(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.)
At 45 years old, New York pro Jamie Hartman is old enough to remember the early days of primitive video games like Space Invaders, Pac Man and even Pong. The games have become more advanced in the intervening decades, and Hartman remains a fan, but instead of tuning into Call of Duty he turns on his Lowrance graphs when he wants some electronic entertainment.
He’s a huge fan of “video game fishing,” a term that translates roughly into finding deep fish with his electronics, parking the boat on top of them, and then watching how they react to his bait. He’ll use vertical presentations like a dropshot to tempt them, and whether it’s smallmouths in the Great Lakes or largemouths on the deep, clear lakes of the South, he’ll often “see” them take his bait.
When he knows that this is a technique that he’s likely to employ, the first thing he does is clean up the “dirty screen” on his graph. He wants to eliminate the clutter that can make it hard to distinguish fish, bait, cover and his lure from one another. The first thing he does is set his graph to “Advanced” and then adjusts both the surface clarity and the noise settings to “low” or “medium.” He’ll also put his sensitivity at 75 to 80 percent.
Because he wants to be sure that he’s presenting his lure directly to the fish, he’ll move his scroll speed from “normal” to “X2.”
“You can instantly see how it speeds your screen up,” he said. “When he’s down below you, he’s down below you. He didn’t move off to the side.”
While screen speed may help, it pays to be deliberate when you’re in a likely area to avoid missing something. “When I get to a target zone I’m going to slow down,” Hartman explained. “Without wind, the trolling motor is on about 3.” Many electronics suffer from interference when the trolling motor is running, particularly at mid to high speeds, and he suggests that if you’re suffering greatly from this issue you find a cure so that your screen stays “clean.”
One other tool that shifts the advantage from the fish to the angler is the use of the “amplitude scope” on his Lowrances, which allows him to tell when something – ideally a big bass – is about to come into the screen.
He’s worked hard over the years to learn what each individual bait looks like on the screen, how to judge a fish’s attitude from its movements, and can easily tell the difference between his dropshot weight and his dropshot worm as he yo-yo’s them underneath the boat. That’s a matter not only of time, but of making sure he maximizes the value and effectiveness of his electronic “eyes.” It’s a form of sight-fishing, even though there’s an intermediary between his face and the underwater scene. Nevertheless, to Hartman, who says “I love fishing this way,” it’s still a game, and as his early returns on the Elite Series show, it’s one that he intends to win.
If you want to learn some of the other keys to Hartman’s video gaming system, check out his complete video, available only by subscribing to The Bass University TV.
