eugene1 said:
I wonder if those fish you're seeing with that side scanner are salmon, sturgeon, or other stuff? Have the fish you've been marking been increasing with the run timing? Just curious as my own fish finder is a piece of junk (I'm sure yours is not) that doesn't see fish that are there but does when there is a thermal break or weedline. .
eugene1- a great question that I have been expecting. in April, I finally tossed my 20 year old Eagle unit and intalled a high resolution sonar. Since then, I have been diligently observing fish response- lots of days fishing for planted trout in Lake Munsel, then a week at Green Peter fishing Kokes, and many crabbing trips in the Siuslaw since June...so the different arches from the trout (small and large) and schools of Kokes and even smaller bait fish are easy to identify thanks to the screen resolution. So in all the crabbing trips before salmon were in the river, I was able to get a good baseline for what to expect in the Slaw (plenty of smaller fish in places, but really no big fish seen), and then I waited to see what changed in late August when the first Kings came in, other than a longer arch, I wasn't sure what to expect.
the palette I use goes green-blue-yellow, so fish show as green arches, bottom weeds, heavy patches of seaweed, thermal break, these also show green, then river bottom goes blue and yellow. the fish that suddenly appeared in late August had longer, slightly thicker green arches but something more- a small yellow rectangle with blue line around it. I had not seen this in any fish before then, not in larger planted trout or any of the Kokes in GB or any fish in the Siuslaw earlier in the summer. I think that this stronger response must be the larger air bladder in the Kings, especially since I started seeing the yellow/blue spots the day I hooked up and lost one near the bridge...and also was seeing them 2 days later when we watched 2 Kings netted up river...and the fight I got on video, just below the bridge, we had been seeing a few of these big fish in that area....
what I also noticed is that I don't always get the entire long arch from the Kings, they are either moving into or out of the beam as we pass over, but if I see even a partial arch and it has that yellow/blue strong signal in it, most likey a King. Lastly, since we are going to pass over only a fraction of the big fish, marking just a few should mean there is a good group of fish in that part of the river, but on the other hand, marking zero of them, especially if we are covering the deeper channel areas they usually move through or hold in, I think seeing none would make it seem likely there are at most very few around...
next question: will the Coho coming in later also show this stronger center signal or just be long/thick green arches?
cheers, roger
(...you don't need any luck with the fishing)
