Bass fishing has passed me up

Sorry for the long winded reply...

I am from 2 levels on this.  I am an I.T. geek so I like the tech.  I do enjoy looking at a screen and trying to decipher the environment under water.  There is no doubt for me the electronics have helped especially with off shore fishing.  In a shallow lake like Okeechobee that was ref'd the electronics are all but useless except water temp.  That is a big shallow bath tube.  When I am fishing that shallow in the spring I will actually cut off the sonar especially on a highly pressured lake. 

I do not think fish can think but I do think they can get conditioned to certain things kinda like a mouse in a maze.  They go the wrong way enough, get shocked, and they get conditioned not to go that way anymore.  I think the same thing applies to bigger bass when shallow.  For years they heard out little pinging, see something to eat and then have their face jerked off.  After a while I really believe some bass just stop eating when they hear our "pings".

One thing I know for sure,  that the new tech helps me manage my fishing day.  Almost all of us have a few spots in our favorite lakes where we run the same bank or weedline every visit or the same point/ledge. 

-Setting the a route on the weedline/bank saves me time and keeps me disciplined.  I have a hard time moving along at times and it solves that.  As I catch fish on that route I mark a waypoint.  After some time you will see a pattern  about your catches and their locations.  Once you see that you can fish the good spots and then move on to newer/diff water.

-SpotLock is just one of the best pieces of tech ever for the offshore angler.  I fish a lot of ledges and points in the summer and our lakes have a lot of recreational traffic.  IT is darn near impossible to effectively fish a ledge or a point trying to manually manage a trolling motor/boat position.

-Side imaging is 100% worth it to me for one thing, ROCK PILES!! .  One thing you can see on SI without being a wizard is hard bottom/rocks.  More than once I have been idling along and see something 80 feet to the right or left I was not even looking for because hard bottom and rock is such a bright return and if you find some rock or a hard bottom in a veggie lake you have found fish.

Now most all of these features help way more off shore than the shallow water fisherman.  For some like Tommy Biffle who is always shallow it seems all he needs is a paper map and a water temp gauge.

I did it one the cheap... or as best I could.  I bought a couple of used HBird units, an 898 and a 998 for $600 bucks and are still really good tools and can be nearly as good as the newer stuff just harder to tune (or that is what I have found).  I did not go with an Ultrex even though I wanted one really bad.  I got a MK ipilot powerdrive (about 30-40% less the $ of an ultrex).  It is not a link model but will save 25 tracks in the Tmotor itself which will work fine.

So there is my 2 cents on the new tech.