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Inaudible Sound

Printed From: The Fishing Website
Category: Saltwater Fishing
Forum Name: The Work-Up
Forum Description: Game fishing related topics here
URL: https://www.fishing.net.nz/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=230
Printed Date: 08 Feb 2025 at 3:37am


Topic: Inaudible Sound
Posted By: obald
Subject: Inaudible Sound
Date Posted: 17 Sep 2002 at 1:57pm

Time for a new thread? -why not?

How do you use your sonar/fishfinder/depthsounder (note the subtle differences) when gamefishing for the day?

That's all

obald




Replies:
Posted By: Fishb8
Date Posted: 17 Sep 2002 at 4:02pm
I don't have a boat but my regular charter skipper reckons he can see marlin meatballing. They show up as red spots around the bait school. He stops immediately and chucks out a livey from the tuna tubes. Last time out it took all of 10 seconds for a skippy to get hit. BTW, there were circling terns in the area over the bait school. All part of the picture.

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Be yourself; everyone else is already taken


Posted By: Master Jig Builder
Date Posted: 18 Sep 2002 at 10:13am
Usually larger fish will gather around designated marks because the bait fish are their e.g. rising sea mounts, broken bottom, drop off's or fathom lines where currents change temperature.

Where there is bait, there is usually the bigger fish.

In current lines (or the slip stream in water terms) we often have to take the bait fish to the bigger fish to get them to fire up.

On that basis, most of our fishfinder work is about finding those spots, plus using the GPS to get us their in the first place. Once on the mark, the fishfinder simply acts as a means of pin pointing the exact parts we want to target and gives us some idea of what is underneath us fish wise.

From that point on we then decide to jig and/or troll.

Working birds are always the other thing we look out for and regardless of what the sounder says.

This can be while we are on a particular spot or as we are making our way between locations. Either way, they are the pointers in the sky.

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Burnin Thumbs!

Steve Badman
Master Jig Builder - Oz


Posted By: dustin
Date Posted: 11 Oct 2002 at 11:26am

The way my skippers used to work the machine was if in water shallower than about 200m which is approx the depth of the shelf water the machine would be set to record the bottom to mark structures and bait , although in the area we fished you could get a good feel for where the structure was with a bit of experience (using shore marks)

if operating off the drop the sounder would be set to 150m max and usually 100 as it was considered if bait or fish were marked deeper than this the odds of raising them with trolled lures was minimal

i would say that the machine wasn't a great deal of help in blue marlin fishing in our area, mainly because of the scarcity of bait you tended to be looking for individual lone fish - the odds of seeing those on the machine were pretty poor (although I have seen blue marlin on the screen when fishing in Kona) and the typical blue marlin bite would be a fish in the lures without warning of any kind, normally when you least expected it ... bait and tuna would show quite well - it is quite a trick to drive the boat with one eye on the spread, one eye looking for sign in front and around the boat and one eye on the screen - on the wahoo grounds (50 to 120m) being able to see bait and structure on the machine was very worthwhile , good looking areas could be identified and worked hard

the last machine we used was a dual frequency 200/50 my skipper used to insist that the gain be fine tuned in an area where there was no bait - he'd turn up the gain till interference started appearing on the screen and then turn it down just a little - he advised to resist the temptation to turn the gain on till you started to see something cos you'd end up seeing loads of imaginary bait and whenever looking for bait he'd use 200

i don't claim to any expertise whatsoever in fishing by the machine so i definitely want to know more about it myself

cheers dustin




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