W2F Blog

• At the right depth
• Within a pattern
• A good hard bottom

• 3/8-ounce V&M Football Jig (Classic winning jig)
• Texas-rigged V&M Pork Pin
• Jackall Muscle Deep or MC/60 crankbait
• 1/2-ounce V&M Cyclone Classic Platinum Spinnerbait

Wishing, wanting, lusting – whatever we call our desire for new fishing tackle, it definitely comes to a head this time of year. Of course it's closing in on Christmas, but as I get older the holiday is more about eating and family time and watching my son open new presents and light up with the joy of a child on Christmas morning.

But for fishing tackle this is the time of year when all that new stuff we saw back in July becomes available to those of us who've been dying to get our hands on it. We're fortunate at Wired2fish to be the first to use a lot of the new products, sometimes before they are released at major events like ICAST and the Bassmaster Classic. It has quelled my anticipation but led me to realize we have a duty to give our take on some of our favorite new tackle this time of year.

Maybe you are letting folks know what to get you, maybe you're looking for your significant other who loves fishing and you don't know what to get them. So we all put our heads together and came up with more than 30 items that we think folks will enjoy adding to their fishing next season. These are some of my favorites for the 2012-2013 fishing seasons.  More of Walker's and Terry's favorites will be coming in the next several days.


Minn Kota Talon, $1,449

To be perfectly honest, I was a bit skeptical about the shallow water anchoring systems until I got them and used them for a season. But now, while I'm sure I can live without them, I don't want to. They have served so many purposes this year, from launching a boat alone, to flipping and even fishing shallow areas at night. It's an invaluable tool now and has made me so much more efficient. It's a high priced item that really aids your ability to deal with things like wind and pressure. I'll have a full blog on what I learned from the Talon this year in the next month. But for now, I can say I love its easy install, easy programming and operation. There's no hydraulics to worry with and the grey poles on the back of the boat have been the hot conversation piece for me at local gas stations.


Lowrance HDS Touch, from $1,299

The new Lowrance depth finders appeal to the "techno-geek" in me. They operate more like a tablet or smart phone with intuitive layouts and menus. The screen eases strain on your eyes, even in direct sunlight. I love the easier rigging with the units, with a direct connect from the Structure Scan transducer and Ethernet networking. They look great, work well and for someone who spends long days staring at a graph, they are just a joy to use.


Abu Garcia Revo 3rd Generation Baitcasting Reels, from $129

We got our first few Gen. 3 Revo reels from Abu Garcia back in the spring, and we were so excited after the first outing, we couldn't wait to start talking about them. The reels are lighter, lower profile, cosmetically appealing and cast as far and as smooth as any reels we've ever used. They offer blazing speeds up to 8:1 gear ratios and the same low-end power from their 5.4:1 models. From styling to functionality, these are truly some of the best reels we've ever used.


Denali Terry Bolton Offshore Worm and Jig Rod, $209

I reviewed this rod earlier in the year, but can say it's been a staple in my rod collection all season.  The rod works for pitching docks equally as well as it does casting big worms offshore or hopping spoons for deep bass. It's listed as a heavy action but fishes more like a medium heavy with some power on a long, deep hookset. At 7-feet, 2-inches, it gives you a good casting rod, easy to fish rod and powerful fighting rod for all your "away-from-the-bank" needs.


13 Fishing Omen Baitcasting Rod, $99

13 Fishing impressed us with their introduction at the 2012 ICAST show in Orlando. From the way they talked about their products and fishing to their "design and manufacture everything" mentality, they show a unique insight to building quality tackle. Their Envy rods are amazing great rods, but we're equally impressed with their $100 offering, the Omen series. These rods feature great styling, a small frame Japanese high modulus blank, custom made components like a split grip that allows you to touch the rod blank with the tip of your finger. Their styling and quality will make this rod very popular among anglers in 2013.


Megabass Ito Vision 110 FX or FX Knuckle 60 , $27

We thought Megabass did a good job of making some lures more practical to the situations anglers face. Two of those baits that debuted at ICAST really proved their forward thinking in designing tackle. The Ito Vision 100 FX expanded on their weight-transfer system that already helped make their slender and lively jerkbaits cast better in windy conditions by adding a collapsing bill that greatly reduces a jerkbait's tendency to helicopter on the lip's turbulence in the wind. 

Meanwhile the Knuckle 60 gives you a square bill and sub-surface crankbait for fishing over the top of shallow grass in one. With a lip that locks in place in two positions you can fish 2-4 feet deep or just 1 foot deep with the snap of the lip. The bait has a great casting weight, hunts and tracks well and swims well over and through cover. The colors are the same great Megabass colors anglers have come to demand.


