Forward Facing Sonar All The Rage For Fishermen

This view on this forward-facing sonar shows trees with fish around the bases and in the upper limbs. The bottom depth is 22 to 24 feet and slowly sloping away from the boat. The bottom grid is set at 2-foot intervals. The top numbers show feet away from the transducer on the trolling motor. The tallest tree is 20 feet from boat, and the shorter ones are about 30 to 40 feet away. “Looks like a big fish, probably a catfish, near the bottom 23 feet deep about 34 feet from boat,” the author said.

Love it or hate it, forward-facing sonar (FFS) is here to stay. Some say it is just another tool in fishing, the latest technology innovation. Others say it gives anglers an unfair advantage, taking away the need to learn fishing skills,  and some even say it should be banned.

FFS has been around much longer than most fishermen realize, with the first Garmin Panoptix units hitting the market to the public in 2018. But when fishermen using the Garmin LiveScope started winning big tournaments a couple of years ago, the controversy flared.

What is FFS? Think of traditional sonar as a camera taking a still picture straight under the boat, and think of FFS as a video camera showing you a live view ahead of the boat. With FFS, anglers can actually watch fish as they move around and react to baits.

Every innovation in fishing is met with some resistance. I remember one of my uncles back in the 1950s saying those new-fangled electric motors would scare the fish, and he was sticking with his sculling paddle. Two years later he had one on his boat after another uncle with a trolling motor took him fishing.

I bought my first bass boat in March of 1974. It came with a Lowrance flasher unit on the console. That summer I moved the flasher to the front and installed a Garcia curve line paper graph on the console. During the Christmas holidays, I went over a hump at Clarks Hill Lake. A solid line showed up 2 feet above the 12-foot-deep bottom on my curve line graph, and it showed up on the flasher when I got up front. I knew the bottom had nothing on it—I had seen it when the lake was low.

I went through all my baits with no luck until I tied on a Little George. When I dropped it straight down, I could see it go up and down on the flasher, passing through the solid line. When it stopped falling, I set the hook and landed a 2-lb. bass. Over the next two days I caught 22 largemouth on the Little George, watching my lure and the bass on my flasher.

Since then, I have kept up with current technology, adding LCD sonar when it came out, and then going to side-imaging and down-imaging in 2010 when I made the GBCF state team and got a good discount.

In 2017, I bought Chad Pipkins’ 2016 Elite Skeeter, and it came with four Helix 10 units, one with a 360 scan transducer. That unit amazed me—I found cover I never knew about on points I had fished for years. Two years later I was debating on upgrading my 360 to Mega or trying the new-fangled FFS. Then I fished with Garmin pro Brent Crow in November of 2019. Brent had a Panoptix LiveScope, and it was networked so I could watch from the back of the boat as we fished. I came home and ordered one that night. For the past 4 1/2 years, I have had a love-hate relationship with my FFS.

Although a lot of time has passed between my first flasher and my current FFS, the technology is basically the same. A transducer in the water sends out a pulse of sound, a ping, and when it hits something, the echo comes back to the transducer.

The head unit picks up the echo and interprets distance and size. On the old flasher, the results showed up as a line of light on a dial. On paper graphs, a stylus burned a mark in a moving roll of paper, showing more detail.

LCD sonars interpret the ping echo and show it on a screen as colored pixels, giving even more detail. Although the picture on the screen moves, much like the paper roll on a paper graph, what you see is the past. The present is shown on the very front edge of the unit. So you can see a line as a fish moves, looking at its past position compared to its current position.

The same for a lure going up and down. Although the lure goes straight up and down, the lines marking it go at an angle from one side to the other as time passes and the screen moves.

Fish on flashers just showed up as a line. On LCD they showed up as a small blob. Down and side scan sonar gave better images, often showing the outline of the fish, but it is a still image—it did not move in real time.

