DownScan Bait Balls

Everybody wants to know what a fish looks like with their sonar. The next question is what does bait look like? Bait is important for finding fish that bite and other times it makes no difference. I have fished some lakes and you must find the bait to catch fish and other lakes the bait it doesn’t matter. When I can’t figure it out I believe we just have to wait until we receive enough information on fish and bait to solve the problem but in 20 years someone may have studied the prey-predator relationship in detail on the lake and we will have the information to make educated decisions.
Bait can be tightly packed schools, tiny fry or finger size minnows of all species. Fish are not family friendly and will eat whatever they can. They have preferences like we do but they will eat their own species if the opportunity arises.
This example demonstrates what I call larger bait fish in a loose school. This photo is from Chris Meyer’s collection. Notice how the DownScan and side scan separates the targets better than the traditional sonar even with the Broadband technology Lowrance uses.
The next example has massive bait balls over 40 FOW. I have looked at bait balls for years with traditional sonar and the bait balls on the DownScan are easier to interpret.
This screen capture is panfish around a sunken ice fishing house. The arrows point to the same baitfish with the different sonar views.
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