# What am I seeing?



## Cat O' Lies (May 21, 2004)

I need someone to tell me what I am seeing on my finder. I've fished many years and used several finders to find fish but this is perplexing to me. I see fish being marked but am never able to catch them. There are large yellow blobs with dark red spots scattered around. Spent 4 hours on Lake Livingston Sunday morning jigging and trolling areas that looked like there are fish there with no luck. Is this just schools of shad? How can you differentiate them from larger fish?


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## tbone2374 (Feb 27, 2010)

Many reports and catches of those 3" to 5" WB, this year... many in the Tailrace, as well. We caught many in the WB Tournament. IMO, I'm seeing many of those, with a few schools of shad, and some medium more active feeders, around the edges, and above...


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## mrsh978 (Apr 24, 2006)

Offshore here. I see several â€œ larger â€œ fish - the big flat lines and bait balls / groups are the little â€œdots â€œ. You can possible see some interference move through screen area on water turbulence ?


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## mrsh978 (Apr 24, 2006)

Screen shot of the endangered red snapper. All sizes.


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## SKs Crappie Fishing (Mar 24, 2008)

You could probably lower your sensitivity some and it'll clear a lot of those blobs up.......


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## whsalum (Mar 4, 2013)

You are looking at huge schools of tiny white bass. I posted several different pics on Lake Livingston Hunting and Fishing Facebook page last week of depth finder shots like this. I down sized my tackle and caught sackfulls of 4-5 inch fish out of these schools. The future looks great, the present not so great


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## whsalum (Mar 4, 2013)

*Sonar Shots Lake Livingston*

All these shots are different schools of small whites along with fish that were caught out of the schools


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## SeaOx 230C (Aug 12, 2005)

I fish the river and I believe the spawn this year was a very good one. The river is as full of this years spawn as I have ever seen it. I tried catching some shad and all I could get was a net full of various size juveniles. So many that I thought they were shad popping the surface. Nope.all little whites.

I used my fly rod and every cast hordes of them could be seen following.

The thing I find interesting is you can track the progression of the spawn by the different sizes. There are tiny two to three inchers on up to five and seven inchers. With a few ten to eleven mixed in.


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## mrsh978 (Apr 24, 2006)

Those little ones are what I call bait ! Turn sensitivity / gain down to reduce clutter


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## Cat O' Lies (May 21, 2004)

Thanks for all of the pointers and information. I did catch a few small whites so that helps to know that those large yellow clouds are smaller fish. Some day soon all of those small bass will be legal size!


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## fishinganimal (Mar 30, 2006)

Its a great sign. The lake is loaded with Juveniles. Going to be some massive surface feeding schools in the future


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## shadslinger (Aug 21, 2005)

silentkilla said:


> You could probably lower your sensitivity some and it'll clear a lot of those blobs up.......


Spot on comment. Adjust the sensitivity until there is less of everything and some details will pop out.
In general if your unit is on a default setting yellow will be the hardest return. Only hard scale adult fish will return a single signature of yellow. A school of adult white bass will be represented as a series of arches or horizontal â€œbarsâ€ that are often stacked on each other if they are moving fast it will be more like lines.
Soft scale fish will be blue, like Shad and very small buffalo and carp. Catfish will be blue, a large catfish(#10) will have red on one end which is its head that is hard and returning a harder signal.
A thick ball or school of soft scale fish like Shad and other baitfish will return patches or large areas of yellow where they are so thick it returns harder.
Turn your sensitivity to auto and the color to auto as well. Gradually make increases in sensitivity if needed and color saturation too.
I find most modern units work on auto just fine. When I do it manually I run about 75% sensitivity and 78% color and low or none surface clutter filter.

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## whsalum (Mar 4, 2013)

If youâ€™ll zoom in on my unit youâ€™ll see the sensitivity set on 63% and the color line at 76%. The surface clutter was off. I set out on a mission to find out what these were and they were massive schools of little bitty fish. They were so thick I could actually feel the slab bumping them when jigging softly. If you would snap your lift in these schools you would snag the little fellas lol


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## shadslinger (Aug 21, 2005)

I had my boat back briefly yesterday only to find the problem had not been fixed.
I did fish the south end and found several schools of 11â€ to 14â€ fish.
Each time I could only catch a few before the school quit hitting. I tried backing off and working the slab back to me with not much improvement.
So I started deadstricking the slab suspended at the depth fish were holding and did much better.
After looking over these posts I was able to avoid the hordes of little guys.
The clouds of little fish were easy to spot. It seemed often big fish were close by and looked to be feeding on the little white bass. Anybody have first account of white bass feeding on the tiny white bass fry?
After calling the mechanic and relating that the problem still existed he drove from lufkin meet me at the ramp at Beacons and found the problem.
He took the boat back with him and should have it ready by Friday.



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## SKs Crappie Fishing (Mar 24, 2008)

shadslinger said:


> I had my boat back briefly yesterday only to find the problem had not been fixed.
> I did fish the south end and found several schools of 11â€ to 14â€ fish.
> Each time I could only catch a few before the school quit hitting. I tried backing off and working the slab back to me with not much improvement.
> So I started deadstricking the slab suspended at the depth fish were holding and did much better.
> ...


Sound like a fun day of figuring the fish out and putting them in the boat..... Sound like you've got a good mechanic for him to come meet you to check out the problem.....


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## Hoytbowhunter (Jan 15, 2009)

shadslinger said:


> I had my boat back briefly yesterday only to find the problem had not been fixed.
> 
> After calling the mechanic and relating that the problem still existed he drove from lufkin meet me at the ramp at Beacons and found the problem.
> He took the boat back with him and should have it ready by Friday.
> ...


Thatâ€™s a great mechanic, I had a mechanic like that they lived over off of 2100 over by Lake Houston. marine works Matt, used to come out take care of problems all the time like that those Great mechanics are hard to fine.


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## shadslinger (Aug 21, 2005)

Carlton Calahan of Calahan Marine in Lufkin. Yes someone who backs their service like that is rare these days.


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