New School Meets Old School

In my last blog I talked about my first impressions with Forward Facing Sonar (FFS). Since the writing of that blog, I have had more time to utilize this piece of technology and found that it did something rather interesting. This new piece of technology brought me back to the roots of fishing: bobbers!

In a few recent trips with my FFS, I was targeting trout that were roaming open water with an assortment of jerkbaits and FFS specific baits. I would get so many trout to follow in these lures without ever actually taking the bait. Rather frustrated, on my next trip out, I put down my jerkbait rod, picked up a light combo, and threw on a tiny jig with a small plastic under a bobber.

I began scanning around open water for roaming trout in the upper parts of the water column. Once located, I’d bomb my bobber setup towards those fish and wait. It took me back to when I was a kid and would throw out a worm and bobber eager to catch whatever would bite my hook. I watched on my sonar as a trout came up to investigate my jig. I looked up and watched the magic happened as my bobber went “bloop”. I set the hook and reeled in a 19” trout. Now THAT was fun!

The search was on for the remainder of the day! I started targeting high percentage areas such as points, drop offs, transitions, etc and would scope around until trout were located. Once again, I’d cast that bobber out towards them, watch them come up to the jig, look up at the bobber, and set the hook after that satisfying “bloop”! 

I thought it was really cool how a new piece of technology really encouraged me to go back to the roots of bobber fishing. I haven’t fished with a bobber in a long time, but now with FFS, I will likely have a slip bobber setup on my kayak ready to catch those unsuspecting open water trout!