(Editor's note: The following is the latest installment in a series of fishing tips presented by The Bass University. Check back each Friday for a new tip.)
When Greg Hackney fished his first professional bass tournament in 2001, his boat was outfitted with two flashers. He didn’t get his first GPS unit until 2003.
Today, less than two decades later, his boat is equipped more like a spaceship than the bass boats seen most commonly in the early portion of his career. The value of these modern electronics for offshore fishing is well-known, but Hackney said their use is critical in all water depths.
“They’re just as important shallow as they are deep,” said the noted flipper. He uses his down-scan technology in skinny water to determine how hard the bottom is and also to determine the quality and variety of the vegetation around him.
“I want as much information as I can know about each fish that I catch,” he said of the prolific mental notes that he takes. “There’s a reason for everything.”
Over the course of a 4-day tournament, if he’s fishing a single grass bed, he’ll keep his tracks visible, but change their color every day to see which areas he’s worked and which have produced best, allowing him to create a grid of not just the grass, but what’s beneath it. If all of the bass come from certain types of bottom composition, he’s found his pattern.
The prime tool he endorses is Garmin’s Panoptix technology, which allows him to see the water column in front of his boat in three dimensions. Because it’s mounted on the trolling motor instead of the transom, everything he’s seeing – from the cover to his moving lure to a fish chasing it – occurs in real time. For that reason, he keeps it set to show no farther away than a single cast length so he can take a shot at any fish he spies.
Frequently he’ll catch a glimpse of a brush pile, a log or even a fish out of the corner of his eye, adjust the trolling motor to aim at it, and find something that otherwise would’ve evaded him. For example, at the 2015 Bassmaster Classic on South Carolina’s Lake Hartwell, he worked a row of docks, all of which looked the same from above the surface, but only one of them produced fish. Not coincidentally, it was the one that held brush, visible on his Panoptix, and it resulted in a 4-pounder and another keeper for his livewell.
With this technology, he feels “like I’m equipped to catch a fish off the moon.”
While he prefers to have his electronics on all of the time, he noted that in heavily pressured areas, he’ll turn them off. While the Garmin transducers are quieter than their predecessors, he still thinks that educated fish quickly learn to associate that noise with seeing their friends get captured.
While most of the Elite Series pros now run multiple sonar/GPS units on their dash, Hackney has returned to a single screen. The average weekend angler could follow suit and save money, but Hackney noted that it’s still critical to go as big as you can.
“I very seldom look at a topo map on paper anymore,” he said. He wants to see as much of the lake as possible at any given time, so that he can work to build upon what he’s already learned. “Once you develop a pattern, the most important thing you can do is look as far down the lake as you can and find more places just like that.”
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