Tackle, Tactics and Experience

Making Sense of the Fishfinder

If you have been out fishing on a boat with a fishfinder you will have been entranced by the magic of being able to "see" into the water. After the initial fascination has worn off though, how do you use this technology to get more pike into the boat?

The advice here is based on fishing the rivers Severn and Warwickshire Avon, but I think the lessons I have learned are valuable and might be applied generally. Both rivers are very productive coarse fishery with a tremendous variety of species which sometimes group together either in single-species or mixed-species shoals. If you have experience of general coarse fishing you will have experienced days when all you catch are say, roach, and others when every bite seems to bring a different species. I cannot pretend to understand the reasons behind these groupings but I presume they are dictated by food supply, water temperatures and clarity, flow levels, and seasonal factors connected to spawning.

Whatever the reasons it is important to be aware that prey fish are not scattered about like currants in a cake. On occasion I have motored up the river and hardly seen a fish for a couple of miles! Then found a shoal tightly packed into a twenty yard stretch. This phenomenon is more regularly seen in the winter, but heavy rainfall resulting in changed flows and temperature will have the same effect in the summer as well, as can very high water temperatures. I have realised that prey fish and pike will regularly move what seem to me to be long distances and an awareness of this is essential for consistent pike sport.

I have read reports in various magazines about using fishfinders, predominantly on large lochs and lakes, where the authors recommend largely ignoring the fish signals and concentrating on the features that show on the screen. This might be the case on those types of water but as far as the Severn and Avon go the golden rule is: FIND SOME PREY FISH!

The beds of both rivers have their share of depth variations, humps and hollows, and it is interesting to note these features. It is interesting also to see how many of these features do not have any fish on them. The size or nature of the feature appears irrelevant, sometimes a feature holds fish and sometimes it does not, different features hold fish at different times and fish sometimes shoal up around no apparent feature at all.

My results hammer home the importance of learning to trust the screen, no matter how good the results from a feature are in general, we have found that if there are no prey fish nearby then we will catch either no pike or very small pike. We have had our doubts, on occasion, about the huge numbers of fish that sometimes show on the screen, with suggestions that suspended material in the water may give fish signals, I do adjust the sensitivity to see how low it has to go to not show any fish, but my own feeling is that if you see fish, there are fish.

One lesson from the 2003 season was to note the 'shape' of the preyfish shoals, Michel Huigevoort mentioned this during my late September holiday in Holland and I applied it as soon as I returned. If the shoals are loose and scattered there are less likely to be numbers of predators present, but if they are compact, then it is usually pike that have made them take on a defensive position. Typically a worried preyfish shoal will look like a flat-topped cone, rising from the river bed to about half depth, it is densely packed and presumably all the fish are moving around within this shape, it reminds me of the Western settlers 'circling the wagons' as the Cheyenne approach! Occasionally a pike (or sometimes two) is clearly visible adjacent to the shoal, near the top of the shape or directly above it. Every time I've seen this I've caught a pike, I assume the pike is edging closer to the packed baitfish, hoping to upset them enough so one will break ranks and present a clear target, the second they see the lure they charge it.

Just because you are not catching pike does not mean that there are none present of course, but if there are no pike present then you certainly will not catch any! Active, catchable pike will generally be near preyfish, or looking for some. The other notable fact is that if I am going to catch pike from near a particular shoal of preyfish I tend to do so quite quickly. It just does not seem to be worth hanging about for too long if a pike has not shown, it is better to find another shoal and work on that. It is amazing how often the first cast into a swim gets a pike, and if one has not been caught within a few casts then the chances are that none are going to be caught from that spot.

The fishfinder will help you catch pike if you trust it, a feature is only a good feature if there are pike nearby when you fish it, and it seems to us that pike are near the features that are near the preyfish.

The hardest days have been when we see no preyfish at all, I don't know where they go, they're not in the fields! Perhaps just inactive and lying tight to the river bed, or maybe tucked well into weed beds and fallen branches. These days mean a long trolling session with smallish lures, trying to scratch out whatever I can, it's not so unusual when this happens to end up with a number of fish, but seldom any big ones, and no numbers of fish from the same spots.

A final point, the quality of your fishfinder really matters, you simply will not get accurate detail on a low-powered one, I upgrade mine last year to a Lowrance X87, this boast 1500watts peak-to-peak (whatever that means!) and the improvement over my ancient Eagle Magna 2 was mind blowing, don't believe anyone who says that more powerful ones are not worth the money, they can transform your fishing. These powerful units are expensive, but after shelling out for a boat and outboard you need the right kit to make that investment worthwhile.