Fish behaviour learned by sonar / Gator stuff
Modern sonar is amazing. With sidescan, it's like looking at the bottom of the lake. Have wondered what fishermen have learned about fish or been surprised at seeing. Couple of observations...
Bream beds seems to shift in usage during bedding season. A bed can remain used in a general area, but seems to me, the bream will move their location from one end to another or anywhere in between and begin building new beds. You might cast and cast to a spot you know fish were at a few days ago and catch zero. Then you make a pass by the bed with sonar and you see that there are fresh beds only 20 feet away from where you were casting. Close is usually not good enough for bedding bream. As for identifying beds, with sonar settings tweaked properly, a bream bed is quite something visually! Also, you can see bream within beds. So, you can see if fish are actually on beds you know are there because you can see them! Within the dark, circular image of each individual bed, you can see a small, bright spot. That's a bream and those 'little' guys show up well with good settings.
Sometimes I will see what I can tell are fish on sidescan and I might think that it's bass. Or crappie. But there's only two. Or six. Whatever. Point being, without sidescan sonar, in the past, if I caught a couple fish in a spot, I tend to think it's a hot spot and there's a bunch more. But it might have only been two fish there in the first place!
I see alligators on the water surface pretty often and I have cruised by them to see what they look like on sonar. When you get too close, the gator will submerge. When they do that, it's quite a ruckus for him to get his body down in the water; it makes quite a bit of surface disturbance. Once he's under the water, the sonar will pick it up as bright swirls. I think that might be air bubbles. Pretty cool. Another thing I learned is how fast a gator can swim underwater. They can really boogie! Sometimes, I have seen him go under and cruise up and expected to see the sonar image and nothing showed. And then I saw him surface far from where I expected him to be.
On a sidenote about gator behavior, I see one particular gator that very slowly cruises along on the surface for long periods of time in the open lake. I'm talking a LONG way from land. I see him all the time. I worry about a boat hitting him but I just hope he can sense a boat coming and get deep enough quickly enough to not get hit. It appears to me that this cruising is effortless for the gator. He just barely moves his tail and moves slowly along. When I first saw this, I assumed it is a male and he's looking for a honey but then I saw him in a cove with his honey; he had one! And weeks later, I see him still cruising. Maybe she kicked him out. As for this gator, if I am fishing and he's near, he will swim slowly right by my boat. Like, 30 feet away. You would think this might be due to him wanting a handout but I cannot imagine this gator having been fed by humans. One day, I got near to what I later saw appeared to be his hangout on the bank. Or one of them. He cruised by me, went up to his lair and raised his head and tail out of the water and started roaring. The water would shake around his chest when roared (bellowed?) because of the sound vibrations. Now, that was wicked. He did the same thing a day later when I saw his honey was near. I guess he was showing off.
As for gators not being afraid, this might just be their normal behavior because I see them often when catfishing at night and it's like those dang gators watch you. They wait patiently near a limb line and when you bait it, I think they wait for a fish to get on and then they steal the fish. We often lose entire limb lines and it's gators stealing the whole thing.
What have you observed that taught you something or surprised you?
