I’ve been using forward-facing sonar for a week and I’m curious how it’s changed your fishing and what you’ve learned about fish behavior?

• How has FFS changed your techniques or style? Are you fishing differently than before?

• What have you learned about fish behavior (reacting to lures, holding around cover, chasing vs. ignoring bait, etc.)?

• Any specific moments where FFS completely changed how you approach a spot or species?

Looking forward to hearing your experiences. Thanks!

This is my 4th season with it now, all hbird.

Things its added:

• chasing fish with a jig and minnow. Certain times, certain days it is the only thing going. And once you’re dialed in with how to do it it can be a lot of fun.

• Fish ID. Once you’re dialed in with a jig and minnow, you can graph in 2D for the arches and then jump to FFS and drop a 3” minnow on their head. if it is crappie or perch, they will eat it quickly and you can go about your way scanning some more. If it’s bass, you win.

• A visual on cover and where my bait is. I don’t always look at it and I’ve learned enough to have a better idea now, but a given retrieve speed with my rod and a 1/2 in bladed jig yields a certain depth. It is shallower than I thought. Now I can take a quick look to confirm it is running where I want it to.

• Smallies. I wasn’t good at them before and I’m not claiming to be an expert. But outside of when they are on their beds, I now have half a chance of finding them and catching them with any regularity. You can always throw into grassy cover and find largemouth but smallies are a different animal and deep water cover is more approachable to me now (I was never a dragger).

• This is fun:

Fished the home lake for the second time today with FFS. My observations:

• Absolutely amazed how many fish are down there, and are picked up on LiveScope. I'm seeing mainly crappie and bluegill. I do see some larger fish cruising by (bass and possibly catfish?)

• Common to see groups of 30-40 stacked on brush piles, just milling around.

• So interesting to see how they flock to my jig-gulp minnow, and fight for it.

• I did find a small group of largemouth...and caught one before they moved off. They were slightly larger on the screen, and were grouped horizontally, not stacked vertically as the crappie were.

• I need to work on settings...I can "see" out to about 30 feet. Water is pretty cloudy, visibility under two feet. Anything beyond 30 feet doesn't show on the screen.

• Tossed a 10" t-rigged worm, and worked it back to the boat...and the panfish were following it the whole way

• As I was moving between spots, running about 1.5 MPH, FFS pointed in front or me...watched fish dive deeper as boat approached.

• Really cool to find groups of crappie in places I would have never fished.

Like you saw, if the fish are stacked vertically they are probably panfish.

30’ is way short. 75’ is a bare minimum for me.

For me, Livescope is a double edged sword. It's easy for an amateur like my to get too caught up in it. And what you get out of it is what you put into it. I've listed to podcasts were pros stated it took them hundreds of hours of playing with it to understand it, and the majority of hours they were not actually fishing.

Yes, it's really cool to see bass sitting on deep water timber, toss a worm out there, and watch them eat it as it sinks. Or see a bass out there and watch it turn and hit your minnow. What I should do is use it more to fish offshore more often, but I'd rather crash the banks and power fish.

I use FFS more to find structure more than find fish. For example, I rarely used it last week and when I did it was to help see the edge of the hydrilla. I do use it a lot to look under docks.

I keep telling myself I need to go out there a bunch of days with no fishing rods and just work on finding fish offshore with FFS, but I never do it. What I'm getting at is that I don't rely on FFS. But maybe I should learn to be an expert at it and rely on it more.