoping for. With the side scan, I was able to see boulders that were much larger than the surrounding structure lying 150 feet to the north of where we were in 40 feet of water. At the touch of a button, I was able to mark that boulder on the built in GPS and adjust my next drift so that we passed directly over it. On our next two drifts, we pulled our two biggest stripers of the night from behind that rock!
Live bait is the key to consistently getting trophy sized fish for my clients. Without the bait our chances of success drop considerably. In the late summer and fall, our bait of choice is menhaden. They are a hardy, schooling type of bait that are about 18″ in length. When conditions are favorable, it is easy to find them by looking for them flipping about on the surface. When you find one, there are usually thousands more nearby. However, when the wind blows or the temperatures drop suddenly the menhaden are impossible to spot on the surface and anglers are forced to probe around with long casts looking for the pods of bait. With the 1197c SI, my problems were solved. I simply switch the screen to the side scan mode and motor along in a grid pattern until I see them. On several occasions this year, we found the bait holding near the bottom over 100 feet away from the boat! In some of my screenshots you can see the swarms of fish and even pick out individual menhaden from 80 feet away. What other fishing system will do this for you? NONE!
The fish finder is a huge part of my success every season. The color LCD is easy to read even in bright, mid-day sunlight. It easily detected the differences between bottom structure and fish holding tight to the bottom. I was finding fish that were glued to the bottom where other boats weren’t. This is also the only fish finder that I’ve ever used that would read at the kind of speed that my boat is capable of. This allows me to cover a lot of ground and still see exactly what is going on beneath me.