Long ago we experimented with angling a transducer for a flasher unit to see ahead of the boat, realizing how much that might help. And it worked… a little. It was very confusing, with little reference to size or distance from the boat. A brushpile looked like a mess of lines, and a quickly sloping bottom looked like an almost solid group of lines covering a lot of depth.

With modern FFS, the transducer has three faces, and pings received by them can be interpreted more accurately. The ping goes out ahead of the boat in a wedge. Screens on the head unit are marked into grid lines ahead of the boat and top to bottom.

When a ping comes back, you can see how far ahead and exactly how deep it is. And the blip showing a fish will show constantly as the fish moves in real time. You can learn to judge a fish’s size by dot size, and you can learn to judge the species of fish by their position to structure and how they move.

With regular sonar, you can see fish and see your bait move in the water, but all you see is a line on your screen. With LCD you see a bigger, colored dot. And with down scan you see a smaller white dot. Side scan will show an outline of the fish if it is big enough and show a “shadow” behind it.

With a FFS transducer mounted on your trolling motor shaft, as you turn the motor, you scan a wedge of water ahead of and below your boat. The ratio is about the same as sonar units—for every 3 feet from the boat you are looking at a section about a foot wide. So at 60 feet ahead you see a wedge that goes out to 20 feet wide.

You can accurately cast directly to anything that shows up based on the grid and the way the trolling motor is pointed. And you can usually watch your bait and see how the fish reacts to it. That first day I saw FFS when I fished with Brent, I was able to see his Spook zigzag across the surface and spotted bass run up to hit it. Or turn aside.

If you’re not scoping, you’re hoping.

As this saying implies, there are a lot of good things about FFS.

That comment is heard mostly from younger fishermen, and it has a lot of truth to it. When you can see the fish and know the depth and distance from the boat they are holding, you know you are casting to a bass, not just combing water.

One of the biggest advantages of FFS is seeing fish in real-time. You can watch them as they move and react to your bait. You can also see how they react to changing conditions.

My unit has proven some of the things we were pretty sure we already knew. As soon as I installed my unit, I went to Lake Jackson on an overcast day. The water was very clear. I was amazed to see blips or dots—fish—hanging over brushpiles, stumps and rocks. And the fish moved around a good bit in the clear water and low-light conditions. I noticed immediately they would move several feet to examine my lure when it came near them.

A few days later, after a cold front, it was bright and sunny. And the dots showing fish were down in the brush or at the base of the rocks and stumps, holding right against cover. We always “knew” fish held tight to cover after a cold front. FFS confirmed it.

A week later after a heavy rain, the water at Jackson was very muddy. Again, the fish were buried in the cover and they did not move much, another “fact” confirmed by seeing it on FFS. And under cold-front conditions, just like in muddy water, the fish would not move far to chase a bait.

Seeing a fish in a brushpile made me keep casting, trying different colors and baits to get a bite from a fish I knew was there. One consistently good brushpile in front of a dock showed two blips in it. Normally I would make two or three casts to the brush as I went by, as I did that day without a bite.

But since I could see fish on my FFS, I stopped and kept casting, and I caught a keeper on about my 10th cast to the same brush. I would not have had the patience to make that many casts without seeing the fish on FFS.

This FFS image shows a school bus under the water, with a school of baitfish over it and another right on top of the bus’s roof at the center.

For years, we knew bass suspend quite a bit, and the thinking was that they were almost impossible to catch. You could try to count down your bait after going over their heads with your electronics to see their depth, or you could back off and try to get them to bite a crankbait running that depth or a jerkbait. But as often as not, the boat going over their heads spooked them.

Now, with FFS, you can cast ahead of the boat to a suspended bass before spooking it. And you can watch your bait to make sure it is close to the fish. You can see how the fish reacts to it, giving you an idea if you should change the size or color of the bait.

That is another thing I learned with FFS. When I saw fish on top of brush, stumps, rocks or other cover, I figured they were active. But as I got within about 40 feet of them in the clear water, they would sink down into the cover. I just knew they would not hit after sensing my boat.