Browning MPACT Zeiss Fishing Collection Sunglasses, $179

I've been wearing these shades most of the year while fishing. They are light, comfortable and fairly stylish. But the real draw is in their Zeiss optics and Ripel water and grime protection that is built into the lenses. The lenses stay clear even in a down pour and they are easily cleaned with a wipe to keep your vision under the water at maximum potential. Their Back Country lens is the best early morning low-light lens we've used to date. We know several pros who were using these in those sight fishing slugfests to finish in the top of the pack by finding more beds in practice than their competitors. A great set of glasses for an avid angler.


TH Marine G-Force Handle, $30

This would make a great present for any angler that owns a boat and trolling motor. As a guy who has literally been flung out of a boat when a trolling motor cord snapped, I can tell you I have a new found love for this seemingly simple gadget. I'm an angler who moves a lot because I know fish generally bite when you put a bait near them. So I try to hit as much water in a day as I can. That's a lot of lifting and dropping of the trolling motor. This cable reduces the effort, makes snug or worn trolling motors pop in and out of place so much better.


Strike King KVD Jerkbait, $9

I'm always on the lookout for jerkbaits that look a little different, act a little different, but perform very well in terms of casting and erratic dancing on slack-line twitch. Jerkbaits tend to have a narrow window of opportunity in an angler's strategy, but for $9, you're going to want to have a few of these in your jerkbait box this winter. They have great colors, two different sizes, they get down well and suspend well and dart lively. They sound good and look good and that's reason enough to own a few to me.


Rapala DT Custom Ink Crankbaits, $7

Generally "new colors" in lures don't thrill us much as anglers. But sometimes a new color or set of colors comes out that really produces and it's hard not to get on the new color band wagon. The DT line of crankbaits have been a staple. The DT 6 is a coldwater killer and the DT 10 is the perfect mid-range crankbait while the DT 16 and 20 catch a lot of deep bass on offshore structure. Now with the new Ike's Custom Ink colors producing so well, our confidence has increased with this crankbait line. The blueback herring and Smash colors have fooled a bunch of bass this year for me and I'll be getting a bunch more in the different sizes of these two colors.


Zoom WEC E2, $20

It was tough to review this crankbait because it's one of those baits to keep under wraps but it's just too good not to share. It's a wide wobbling, hunting lure that can wreck the bass around shallow wood cover. And as a little side note, the smallmouth hate this crankbait. Each bait is hand assembled, hand painted, clear coated and packaged. They are not readily available everywhere so that sort of adds to my confidence with the cranks when I find a shallow cranking bite.


Heddon Chug'n Spook, $7

This bait remained hush-hush though the fall topwater bite, but several anglers revealed the power of the new Heddon Chug'n Spook as something "the bass hadn't seen before." It's big, makes a big commotion, loud, casts a country mile and comes in great colors. The hooks are cheap and need to be replaced, but the bait is solid for a little less than $7. Folks underestimate the power of a big walking lure. If you don't have one in your box, this is a good one to start.


Lazer Trokar EWG Treble TK310, $7

Trokar brought a new sharpness to fishing hooks and now they've brought it to treble hooks. Not to say they are the sharpest but they are a new sharp. They've made it vogue to pressure set on fish and this type of edge on a fishing hook makes more sense to me on a treble hook. The price will be inhibitive to some anglers, but I can tell you a handful of my favorite baits are rocking the new EWG and short-shank hooks from Lazer Trokar.

Stay tuned to Wired2fish.com for more Wishlists from other staff members in the next few days.

Understanding Sonar, Side and Down Scan will improve your fishing

By Jason Sealock

Technology changes yearly, monthly, weekly, daily it seems in today's society. The changes range from making dinner a little easier to treating cancer with advanced scanning and dissecting technologies. Technology in fishing seems to be a hot button topic. Absolutely you can catch bass without a single piece of electronics technology in your fishing boat. But put yourself on a 100,000 acre reservoir and breaking down a new body of water can feel more like finding a needle in a stack of needles.

Those of us that grew up using flashers have forced ourselves to interpret what a ring of pulsing light means in terms of fish, cover and forage around us. Then as paper charters came into popularity, it was cool to be able to draw contours on to a roll of scrolling paper. Next entered the liquid crystal displays and we again had to learn that a fish was a shallow tapering arch or saucer on the screen. Moving active fish under a stationary boat were spaghetti lines on the screen.

Now we truly live in the golden age of depth finding technologies. We have available to us side imaging and down imaging technologies, HD sonar that can actually look into cover and see fish. Yet with all this technology available to us, the most requested topic I get from anglers involves interpreting what they see on their sonar, or Down Scan or Side Scan imaging.

