Bought my first boat about a month ago! Been fishing my entire life so not new to that, lol. But I am new to having to find my own spots on lakes. I've spent time on lewisville and ray roberts, mainly just finding spots that look good to me visually. But unfortunately most of those spots happen to be shallow water. I know that it's summer so bass are in deeper water, but I've been struggling to find good deep spots. My boat only came with a Lowrance x52 at the helm which is pretty much just good for depth lol.

With that being said, I just bought a Garmin 93sv for the helm and 73sv for the bow. So once I get those installed, I'm planning on just going to the lakes and driving around to find underwater structure, marking waypoints, then going to fish those later.

I'm just a little nervous because I'm wanting to fish some college tournaments starting in October, so I really need to figure out how to find spots on lakes.

What "routine" do you guys go through when you fish a new lake for the first time? How do you find fish/honey holes?

Read some of the posts here by Donald. He has several write ups giving advise. You might even want to schedule a trip with James Biggs. He does instructional trips in your boat and teaches how to locate and fish different seasons. He isn't too expensive and you will get a wealth of information that will carry over to other lakes.

All of this is great advice.

He’s talking about Donald Harper, just saw you only have 2 posts so you may not know who he’s talking about.

https://texasfishingforum.com/forum...965/re-article-33-top-water#Post13630965

If you go to this link, you can then click on Donald Harper's name, then click on forum posts. He has a lot of articles written on bass fishing. Go thru the pages of posts and look for them. There are some that are about off offshore fishing.

If you simply GOOGLE, How to use electronics to find structure. , you should get more hours of video than you can watch in a month.

That Garmin 93 is decent if set up right. Lean to quickly set a waypoint , throw out a marker buoy and circle back into the wind to hold boat position better. It takes a lot of practice just to find, mark, and get boat back to position to fish the spot.

good luck

I will be glad to help you and sent a message so we can get started with some articles on mapping skills.

Go to navionics.com and select chart viewer. Find your home lake and start to study it using Donald's articles. I have them all saved in a pdf. Still think he should write a book. Find drop offs, humps, stuff like that. If you can find rock, try a c-rig over the rocks. Preferably on a drop off coming from shallow to 20 fow. This is still a tough time of year. You can also catch fish around bridge pilons. Use a drop shot for that with 1/8 or 1/4 oz weight or maybe weighted wacky. Also pitch a drop shot up against timber. Just fish it weedless. Donald sells chips for lakes with brush piles, etc. marked. Never used them, but others have had good success.

Book is being written. It will go to E-Books first. If that is successful then it will go to hard copy.

Buy Bill Murphy’s book and study it. Tons of information on structure, offshore fishing, techniques for lunkers, and all sorts of great tidbits. Also, troll deep diving cranks to find bass. Then slow down and drag jigs and Carolina rigs to extract the less aggressive ones. It’s not rocket science, but it does take patience and imagination.

You can get the navionics app for your phone and it's cheap, I think $10 a year. It can also be adjusted for lake level. Study it, look for road beds, old ponds, channel swings near points; then take your boat out to those spots and use the garmin to find fish. Nothing will substitute time behind the wheel though. Guys like Combs spend hours, if not days on their graphs and don't even pick up a rod. Congrats on the boat and good luck.

welcome and good luck. This is all real good info that will help you before you go out and get frustrated.

James Biggs will definitely massively shorten the curve!!