Arkansas Outdoors

If you’re missing a vehicle or a boat, it might be swimming with the fishes in east Pulaski County. Ricky Ellis of Cabot, a bass angler and avid bass tournament angler, had a phenomenal day of fishing Sunday at Tull Lake off the Arkansas River in the Willow Beach area. He and his partner caught about 23 pounds of bass off a hard structure at the end of the boat ramp.

If you’re missing a vehicle or a boat, it might be swimming with the fishes in east Pulaski County.

Ricky Ellis of Cabot, a bass angler and avid bass tournament angler, had a phenomenal day of fishing Sunday at Tull Lake off the Arkansas River in the Willow Beach area. He and his partner caught about 23 pounds of bass off a hard structure at the end of the boat ramp.

An ordinary electronic graph would merely show a representation of a solid mass, such as a rock pile. In fact, Ellis thought it was a rock pile until he scanned it with his new Garmin Panoptix Livescope graph, an advanced unit that is almost as good as an underwater camera.

Ellis wasn’t fishing a rock pile, but an overturned late-model pickup truck.

“It has 20-inch rims,” Ellis said. “It’s right off the end of the ramp. All I knew is that there was fish on it, so I scanned it with the Panoptix to look at it. I’m catching them off the rear tire.”

Ellis’ romp through the submerged salvage yard had only begun. Farther out in the lake, about 75 yards past the end of the boat ramp, is a Dodge Charger resting on its wheels at 11.7 feet.

“For it to be that far out there, somebody would have had to put a brick on the accelerator and aimed it down the ramp,” Ellis said. “Either that, or it floated out there before it sank.”

Ellis threw a marker buoy on the site and then showed the image of the vehicle on his Garmin screen. The profile is clearly a Dodge Charger. The graph also shows the marker buoy rope, demonstrating that Ellis pinpointed the location.

“There’s a couple of big fish on this one. Big fish,” Ellis said.

But wait, there’s more. Off the end of a different ramp nearby is a submerged pickup with a boat and trailer attached. Ellis also found a four-wheeler and a solitary boat on the bottom.

On Tuesday, Ellis sent me a text message. He found a sixth vehicle a long distance off the shore and to the side of the ramp.

“They had to drive that over there, or floated it over there,” Ellis said. “There’s fish all over it. I’ve got to fish this.”

After finding the vehicles Sunday, Ellis called the Pulaski County sheriff’s office. Ellis said he directed the deputies to the vehicles’ locations, but Ellis said authorities had not returned as of 3 p.m. Tuesday. The sheriff’s office did respond to calls from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette seeking information about the vehicles as of 4 p.m. Wednesday.

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission often uses the Garmin Panoptix Livescope in rescue or recovery operations. Ross Spurlock, former Pulaski County wildlife officer for the Game and Fish Commission, used it to locate several drowning victims. The image of a drowning victim is unmistakable and haunting.

For fishing, the Panoptix clearly shows brush piles, standing timber, rock piles, submerged bridges and anything else on the bottom. Instead of basic sonar returns, it also shows individual fish, so you can actually see how many crappie are in a brush pile. Depending on the retailer, it costs between $2,100 and $2,600.

For better or worse, Garmin’s Panoptix represents the increasing reliance on electronics for not only anglers but also hunters. It’s a rare hunter that doesn’t use at least one remote camera to photograph deer on hunting properties. Others use an array to photograph game trails that connect bedding and feeding sites. Many cameras can send real-time images to a smartphone via built-in Wi-Fi or through the owner’s data plan.

The upside is that the cameras virtually eliminate the need for scouting because they show you the deer that use an area, a scrape or a rub, and at what times. The downside is that they eliminate the need for scouting, and they substitute for traditional woodsmanship.

The upside outweighs the downside because the cameras allow us to interact with the woods when we don’t have the time to be there in person. They allow us to watch wildlife and enjoy our favorite hunting areas year round.

In the same fashion, modern electronic graphics add an interactive dimension to fishing, too. Instead of discerning a lake bottom through a strand of monofilament line, a graph allows an angler to maximize his fishing skills by defining the fishing arena.

As Ricky Ellis can attest, it’s enlightening to know the difference between a rock pile and a four-door sedan.