Color Your World

Color sonar units are now practically standard equipment in the electronics ensemble of today's tour pros. And why not have one, especially when it's at -- shall we say -- less than retail price? Yet even at full price, a color unit could be an investment that pays immediate dividends.

You could call Arizona pro Brett Hite an electronics guy. Plying offshore structure in western lakes at age 10 will teach a guy a thing or two about depthfinders. But even with that background, switching to a color unit enlightened his view of the underwater world. He attributes a lot of his top finishes to sonar-reading ability, especially the last 3 years when he's had a color box in front of him.

That Much Better Than Grayscale?

To the trained eye, a medium- to high-end grayscale graph will show plenty of detail, such as brushpiles, ledges, grass beds, schools of fish and baitfish, even bottom hardness. Hite says a color graph gives detail far beyond a gray graph.

"You can determine a lot of things more clearly," he says. "Before (color), you were never quite sure, but now it's plain as day how big a fish is or what type of bottom you're sitting over, stuff like that."

Structure, cover, fish -- even a lure and line -- show up in different shades based on their densities, or how hard the sonar signal bounces off them. Blue indicates a soft bottom or a smaller, lighter object. Green represents something slightly harder and denser, then yellow and orange and red as you go up in density. Try determining dead grass from live grass with a grayscale unit. You can't.

But Hite did just that with his Lowrance LCX-19c at the Guntersville Bassmaster last month (he finished 38th). He says: "The key to my pattern was finding green grass rather than the brown dead stuff. Dead grass was showing up blue or green, while the fresh stuff gave off more of a lighter yellow because it had a harder base to it, milfoil and hydrilla both."

At the Smith Lake Bassmaster (28th place), he was able to distinguish keeper-sized (16 inches or better) spotted bass from the many shorts swimming around. "Keepers had a yellow center in the arch of the (sonar's) fish symbol, and most keepers would hang together," he says. "I could easily specify which fish I wanted to target."

Are Those Bass Down There?

Even on a cheapo unit, it's obvious when you're sitting over a pile of fish. High-end grayscale graphs are a little more discerning, and therefore, trustworthy. So even though fish on a high-priced screen are almost always fish, how do you know they're bass?

"The size of the fish symbol will give you an idea, but it's not so much the size but the thickness of the arch (that indicates bigger fish)," he says. "With these graphs today, if I'm fishing vertical and watching the fish, on a good bite I can see 90 percent of them eat my lure, even down to 70-90 feet. A bluegill will just be a line (on the screen). A 2-pounder (bass) will have a thicker midsection (in the arch symbol). With a dropshot rig, you'll see this line go up and down on the bottom, here comes this thick arch up from the bottom and, boom, (the arch) goes down and I've got a bite. I don't know how many hundreds of fish I've caught doing that."

Sometimes you simply can't tell if the arches represent bass or not, in which case experience and trial and error still come into play. Both are aided by a detailed color readout.

Hite says: "Usually a bass is curious. He'll stay around (a bait) or move up to it. A carp or other type of rough fish will just swim out. With a bass, if I see an arch down there, down goes my drop shot, and he goes down after it.

"A lot of times it's how they're setting up on structure. Stripers are usually suspended higher over structure, and if they bite, they'll streak after the bait (as seen on screen). Crappie usually school in the shape of a Christmas tree. And if you see schools of shad close to bottom, almost like a haze, you'll see low-lying arch streak through it. That's an active largemouth."

Not surprisingly, any time he fishes a tournament on a "structure lake," Hite devotes a lot of practice time to driving around watching sonar. "I'll go out and just graph for a couple of days," he says. "A good example was the Lake Pleasant EverStart (which he won in 2003). I spent a lot of time hunting for fish, and every single fish that I caught was one I saw on my graph in 40-60 feet. Generally, if I don't see them, I don't catch them."