Author Topic: FLW winner shares unit settings on hard to see targets  (Read 3130 times)

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Offline newkid4si

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FLW winner shares unit settings on hard to see targets
« on: August 13, 2017, 09:35:23 PM »
Justin Atkins just won the 2017 Forrest Wood Cup at Lake Murray. In the write up about it, a lesson is shared that my help us. I think it's worth the time to read.

         Cashing in on cane

All week long, Atkins targeted cane piles and the fat blueback herring-eating largemouths that hung around them, but his success story actually started back in college, when he fished in consecutive College Bass National Championships on Lake Chatuge, a spotted bass fishery in north Georgia and North Carolina. There, Atkins learned some hard lessons, but in the post-game, he was able to pick up some herring skills from fellow competitors Brad Rutherford and Patrick Walters.

“They did really well, and they were catching them on top and calling them out of brush,” says Atkins. “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I was friends with them before the tournament ever started, but learning from them how they managed to succeed, that taught me a lot.”

Because of that, Atkins was prepared to look for cane-dwelling largemouths in practice, but he was the one to put it together, demonstrating just how quickly today’s pros can master a bite.

Atkins had about 60 to 80 waypoints on cane piles he liked, and he accumulated most of them after some early struggles in pre-practice.

“It took me two days to get my graphs dialed in,” says Atkins. “That cane is hard to see. It’s real narrow. So I had to sit there and play with settings. I was here an afternoon and a full day before I finally found one pile. I went over it, and I saw it on the sonar and marked it, and I could barely see it on my down-view – just a little bit. I ended up graphing for a while and fishing some and never found any. The next morning I went to that spot and went around and around and around that pile. I turned my sensitivity up, my contrast and all that, until I finally got to where I could see it and knew what it was on my side-scan. After that I probably found 100 piles in my next six days of practice.”

Besides cranking up his sensitivity and contrast, Atkins also sped up his chart speed, which made the narrow cane piles appear larger and much more visible. Once he was dialed in, Atkins could mark cane piles up to 100 feet out to either side of his boat.

After some success in pre-practice, Atkins started on an innocuous pile on the first day of official practice and caught a 3-pounder on his first cast. Once he’d marked plenty of fish, he committed almost solely to the cane-pile pattern and continued to expand on it throughout practice.

Most of the piles topped out about 8 to 10 feet below the surface, rising up from about 20 or 22 feet deep. The fresher and “bushier” the pile was, the more fish were in it.

  This was copied from https://www.flwfishing.com/news/2017-08-13-atkins-tops-em-all


              Mike


Offline rnvinc

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Re: FLW winner shares unit settings on hard to see targets
« Reply #1 on: August 14, 2017, 08:29:58 PM »
I always mention in my seminars that Chart speed matching boat will give the best "ratio" of distance covered vs image data displyed for a perfect picture in SI  ...

But  I also mention that increasing Chart speed a click or two is not necessarily a bad thing because it will elongate echoes that sometimes help to discern smaller echoes (like fish, stakes, vertical pilings, cane in the article noted above)  ...

Good article Mike  ...

Rickie
« Last Edit: August 14, 2017, 08:32:04 PM by rnvinc »


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