Livescope and Deepwater Smallies

We have had a blast fishing with Garmin’s livescope on the bow of our boat. I have become so dependent on it that I won’t fish if I’m not seeing fish as I pan an area. The reality is that you can’t catch fish that aren’t there, and time and again we see that with Livescope. This summer, I can’t tell you how many times we would pull up to a spot and literally the screen would be full of fish. We learned so much from watching the fish interact with our baits.

We had lots of times where we fished individual fish where you could see the fish come up and eat our baits. The last day of our season on Lake George, two of the smallies we caught on hair jigs came up and popped the bait as we watched them.

The other significant help that Livescope showed me this summer related to where the fish were at in the water column. Our temperatures were way off this summer. When I arrived at Silver Bay our water temps were the highest I’ve ever seen them for early June: 68 degrees. Fast forward to early August where our water temps had only warmed to 71 degrees. What this did, in my opinion, was stall out the seasonal progression and movement of the fish. So for most of the summer, we fished smallmouth that were suspended. We learned a ton during a tougher season of fishing. We fished lots of suspending presentations, which helped us to fine tune some presentations while learning entirely new ways to catch smallies.

At the end of the day, Livescope is an amazing tool for finding and catching fish, but it’s also the most amazing fish learning instrument ever. Now we are transitioning to walleyes and I can’t wait to “see” the application on the waters of northern Michigan.