Lake George: The Importance of Electronics to Fishing Success

I would call the summer of 2019 the summer of learning. We tucked lots of new information away from this past summer. I would credit much of the learning to my Garmin GPSMap 7610’s. I would pull up on a piece of structure and within a couple of minutes, I would have all the data I would need as to where the fish were and how I was going to target them.

Add to this data one other piece of critical information: thermocline. I have watched and read all kinds of information on thermocline. But the greatest learning moment came this summer when I talked with a friend who loves to scuba dive on Lake George. He was amazed that the thermocline set up at 22 feet for the better part of the first half of the summer. After he shared that with me, I was amazed to see that all the fish I marked were 22 feet down or shallower. This is one of the reasons fish suspend. Below the thermocline, the water temp was 45 degrees (too uncomfortable for smallies) and above the thermocline the water temp was 65 degrees.

Time and time again, I would mark fish suspended, because of the thermocline. And if the fish were suspended, I couldn’t catch them on the bottom. I had to do something different in how I targeted them. So even though surface temps were in the low to mid 70’s, I threw jerkbaits and caught lots of quality fish.

I allowed my electronics to dictate how I fished, rather than my instinct or past experience. And as I went back in my mind to years past, I have always struggled in a two week period until the thermocline moves to 30+ feet.

Eventually, as the summer moves on, the thermocline sets up deeper and deeper and we start to see smallies showing up on humps in 30 and even as deep as 45 feet.

The other major win for us this year was implementing the new Panoptix livescope to many of our vertical presentations in deep water. We got to play the video and see fish scream up off the bottom in 35 feet of water and hit a hair jig worked 10 to 15 feet up in the water column. Livescope isn’t just a game changer when it comes to learning how fish react to your offerings, you get to see the best view of underwater structure I’ve ever seen. It is way better than any side imaging. You get a real time image. With a lot of the technology out there, there is a learning curve to interpreting data. Not so much with the livescope. You see hump details any every nook and cranny where fish could be sitting.

I have always been an advocate of Garmin’s electronics, and the more and more I use this technology, the more we are learning and the more success we are experiencing! Unlock the depths of Lake George and your local fishery with Garmin’s technology.