Bass Club Digest

If you don’t own a GPS map, you need to put one at the top of your wish list. No tool has had a greater impact on bass fishing since Carl Lowrance introduced the first flasher depthfinder in 1957.

Author Mark Hicks has identical Lowrance LMS-332C sonar/GPS units mounted on his Triton bass boat. The waypoints he enters on his console unit mark structure and bass cover he finds while driving the boat, as well as navigational waypoints.

A GPS map is a GPS plotter that displays contour lake maps and your boat’s position on the water in real time. Before GPS maps were introduced, finding a ledge or some other underwater structure that you had marked on a paper map was hit-or-miss. A paper map gets you in the general area, but then you have to search for the spot with a depthfinder. You might spend an hour or more idling around looking for something and never find it.
With a GPS map, you simply place an icon on the spot you want to find and go straight to it. You can check out so many more places in a day’s fishing that your success increases dramatically. And, when you find a sweet spot that holds a load of bass, you can mark it with a waypoint and return precisely to it later without taking a single landmark.

If you don’t have a GPS map, you’re at a distinct disadvantage when you compete against those who do have one. This is especially true when fishing offshore structure. However, if you think you don’t need a GPS map because you always target shallow, visible cover, think again. A GPS map is an unbeatable navigational tool for finding your way around when fishing a vast, unfamiliar body of water. And, it’s a superb scouting tool, even on familiar waters.

The author’s bow GPSMap is convenient to operate when he’s fishing. He usually selects a fish icon as the default symbol and punches in the waypoint immediately after he lands a bass.

When scouting for shallow cover on a big body of water, you might look over miles of shoreline and dozens of points, pockets, and tributaries in a day’s fishing. Add to this the different types of cover you come across, such as boat docks, brush piles, windfalls, stumps, chunk rock banks, flooded bushes, aquatic vegetation and more. On any given day, one of these cover types might be part of the winning pattern.

Say, you start out fishing boat docks in the morning, because docks were the most productive cover the day before. But, after two hours of fishing boat docks you haven’t had a bite. You experiment with other types of cover and finally catch a few bass from a secondary point covered with chunk rock. At this point, the obvious thing to do is fish all the chunk rock points you had found in practice.

However, unless you have a photographic memory, it’s unlikely that you’ll remember every chunk rock bank you saw while scouting, and you won’t take full advantage of the developing pattern. You could have jotted this information on maps and in a notebook, but referring to these resources is a slow process, especially when you’re competing in a tournament.

With a GPS map, you can use different icons as waypoints to denote different types of cover. For example, a tree icon could be used to depict a fallen tree, a boat dock could stand for a boat dock, a picnic table could represent flooded bushes, a car could be a chunk rock bank, and so on. By creating your own secrete icon vocabulary, you go back to specific waypoints you placed on the GPS map while scouting. In this instance, you would look for the car icons and you could go right to all the chunk rock banks you found in different areas of the lake.

You can use icons the same way to mark underwater structure and cover. For example, I use a skull and crossbones icon for a rocky bottom, a green X for submerged grass, and a tent for sunken brush. When I find a spot that’s really hot, I place a bright red stop sign icon there. It really stands out.

Whenever the boat is moving, a GPS map leaves a track line that tells you where you’ve been. This helps when you’re returning to a fishing spot, but I find it even more beneficial when I’m fishing an underwater structure or a large weed bed. I found a ledge on lake Barkley once that was far offshore and loaded with largemouths that were suckers for a jig. The ledge dropped from 9 to 15 feet deep and was maybe 75 yards long.

The first time I fished the ledge, I dropped a marker buoy at each end to help me visualize where it was and to keep from going astray. There was no need to use marker buoys the next day. I simply followed the trail on my GPS map and stayed in perfect casting range of the ledge.

GPS trails also increase your efficiency when you’re trying to follow a grid pattern to cover a large area. This could be something like an underwater flat, or even a visible grass bed. Without GPS trails as a reference, there’s no way you can maintain a consistent grid. You invariably go over places you’ve already fished and miss other areas altogether. Since GPS trails allow you to run a grid pattern with precision, you don’t waste time re-fishing unproductive water, or miss spots that may hold a wad of bass.

GPS MAP OPTIONS

Some GPS maps come with contour lake maps on their hard drives, but most need plug-in map cards, or maps downloaded from a CD, for an added charge. Detailed GPS contour maps are available for most lakes in the lower 48 states, including the Great Lakes. For example, Navionics HotMaps break the country down into four regions, and the card for each region costs $129.99. For about the same price, you can get HotMaps USA Lake Maps, a Navionics card that includes over 3,000 popular lakes and rivers across the country.

Monochrome GPS maps are available, but a color display is far superior because it clearly differentiates land, water, contour lines, buoys, marinas and other features. You can buy color GPS maps these days for as little as $400, such as the Garmin 420, which has a 4-inch display. Larger displays are more costly, but easier to read.

If you already have depthfinders mounted on your bass boat, a good option is to have a GPS map fixed to a swivel mount on the gunwale near the console. Face the unit toward the driver’s seat when you’re operating the outboard; turn it around when you’re fishing so you can read it from the bow. You can’t beat a large display for this application, such as the 12.1-inch screen on Garmin’s GPSMAP 4012.

A hand-held GPS map is the least expensive way to take advantage of this technology. You can buy the 5.4-ounce Magellan Explorist 500 for $250, and the 8.7-ounce Lowrance IFinder Expedition C for $300. Both of them feature color displays and have nearly the same capabilities as full-size units. The displays are small, but they’ll do the job. Mounts are available that secure these little GPS maps to a console or gunwale.

Though you can get by with one GPS map mounted on the console, the ideal setup is to have an identical second unit mounted on the bow. I cut costs by getting combination sonar/GPS maps. I set the display on split screen, one side for the sonar, the other for the GPS map. This eliminates the need and expense of two separate sonar units.

I have two Lowrance LMS-332C sonar/GPS units mounted on my Triton bass boat. The bow unit is convenient to operate, since I don’t have to walk back to the console every time I want to punch in a waypoint or change the map’s functions.

I usually choose a fish icon as the default waypoint image when I’m fishing. When I hook a bass, I punch in the waypoint to leave a fish icon precisely on the spot where I caught the bass. If it’s a big bass, I might edit the waypoint and rename the waypoint as the weight of the bass. Therefore, a 5-pound, 8-ounce, bass would be waypoint 5.8. If I see a brush pile or anything else of interest on my depthfinder, I can punch in the waypoint and then change the icon to represent what I’ve seen.

The waypoints I enter on my consol-mounted GPS map mark structure and bass cover I find while driving the boat, as well as navigational waypoints. After I trailer my boat at day’s end, I copy the waypoints entered on the bow GPS map to a memory card. Then I use the card to transfer these waypoints to the GPS map on my console, and vice versa. This puts all the waypoints I’ve entered that day on both units.

The most helpful waypoints are usually the fish icons that mark where I’ve caught bass. By transferring them to the console GPS map, I can go straight to these spots while driving the boat.

Editor’s note: Added information on using GPS units is available at the BOAT/U.S. website. Visit www.boatus.com/husick/.

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