Today is tomorrow
By Nick Simonson
Shortly after purchasing my first boat, a used 1986 Grumman Sportsman found on the classified ad page of a regional fishing website that has long since gone under, I added a Humminbird 300 TX fishfinder to the console and snaked the black wire back to the transom of the craft. With its three-beam transducer, the gray LCD screen was able to show fish to the right, left or directly under the boat as my buddies and I cruised the river and nearby lakes around my hometown. It was the cat’s meow and at the time made me feel like at least the electronics on the late-80s model were right on the cutting edge as we split the surface of the waters in search of walleyes, smallmouth, white bass and crappies.
Oh, how far we’ve come. Today’s sonar units for boats offer side-scanning displays out to 100 feet with renderings of structure and bottom contours so high in definition you can pick out the individual twigs at the end of each branch on a deadfall in 30 feet of water. Not to mention advanced models in the thousands of dollars which can scan around the boat and provide returns which show fish swimming, making the jump from previous sonar’s mere snapshot in time to a real time display which can track lure retrieve, baitfish movement, and the pursuit of the predators around them. Unlike the flying cars promised by so many sci-fi movies from the same era of my first boat, the predicted technology
in fishing has come to be. The same is true for hunting, starting with how sportsmen see the world.
