Until recently, I almost exclusively fished shallow, even on predominately offshore lakes. This summer has been a big eye opener for me, as I have finally started to figure out how to find fish consistently while ledge fishing. One of the biggest keys has been learning how to utilize my electronics to their potential. It's actually ironic, because I have been teaching people about electronics for a long time now, but I still loved to focus on cover and structure I could see for the most part. Just recently I started really applying my knowledge of what my electronics can do, and also spending countless hours idling, and since I started doing that, I am having a ton of fun catching a bunch of fish.
One of the biggest things that is hard to overcome when learning how to offshore fish, is learning what you are looking for on your screen. I figured since I've been having some success offshore, I might as well share what fish actually look like when you are looking at your DownScan. The pic below is a school of bass that I had caught many fish off of.
Once I started finding schools like this, by using my Navionics maps I was able to find a bunch of other spots that have similar characteristics, and was able to expand on this throughout the lakes I fish. Also, it really made a difference in many areas to turn on the SonarCharts layer, which increased the detail on each area. There were several times I could find a small spot-on-the-spot by getting that extra detail.
If anyone else has some cool screenshots of a school of fish, Im sure we would all love to see them!