How do you decide where to start?

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Originally Posted by LowePro

You got side imaging? Trust your electronics. If it says there is no fish....there is no fish. Keep moving til you find em. I sometimes will fish on a gut feeling even tho my graph says no fish, and that has yet to be a good decision. Its hard to NOT go with what I know OR with what worked yesterday. If that thing says no fish...it means it!

P.s it sounds like you did everything correct. Sometimes it just doesn't work out and that is what makes it fun.
GOODLUCK!

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SI definitely makes it easy to know where there are no fish. Once you find them though, the tricky part is determining what TYPE of fish you're seeing on the graph. It can be tough with SI to tell if you're looking at white bass, bluegill, bass, or crappie.

I'm better at identifying fish using DI. I can tell the difference between crappie and white bass pretty easily with DI (not all of the time but a lot). SI is trickier because you're seeing it from the side and it can be hard to tell. That's what happened to me on Friday. I'd move around til I marked fish...but then I had to drop lines to find out what they were. It took a while before what I saw on the screen turned into crappie on my hook.

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Originally Posted by catchNgrease

Is it possible you found them at 2:50 and then left the fish.

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It could be. I fished that spot from 2:50 to around 3:45. Then i thought I'd push a little further down the bank toward the back of the creek to see if anything was in that water. When I turned around to come back a couple of bass boats raced up to the spot I was previously.

I switched to the other side of the creek until the bass boats left, then returned to my original spot. I started trolling again, but it was so slow that I talked myself into casting a crank bait while I waited. On my first cast with the crank bait...one of my crappie rods got hit!!! It was a good strike too, I couldn't believe it. I had sat there for 10 minutes with NOTHING...then as soon as I have my hands full and move my attention to something else...BAM. A rod gets hit and I miss a strike.

I put the bass rod down, cursing myself for being stupid, and got back to paying attention. That was the last strike I got. At 5 PM I switched over to bass fishing. I had been watching rod tips for 7 hours at that point and I needed a break.

I'll start with an idea of a general area I think they will be in. Once I get close I'll idle around until I see fish then shut her down. Once fishing I will work my way in and out of different depths until I find the group of fish that are biting and stay on them. Once they play out I move on. Also once I find the fish I switch to map only on my fish finder--until i have to search again.

very good advise by all. Pickwick is not acting normal right now for some reason. I fished all 5 days last week and had some success. we had 34 fish on Good Friday and we cleaned about 100 for the entire week. Nothing under 10" in the boat. Three of us had to work hard to get good fish. This time last year it was wide open. I'm not sure if it they are behind a little or if its going to be a down year.