Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Beam me down
Electronic graphs take guesswork out of fishing
Crappie didn’t bite Wednesday at Lake Maumelle, but Ricky Ellis provided an even better story with a clinic on how to use an electronic graph.
The sky was slate gray and threatened rain as we idled away from the marina. Passing the no-wake buoys, Ellis eased his throttle forward, and his Bass Cat Cougar reverberated with a low, throbbing hum from his Mercury outboard. He didn’t go fast. There was no hurry. Maumelle is a fairly small lake, and all of the spots Ellis wanted to hit were close.
A menu of waypoints appeared on Ellis’ Lowrance TDS-9 electronic graph. A triangle representing his boat neared the first waypoint. Ellis turned the wheel to the right and then to the left to tack a steady bearing. As the point of the triangle pierced the waypoint, the image of a brush pile appeared on the downscan portion of the screen. I was transfixed.
“The resolution on this thing is stunning,” I said. “You can actually see where the tree trunks have been cut.”
Ellis didn’t linger. The image revealed it would not be a productive stop.
“Crappie look like little dots on the graph,” Ellis said. “This time of year they school up on these brush piles in vertical piles. They stack up so high that they look like Christmas trees.”
Ellis pointed out a few crappie that were burrowed deep in the brush pile, but he was looking for the mother lode. We were off to the next waypoint.
Only then did I realize that I had scarcely looked away from the screen. This is modern fishing, hunting by sonar.
“It has revolutionized fishing,” Ellis said. “The days of pulling up on a bank and casting away for hours and hours are over.”
A serious tournament angler can tie up about $10,000 in two graphs, transducers and a high-tech trolling motor that can keep a boat in one spot or follow a course on autopilot.
Before electronics became so advanced, fishing offshore was beyond the abilities of many anglers. We knew about deep structure abstractly, but we didn’t know exactly how fish related to it, when they used it and when they didn’t.
“They were safe out here because they were so hard to catch,” Ellis said. “Now, this is a dangerous place for them. You can find them now, and if you can find them, you can catch them.”
Still, an angler must know the seasonal patterns of the fish he pursues, and he must also know where they are on a day-by-day basis within that pattern. The water temperature was 49 degrees Friday, and the wind was out of the east.
“They’ve been on deep structure, but the day length is about right for them to start moving shallow.”
Ellis spent the first hours graphing brush in deep channel pockets.
“Before they flooded the lake, they pushed all the timber into big piles in these holes,” Ellis said.
Again, the few dots we saw were deep in the brush.
“When the sun comes out and warms the water a little, a lot of times they’ll rise up out of the brush,” Ellis said.
Ellis idled all around waypoints to see how fish were using it. Fish often stack on one side or the other. Sometimes they are high, and sometimes they are low. A complete set of readings tells Ellis from which direction to cast.
When he figures out where he wants to “anchor,” Ellis throws out an orange buoy.
“When a brush pile appears on the screen, it’s actually right about here,” Ellis said, pointing to an invisible spot beneath the deck. By the time I’m ready to throw the buoy, it’s already back behind us about … there!”
He pitched the buoy over his shoulder.
“I usually drop it dead in the middle of the brush,” Ellis said.
Unlike traditional crappie anglers, Ellis doesn’t use a real anchor. His trolling motor has an anchor feature that keeps the boat in place. It compensates for drift by turning and giving small thrusts.
After about one hour of watching the graph, Ellis made his first cast. He uses 7-foot St. Croix Panfish rods with 15-pound test Daiwa braided line and a 6-pound test leader. He connects the braid and monofilament with a double uni-knot, and he uses a Trilene knot to tie jigs to the leader.
He uses 1/8-ounce jigs of various designs, but he said ball head jigs resist snagging in brush better than pointed jigs.
“I count it down to the depth I want it to go and reel it slowly,” Ellis said.
We made about 10 casts total before Ellis abandoned that pile.
“A graph tells you know right away if it’s worth messing with a brush pile,” Ellis said. “You don’t have to waste hours casting trying to see if fish are here.”
Seeing no concentrations of crappie on deep brush, Ellis checked structure near the bank. An old bridge railing about 30 feet deep showed up on the graph.
“This is where the old road crossed the creek,” Ellis said. “It goes all the way across here. You can see all kinds of stuff down there.”
Ellis activated a side scanning feature on his graph to widen his perspective.
“I’m looking for subtle bits of structure off to the sides,” Ellis said. “Because of the beam angle, your optimal field of view is between 40 and 60 feet. If you try to scan farther than that, the resolution quality drops off dramatically.”
By 2 p.m., Ellis concluded that crappie were either inaccessible within brush, or they had dispersed in the muddy water. We made less than 20 casts total, but we had worked the water as thoroughly as possible with electronics.
For what I learned, it was one of the most valuable fishing demonstrations I have seen.