Tip #14 – Keep a sharp eye on side-imaging as you fish from a Spot-Locked position.

When you are Spot Locked, keep your side imaging sonar scrolling and glance at it frequently. It will often show you on which side of your boat the majority of the fish are located as they pass by in schools patrolling for shad, thus advising you on where to cast horizontally, using the MAL Lure with a sawtooth retrieve.

This practice is particularly helpful in the summer months when shad are most abundant, and when white bass metabolism is at its highest due to high water temperatures.

Remember, that your side-imaging is a “thin-beam” technology, therefore (on a transom-mounted transducer, for example) the fish you see will be directly out to the left or right of that transducer, in line with your boat’s transom.





CAPTION: The yellow circled area shows the greatest concentration of white bass. Understanding how far out to the port side these fish are will help you make an accurate cast. Example: if a fish is showing inline with the 114 foot port side range mark shown on the scale at the top of the sonar screen, that fish will be 92 feet away from the boat (114 minus the depth, which is 22 feet). The depth is shown in the lower left of the sonar screen.





CAPTION: The yellow circled area shows the greatest concentration of white bass. Understanding how far out to the port side these fish are will help you make an accurate cast. Example: if a fish is showing inline with the 76 foot port side range mark shown on the scale at the top of the sonar screen, that fish will be 52 feet away from the boat (76 minus the depth, which is 24 feet). The depth is shown in the lower left of the sonar screen.




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If you have tips of your own, feel free to respond to this post, or send a private message. I will give credit where credit is due!

A LITTLE BACKGROUND: This is one in a series of tips posted for the summer of 2022. These helpful suggestions are borne out of thousands of hours of on-the-water experience in pursuing white bass and hybrid striped bass in Texas using the in-line spinners in the MAL Lure family. With tens of thousands of the MAL Lures now in use (and most of those in Texas!) I want to help give current and future MAL Lure users their best shot at catching fish by sharing what I've discovered 'the hard way' in hopes of reducing your own learning curve. These tips are in no particular order.