Before the Screen
Let’s get one thing straight right out of the gate: I don’t just appreciate forward-facing sonar. I’m completely, unhealthily obsessed with it.
It is wired into my nature to explore, and being able to actively hunt and find bass underwater is about as close to a legal drug as a fisherman can get.
When FFS started taking over bass fishing, a lot of people looked at it as a disruption. It was something new that suddenly changed the way everybody fished.
For me, the transition was probably the easiest and most natural shift I’ve ever made.
And the reason is pretty simple.
Nobody on the outside realized the ground had already been paved for decades.
Long before anybody bolted a forward-facing transducer to a trolling motor shaft, we were already doing it.
If you spent winters on East Tennessee’s highland reservoirs—Norris, Cherokee, Dale Hollow or Watauga—you knew the drill. You didn’t need a high-definition picture of the underwater world. You needed a 1/8-ounce ball-head jig, a 3-inch Gulp! Minnow in smelt and a spool of 4-pound test.
Guys like Nathan Light had been sharing that knowledge for years. They put in the freezing hours and figured out how to catch those winter fish on steep, 45-degree rock banks when most people would rather have been sitting inside drinking coffee.
It wasn’t some secret technique.
It was just really good cold-water fishing.
And it wasn’t like we had no electronics.
We had 2D sonar. We could see depth, structure and, if you knew what you were looking at, occasionally get a little information about what was happening underneath the boat.
When we were vertical Damiki fishing, we’d crank the ping speed up and stare at that little sliver of real-time information on the side of the screen—the RTS window, or A-scope—hoping to catch the tiniest flicker of a bait or a suspended fish.
That was about as close as we could get to seeing what was happening.
The rest was feel.
You felt the bait.
You felt the pendulum swing.
You watched your line.
And when that little 3-inch minnow disappeared from the end of your line, you hoped there was a bass attached to it.
Then the technology changed.
And the fishing world went a little crazy.
What the professional tours and tackle manufacturers eventually figured out was that forward-facing sonar was almost the perfect technology for these presentations.
They didn’t invent a new way to catch fish.
They gave anglers a way to see what we had already been doing.
That’s where things got interesting.
It was the perfect marriage nobody saw coming.
The slow, subtle, almost boring-looking presentations that East Tennessee anglers had been using for years suddenly had a high-tech window into the underwater world.
Instead of wondering whether a bass was down there, you could see it.
Instead of guessing what your bait was doing, you could watch it.
Instead of making a cast and hoping you put the bait in the right place, you could put it right in front of a fish and watch what happened next.
And suddenly a wintertime East Tennessee technique wasn’t just a wintertime East Tennessee technique anymore.
It became a year-round phenomenon.
The rest of the country discovered it. The pros refined it. The tackle industry gave us enough tiny plastics to fill a garage. And before long, we had an entirely new vocabulary for something that, at its core, was still pretty darn simple.
A minnow on a jighead.
That’s the part that makes all of this so interesting to me.
I’m not standing here telling you that FFS is ruining bass fishing. Quite the opposite.
I’m addicted to the thing.
I’ve spent money learning how to use it. I’ve spent countless hours staring at that screen trying to figure out how bass react to different presentations. I love being able to go somewhere I’ve never fished and actually hunt for fish instead of blindly wondering what’s down there.
But when I look at what is happening today, I can’t help but think about what we were doing before the screen.
We were already shaking a minnow.
We were already looking for suspended fish.
We were already learning how those bass behaved in cold East Tennessee water.
We just couldn’t see them.
That’s the irony of the whole thing.
FFS didn’t create the technique.
It exposed it.
And once everybody could see it, something that had quietly existed in East Tennessee for years became one of the most talked-about—and controversial—ways to catch a bass.
For the guys who had been doing it long before the screens, watching all of this unfold has been pretty strange.
The presentation isn’t new.
The fish aren’t new.
The minnow certainly isn’t new.
What changed was our ability to see the whole thing happen.
And maybe that’s the funniest part of all.
The industry can package it, rename it, put a fancy name on it and sell a pile of tiny plastics to go with it.
But underneath all the screens, electronics and digital hype, we’re still doing the same thing we were doing all those years ago.
We’re finding bass.
We’re putting a little minnow in front of them.
And we’re shaking the thing.
BMFishing 