Muddy water allowed me to get much closer to them without spooking them, as did low-light conditions.

You can quickly learn a lot about bass behavior with FFS. That is a good thing to some, too much of a shortcut to others. But as guide Lonnie Cochran said, “You never stop learning, or you get left behind or crying, all because you don’t want to fish the way you have to in order to compete.”

Forward-facing sonar is to fishing as feeding corn is to deer hunting. There are drawbacks, and some are more than just an opinion. That attitude is common with many fishermen.

FFS comes with some problems. Many lure companies do not like FFS since anglers basically need only two baits, a soft swimbait on a jig head and a jerkbait. They say FFS is hurting lure sales. In the recent BASS Elite Series tournament on Toledo Bend, Bassmaster Magazine highlighted seven different lures used by the top five fishermen. There was one jerkbait, and all the other six were different brands of soft fluke-like baits fished on jig heads.

On the other hand, electronic companies have spent millions of dollars developing FFS and advertising it through sponsorships, so it is not likely to be banned by any of the big tournament trails.

Another drawback is the cost. A FFS setup is expensive, with basic units consisting of a transducer, black box and head unit costing about $3,000. It takes time and effort to learn how to tune the units for different fishing situations and conditions. And it takes even longer to learn to actually use the unit—how to identify different species of fish and how to get them to bite.

Several anglers I have talked with agree that bass are learning that the “ping” of FFS means danger. They have seen fish react to the boat much sooner and at a longer distance from the boat than in the past, often sinking into cover when the boat is still 60 to 70 feet away.

Younger fishermen have taken to FFS better than many older ones. At the recent Bass Elite tournament on Lake Fork, each of the top-10 anglers had four-day limits of 20 bass weighing more than 100 pounds. The winner had an incredible 130 pounds, and he was 19 years old and in his first year on the Elite trail. Two others were in their 20s. All of them said FFS played an important role in their catches.

With established pros, you can find every opinion, ranging from FFS being cheating and should be banned, to FFS is just the newest effective tool that anglers should learn to use.

Some opinions are more reasonable and rational than others.

The Pro Muskie Tournament Tour is banning FFS in their tournaments for the rest of this year. Some local tournaments, like the Despino’s Tire Service “Fishing For Kids” charity team tournament on Toledo Bend, have banned FFS.

The new Touring Anglers Association held their first tournament on Lake Lanier this past April. It not only banned FFS, but it also banned Humminbird 360 imaging. I found it interesting that they held the tournament on a very clear lake during the spawn, and many fishermen were sight fishing for bedding bass. They were using their eyes, without the aid of electronics, to catch fish. They were allowed to wear any kind of sunglasses they chose. It was also interesting to watch many of the fishermen in that tournament with their eyes locked on traditional LCD sonars while drop-shotting for fish they could see on those units.

My personal love/hate relationship is summed up by two experiences. Two years ago at Oconee as I fished docks I saw a slick PVC pipe off the bank in several feet of water. Most of the time I would ignore such slick poles, or maybe make a halfhearted cast. But I saw a big blip down about 4 feet deep.

My first pitch with a jig I watched as it swung away from the pole back to the boat. The next cast I fed out line, and as my bait sank, I saw the blip move off. I realized my line was following it… I set the hook and landed a 5.75-lb. bass, big fish for the year in that bass club. I doubt I would have ever made that second cast without FFS.

But most times my FFS experiences are like a tournament I fished at Hartwell. I could see a group of seven or eight fish swimming over an old roadbed. Every time I cast my Carolina rig to them, they would follow my worm to the bottom. Most of the time they would swim back up, but sometimes one would hit. I wasted more than an hour doing that and landed five 11-inch spots. And I came up one keeper short of a limit that day!

Everybody has an opinion on FFS, just like everything else. You just have to decide for yourself.

The bright lines show an underwater blowdown at Lake Oconee—plus two blips that are likely bass, one 25 feet from the boat and one 30 feet out. “I could not see any of this blowdown in the water with my eyes,” the author said.