Locating Fish

by Mike Gerry

Sometimes you can just have too many places to fish with too many miles to travel to get there. When that happens, you have to think about what you need to do to find fish!
The biggest advice I give folks is to understand what the natural details are of the spot where you have found fish. In other words, is the area a point, a contour drop or break? Does it have wood on it? There are many questions to be answered about the area where you’re catching fish, and when you understand its uniqueness, you can than expand your catching spot to more similar locations.
The biggest advantage to expanding your fishing spots is you generally do not have to travel far to find more fish. Bass move to similar locations within close proximity and are generally not too far away from where you just caught them before.

The key is to expand to locations that have similar characteristics. So, the first thing to do is find those areas within a mile or so and start checking those when your fish dry up. If that does not produce, then change the depths again within short distances but similar in bottom structure.
The point is a point whether it’s a point dropping into 5 ft. of water or dropping into 20 ft. of water. Stumps are in shallow locations as well as deep locations. Lowrance Structure Scan, or Navionics mapping is the ideal tool to find similar spots. They are tools that have unique abilities to help you locate more fish!

Bottom structure is key, so when you find an area that has feeding fish be sure to examine the bottom so you can find a similar bottom structure when your fish dry up!
If you’re struggling, use these tools, and you will be much better off because traveling costs money, and there is no guarantees that moving 15 miles will produce more fish. The fish are not going to move ten miles so why would you? I believe that the bass only move short distances, especially when the elements are similar or constant like in the winter and so on.
Spot expansion is a quick and easy way to move from fish that were biting one day to
sometimes the same school of fish close to where you caught them the day before.
Captain Mike