We're going to work on sharing some cool screen shots and then walking through what's there. No it's not going to be a bunch of underwater things that never hold fish. It's going to usually be fish, forage and the cover the fish are relating to during different seasons. The goal will be to provide anglers with the knowledge to be confident when they scan over something that they are seeing what they think they are.



This is the first screen from my Lowrance HDS 8 Gen2 Unit. Now folks will look at this and say they see the bass. It's a little easier to say that when someone shows you a screen knowing they are going to show you fish. But when you encounter this on the lake you're looking for the position of the fish on the screen as well the marks and arches .

Let's start however with orientation on the three screens. It's important to note where your boat is on each of the three screens technologies. We've place a red triangle in each pane. That is the current location of your boat on each screen. Always.

The left pane is side imaging. The boat is orientated at the top middle. Now anglers often mistakenly think when they set their side scan area to 40 feet they are scanning out 40 feet to either side. No not really. You'll notice our depth is around 23 feet. On the ranges on either side the bottom starts being drawn at 23 feet. What you are seeing is directly below the boat on the left and on the right. Then from there it starts scanning out. So really it is scanning out to the "side" roughly 17 feet. The depth alters how far "out to the side" it images. Because it has to look down and then out.

The other thing folks don't realize is by setting your side scan to a large range, say 100 feet, you're looking for cover or structure because the bass will be too small, mere specs of sand on the screen.  I like to set my range outward about 30-50 feet depending on how deep I'm fishing or looking for schools of bass because I am often looking for the actual fish. Unless I'm looking through open expanses of water searching for isolated pieces of large cover.

In this screen, we see a school of bass hunkered down around the bottom in 23 feet of water on all three screens. I placed 3 circles on the exact same group of fish in each window. Again it's about perspective.

On the right side I have it split showing down scan and sonar together. One thing to note, and why I often switch to the three screen mode when I'm searching, the side scan screen shows me roughly 28 catchable bass. The sonar shows me about half that. What you often get with side imaging and down imaging is better separation and less masking. Sonar looks downward in a conical spectrum while side imaging and down imaging to a degree look down and outward more as a sheet fed scan, so the way they interpret will be vastly different.

Then as I stop to fish, I often go to straight sonar or sonar and GPS split screen. That's because Structure Scan needs the boat moving to paint an accurate picture. On the Lowrance units, it actually matches the speed of the scan to the speed of the boat. If you go to slow you get elongated distortion. So I often scan at roughly 4-6 mph.

When I'm not moving, sonar will just constantly echo returns and what you see is a continuous line as it re-pings the same object over and over but the screen is scrolling so the result is a line moving up and down or multiple lines moving up and down instead of a single dot as you pass over quickly with side scan.

Now back to the orientation aspect. Yes I've caught a lot of bass suspending, but I've caught way more bass that are relating to the bottom or some form of cover. In this picture it's also good to note the bottom hardness. The Down Scan illustrates a hard bottom.

As you pass from a soft bottom to a hard bottom on side and down scans, the bottom will get much brighter (i.e. a stronger return). Bass in deep water like hard bottoms.  When you mark fish positioned on a hard bottom in deep water and they are orientated horizontally along the hard bottom, they are often bass. I don't like to see short clumps of fish stacked up tall on the screen. Typically that is what white bass, yellow bass, crappie, even species like drum do.

Bass when they are actively corralling bait fish on the bottom will position more horizontally along the bottom over a long space, rather than straight up and down in a small space.

Now size can tip you off to what is on the screen too. IF those arches were larger and appeared almost "hairy" on the screen, they are generally rough fish. For some reason, the denser the fish (or harder the scales like on rough fish) the return almost looks like an arch or spot with hair draping off it. Also notice how much a foot would be if the dark space on the side scan screen on the left has 23 feet in it on either side of center. So I've come to realize when I see fish of this size at this 40 foot scale in 20 feet of water, I know they are bass.

Perspective is everything when looking at electronics. If the fish seem too large on a small scale, they probably aren't what you're looking for. If they are stacked up tall, again they may not be what you are looking for. But when you see them orientated along the bottom, you're going to figure out a lot quicker what's going on down there under and out to the side of your boat.

We'll work more on sonar, some of the settings to help you get the most out of your units in our next installment of Fishing Technology and feel free to send us suggestions on what you want to see.

If you liked this, you'll probably like these two articles on finding and catching suspending fish with sonar and imaging:

Bridging the Gap on Suspended Bass Part One

Fishing Suspended Bass Around Cover Part Two

And this video:

How to Read Your Electronics

4 baits will give you better chances of boating hot-water bass

Justin Lucas shares his secrets to catching suspended bass on hollow-bodied swimbaits