I don’t want to make any of the younger pros who are fishing the bass tournament trails mad, but I realized a while back that the learning curve is much shorter nowadays, making it much easier to cash in on one’s fishing ability without necessarily having to put in your time.
The biggest reason, I believe, that so many 20-something pros are regularly knocking down big checks is that the unbelievable advances in electronics have taken away some of the advantages that older fishermen had worked years to gain. Units like my Humminbird 997C do all the scouting work that it used to take us hours and hours to do.
I used to use a topo map to find places that looked like they’d hold fish, then use my depthfinder to see if what was on the map was right. Now, I punch a couple of buttons, and my unit tells me I’m in the right spot, shows me where I am on the map, and shows me what the bottom looks like — and that’s not even using the side-imaging feature.
What brings this to mind is that June is the first month when bass fishermen in South Carolina get a real “offshore” bite, and that’s when your electronics play such a big role. It might not be as easy to find fish as it is when they’re shallow, around piers and rocks and laydowns, but when you do find them, you usually hit the mother lode. You will catch multiple fish on a single spot. You might catch a limit without ever moving your boat. And because of the technology available, you can more easily find other spots that match the one where you’ve put all those fish in the boat.
I really feel for somebody like David Fritts, the crankbait king who was so far ahead of everybody else when it came to using his depthfinder — and his was just a flasher unit for a long time — to find places where bass would hold when they moved toward deep water. Now, electronics do all the work that only he used to be able to do. Veteran fishermen who had put in their time learning all the lakes we fish, learning where things where, how fish related to certain bottom structure and features that were particular to certain lakes — that learning curve had disappeared.
The thing that drove this home to me was when I took a guy from my hometown, Ninety Six, out on Lake Greenwood. He was interested in buying a unit like I had on my Triton, so I took him out and showed him what he could do with it. I realized that everybody is a master of their electronics — if they’ve got ’em. Nowadays, you can’t seriously compete in big tournaments without top-flight electronic equipment.
I love to use the side-image function on my electronics to see what something I’ve marked on my depthfinder really is. You can see trees and rocks and stumps and brushpiles, and all you have to do is hit “mark” and you’ve got a waypoint. You can turn on your map function and depthfinder function and ride back over it and see what it looks like on the depthfinder, and you’ve got it marked.
I had a co-angler in a tournament in New York last year, and he had it figured out. We were fishing drop-shot rigs vertically beside the boat. On the side-image function, you could see your bait going down in the water, and you could actually see the smallmouth bass moving up to hit it. He said, “It’s like you’re playing a smallmouth bass video game.”
He was right.
For those of us old enough to have sat down looking at a map with one eye and the depthfinder with the other to figure out exactly where we were — and even then, we still needed to be able to line something up we found with something on the bank — that’s amazing. I use the side-image primarily to look for rocks and stumps. The map function, in June, you can really use it to look for places like ones you’ve found holding big loads of fish. If you find a pocket with a long underwater sandbar off one corner, and bass are on that sandbar, you can look on the map that’s loaded in your electronics and immediately find other pockets with the same features. Then, you go to those places and load the boat again. It’s amazing how easy it is to run a pattern with the technology we’ve got.
But enough about that. For June, you still need a starting point from which to look for fish, and you still have to be able to catch the ones you find. It’s a great month, because the bass have finished spawning, and they’re hungry again to replace the weight they lost, and they’re ganged up, hunting like wolfpacks. Early in the month, you look for them on little corners and secondary points. As the month progresses, you move more and more toward the main-lake — that’s where you find ’em by Memorial Day.
Fish will really be concentrated around bait. You find bait, you find the right kind of structure they’re using, and you find them. I like to use a crankbait as my main search bait. I like the Rapala baits, the DT-10 and DT-16, because they tell you how deep they run and how deep you’re searching. A Carolina rig is a good search bait; it’s not as fast as a crankbait, but you can get a better idea of changes in the bottom — from rock to sand or soft bottom. My favorite plastic to use on a Carolina rig is probably a Senko, with a lizard or a big worm next.
When you find ’em, catching them is the fun part. Well, that and playing “video games.”
Davy Hite is a 44-year-old native of Saluda who lives in Ninety Six. He was the BASS Angler of the Year in 1997 and 2002, and he has won the 1999 Bassmasters Classic and the 1998 FLW Tour Championship. He is sponsored by Triton boats, Evinrude outboards, All-Star rods, Pfleuger reels, Berkley Trilene, Yamamoto Baits, Owner hooks, Humminbird depthfinders and Solar Bat sunglasses.
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