The Outdoors

By Scott Rall, Outdoors Columnist

The winter we never had last year has appeared this year. At least in the form of decent ice as a result of day after day of below zero temperatures during the overnights. Most of the local lakes in my area are at 14-15 inches of solid clear ice in most locations.

I was up in NE South Dakota a few weeks back and the ice conditions there were very good. You will still see a few someone’s who go where they should know better and drop a car or a truck through the ice. As I was told a few days ago, there is such a thing as good ice but no such thing as safe ice.

Ice fishing today is nothing like it was when I was chasing that sport really hard. Back in the day if you had a basic flasher sonar unit you were pretty high tech. This piece of electronics would show you the bottom and indicate if there was a fish between the lake bottom and the ice. It let you know at what depth the fish were moving and allowed you to move your bait up or down to improve the odds of a fish seeing your bait.

The limitations with these old units were that it only showed you what was directly below your hole in the ice. In 10 feet of water the unit would be able to cover about 3 feet of the bottom. These units have been much improved from a detail point of view, but they still had a small window of the underwater world.

Enter two new kinds of fish electronics. One is called 360 live and the other is called live scope. There are many other names for these but these two pretty much catch most of what is available. The 360 live looks just like an airport control tower screen in the movies. You drop the transducer below the ice and it rotates in a 360-degree circle. It will show you exactly where the fish are in relation to where you are sitting. It will also tell you how deep the fish are.

You can explain to your fishing buddy that there is a school of fish 60 yards away and in exactly what direction they are holding. This allows that angler to go punch a new hole in the ice directly over the school. You can run and gun and stay right on top of the fish. This does not work as well in really shallow water as the school might spook if you are drilling lots of new holes.

The second one I have seen used is called a live scope. This is a unit you can use under the ice or mount on your boat during open water seasons. You drop this unit in and it will show individual fish or the lack thereof. Many fishermen will not even make a cast until they see a fish on the monitor. If you cast to an identified fish, you can actually see the fish following your bait back to the boat if it does so. You might cast near a fallen tree and see a whole bunch of fish chasing your bait.

These two new technologies are changing the fishing landscape in ways never before even imagined. You can tell on the monitors if the fish is big or small, and with enough practice, you can even get pretty good at telling what kind of fish it is. The end result is that those who can afford this kind of technology can and do catch many more fish than those without it. It would be pretty easy to drop anywhere between $3,500-$6,000 for the middle-of-the-line units in these two categories.

One of the big unknowns is whether our lakes can sustain the dramatically increased harvest that these units make possible. For the occasional angler, they most likely wouldn’t make this kind of investment anyway; the difference might be negligible. But think about a fishing guide, or 100 fishing guides that can limit out his or her boat with clients and then drop them off on shore and take a second or even a third group of clients out to those same schools of fish day after day after day all summer long. I don’t think for a minute any sensible angler could ever make a case that this would not have an impact.

I know that finding the fish is the hardest part. You might fish almost all day and when you finally find the fish you can make hay in a very short period. What if there was no longer a need to spend much time looking? If you don’t see them on the screen, you don’t fish there. You only spend time fishing where you are sure fish are present.

As a result of this modern technology and as more anglers start to take advantage of it, will the limits of different fish species need to be reduced? If so, how much reduction? How about the angler who does not keep a single fish to eat but catches 100 fish per day and lets them all go? Anyone with a brain will know that a certain percentage of those caught and released fish will die as a result of the encounter.

I know that technology has been improving steadily for the past 100 years but these improvements are coming in much greater leaps and bounds than in the past. Just how much technology is enough.? If you care about the natural resources of our great state, especially our great fishing, I encourage you to get knowledgeable about what the potential impacts of this kind of technology are. I don’t think that the fishing in Minnesota is as good as it once was and now the future needs to be watched closely by those who care. Make up your own mind but I for one am at least concerned. Maybe highly concerned. Let me know your thoughts at scottarall@gmail.com.