Yeah, I said it. Crappie fishing is the new frontier of fishing. I am not sure in my lifetime if I have seen a sport embrace the future as much as crappie fishing has, mainly in the form of electronics. Let’s look at how, why, and when to use the various forms of electronics and more importantly how to catch fish off them. 

Electronics

Now as things sit right now, we have three major forms of electronics for fishing — 2D Sonar, 3D Sonar, and forward-facing sonar. They might be called something else etc., but these are the current sonars we are working with. Now, what’s the difference? 

2D Sonar is the traditional sonar we have had since, honestly, the Eagle Flasher, and if you had an Eagle flasher or fished on a boat with it you might need to schedule your colonoscopy. 2D Sonar is the ability to look straight down in a cone-shaped beam and see what is between your boat and the bottom. The difference in sonars is the ability to read what that cone sees and how quickly it is done but it is honestly ALL history. You are seeing what was under the transducer (the device sending down the cone). 

3D sonar was the next big step we saw in the last 20 years. This is sonar such as structure scan, down scan, side view, down imaging, or side imaging. When this hit the market, it allowed us to see under docks, to the side of the boat, it showed us better images of the structure that we were over and allowed multiple screens to be used to verify what we were seeing on our traditional 2D sonar. I like using structure scan and 2D sonar together for instance when I am spoon fishing or dropping live bait for stripers. 

Now to the latest and greatest. Forward-facing sonar! This has changed everything. Garmin entered the market a couple of years ago with Livescope and their Panoptics system and honestly the world has not been the same since. The gnashing of teeth, rending of garments, hair pulling, and screaming to the gods we have seen over this next step in the evolution of fishing has been entertaining to watch. What in essence Garmin did was turn a camera on its side and give us a view of what is in front of the boat in REAL-TIME! You can watch your bait interact with fish, you can see the fish move, the trees, rocks, and other structures are open to you now. We get to see the actions of fish as they happen. If you find a school of crappie and drop your jig into them only to watch them scatter you KNOW what has just happened.

Back in October, I visited the final day weigh-in of the CrappieMasters USA tournament at Lake Hartwell. While there I watched and had a chance to talk to the best crappie fishermen in the world. At one point I found myself talking to Scott Bunch and I got to ask him (one of the winningest crappie anglers by the way) what Livescope had done to the sport. His reply was “listen if you are not fishing Livescope today you are not in the running to win anything.” Another friend of mine Richard Malcolm puts it this way “if you could catch fish before you can catch more fish now and you know more about what they are doing than ever before.” By the way, Richard Malcolm and Joey Dickens took third in that tournament and they did so by using Garmin Livescope technology. 

The Saturday after Thanksgiving Richard Malcolm called me and asked me to go with him to Oconee. Now when the master himself calls, trust me I take time to go fishing. Richard wanted to show me exactly how you use Livescope and boy did he put on a show. It was cold, the water was a bit off-color, and the crappie were biting. We met about 9 that morning and were done by 2 p.m. and had a two-man 60 crappie limit with a kicker striper I caught and kept. 

What Richard showed me that day was awesome. We ran around for the first little bit hitting trees he knew of and different areas on the lake that traditionally held fish. Off each spot, we got one or two until we found a roving pack of crappie around a dock. We stayed on them for more than an hour and caught fish continually! Big crappie too! All 1.5# or better. We then went up the river a little and hit a favorite spot of Richard’s. Now I won’t name where that is, but we located fish staging about 15 yards to 30 yards off a major piece of structure. These fish were NOT on the structure but up current from it. I saw other fishermen that day fishing the same areas catch almost nothing because they were fishing the traditional spots and not using forward-facing sonar to look in the AREAS around the structure. This is the key difference. It’s the ability to look in the areas. For two hours we caught more than 60-70 crappie and only kept the biggest to fill out our limit. 

Here’s a key to using forward-facing sonar. Use it to view what’s around you before picking up and moving. In other words, scan the area before you pick it up. Spend three to five minutes looking around before leaving. The kicker here is discovering what crappie do when they get big. In Oconee for instance once a crappie gets to be 1.5 pounds nothing, for the most part, is going to eat him. He can school in open water and chase down shad, and they do. By using livescope you can now target those crappie. 

Electronics allow you to LEARN the fish. You will be a better fisherman because of what you can see and experience, but you still have to FISH! Check out my Facebook page Southern Born Gentleman for videos from my trip with Richard.

 

—Outdoors columnist James Pressley can be reached at pressleyoutdoors@gmail.com