2020 was my first year fishing for white bass and hybrids. I'm not an expert but it's fresh in my mind what I needed to learn to become more successful. I'm fortunate to live on the same lake as Dennis so I used his map and techniques and I'm happy to say I regularly (not always) catch my limit now.

What I would do is look at the map that Dennis provides for CC and identify the patterns that work on CC lake and try to find similar structure on your lake. Once you can identify the right type of structure the next important thing is to learn how to identify fish using electronics.

I started out with downscan and now have upgraded to both down and side scan. Side scan makes it faster to scan an area but I still use my downscan as the final decision maker of when I'll stop and fish. This was one of my biggest learning curves this year. In the beginning what I thought were white bass were actually big schools of shad. Many times what I thought was a school of white bass was a brush pile with crappie. What I thought was a big school of hybrids I'm guessing turned out to likely be carp. Once I learned how to differentiate fish from the noise then the next most important thing was identifying a large school versus a small school. That was the biggest difference maker for me. Once I became much more choosey about when I would stop and fish, I started catching much larger numbers. In the beginning I would stop and fish any spot where I saw a few fish. Most of the time I would catch 2 or 3 immediately and then spend another hour catching the next 2.

Here are some example images that you might find helpful:

This shows my downscan and side scan from a school of white bass where I caught over 40:


This image is a huge school of shad but I didn't see many fish working this school but you can see the birds are active:


This is a small brush pile with some fish around it, a great place to lose you lures when white bass fishing: