How much has...

[Redbone]

Thinking about electronics again. Trying to justify SI.

How much has side imaging helped you catch fish?  One or two key times?  Everytime your on the water?  I can see it being a powerfull tool.  But I also see the novelty of it and I'm a little worried that it will be a distraction from actually fishing. Has it helped your game? Any input would be huge.

[Waterfoul]

SI has helped me many, many times over the 2 years I've had it on my boat.  Found things on lakes I've been fishing for years that I never knew was there.  It's a great too for finding those rocks, logs, weeds where the fish live.

[fishstick]

Its been big for me many times this year. I find it most useful when scanning expansive deeper flats for weed growth or other structure. It makes it so much easier to break down an big area. Easy to throw waypoints in and then go back and check things later. It saved me a lot of time when practicing on new fisheries and of course you'll see things down there that you would never expect!

[Redbone]

It would be alot cooler if it would put 5 fish in my boat when I fished Hardy! 

I'm still swaying both directions.  I'm really thinking about just going with an HD unit instead of getting the SI.

[LennyB]

What SI is good for is finding the little, or big patches of anything off to the side that you would of probably went by had you not had it. An example is last spring, I was on a lake and after beating the bank all the way around a cove I idled across the middle of it while scanning 100 feet to the side. It picked up a weed patch in the middle of no were and the fish were stacked in it. I would have never found them with out it.

[djkimmel]

I found out exactly how the bridge on Lake Ovid lays and realized I'd been fishing it wrong all these years thanks to one trip out there with Genie. Founds some isolated logs. I've never been good at picturing the bottom in my mind based on other electronics. With side imaging, you get an actual picture.

I wish I had this years ago when I fished lots of tournaments. Now I just want it to find all those nuances we miss and to get that actual picture. I'll buy one the day I can afford it. That would be my advice - if you can afford it, get it. Huge corner cutter. If I was B.A.S.S. and using their angler committee thought processes I would ban side imaging from the Elite Series and Classic, not the Alabama Rig.

Personally, I wouldn't ban any technology unless it makes fish jump in the boat or something like that.

[2k JIGS]

Redbone, you are going to have to get out of the pads for SI to work....hahaha!

[djkimmel]

Real early or late in the year, you still might find a stump or some logs! It never ceases to amaze me the things you can learn with side imaging!

[thedude]

if you're gonna spend more than 200 bucks on a graph, you should get SI. the way i see it is the HDs are nice, but with a little practice, you can see everything you'd ever want to see on a 150 dollar black and white eagle - i used to use one for ice fishing and out of the box i could mark a single tear drop in 45+ FOW.... that's all the HD i need.  I see no benefit to the higher dollar HD units compared to a cheaper color graph (and i have actually used an HD a few times). SI on the other hand helps you find and better define offshore structure and even schools of bait fish, where they are suspended. It won't put fish in your boat, but it takes a lot of the guess work out of what you are fishing.

[LGMOUTH]

It won't put fish in your boat,

Thats what the Alabama rig is for.

[Redbone]

Redbone, you are going to have to get out of the pads for SI to work....hahaha!

I'm like a fat kid in a candy store when I get around that stuff. 

[thedude]

It won't put fish in your boat,

Thats what the Alabama rig is for.

you can see your a-rig on the SI and watch fish hit it.

no joke - first time i ran my si, i put on my buddies lund and we hit St. Joe for cohos. I was marking pods of fish off the sides of the boat as we trolled and was able to "call the shot" on several occasions knowing the fish were inline with one of the planar boards... it was pretty cool

[Cy]

I don't think you can go wrong with an SI unit, but it won't change the way you fish.  It will change the way you look at a lake, it's up to you to change the way you fish it.  I have found more stuff using my SI unit then I would have ever imagined.  Objects that look like a pile of crap on the bottom on standard sonar are clearly wood or rock or other things on SI or DI.  The main reason you want SI is so you can see the bottom several hundred feet either side of your boat.  Your effective range of you sonar is increased 100 times instantly.  I have had SI for 3 years now I think and I will never not have it.

Cy