Thread: Time lapse of shad and fish

The following pictures are from fishing under a bridge. It amazes me how a lot of time you can fish for hours at night and the bait and fish will not be there and then they become so thick after daylight that it covers the whole screen. My problem I am having is that I can go search for some of these schools in open water around the bridge and never find any, but all of a sudden it seems they show up out of nowhere. You can see in the regular sonar view in the first few pictures the screen is blank, and the side imaging seems to show some fish of some kind. The side imaging seems to show a little more each time while the regular sonar shows nothing. Then the shot between 9 and 10 on the regular sonar shows bait and some fish from about 7 feet all the way to 22 feet. That is 15 feet of stacked shad and fish. I am assuming the darker reds are fish or either the shad so thick they give the red return. I think the fish were so full of shad they were not feeding. I only ended up with 19. Either these were all mostly shad or the crappie were there and just not biting. You can barely even see the bottom in the side view in the 9 to 10 shot due to all the bait. So where do all the shad go later in the day and at night. Do you think they break up into smaller schools and they just get real thick as they navigate the creek channel under the bridge?