Went to Spencer yesterday with my bro's. All I wanted to do was play with the new sonar but they wanted to actually fish for some reason. We started off at the south end near the ramp and off in the lilly pads and weeds looking for bass with no luck. We did see some people cleaning trout limits at the ramp and saw some trout in the shallows.

As soon as we got out of the heavy growth in the shallow water, I started seeing fish all around the boat on the Panoptix screen. I kept telling my bro's where to cast and how far out and how deep they were but they couldnt get anything to bite. I figured they were probably all trout and my bro's were still using bass gear with no luck. We kept seeing other guys catch trout and I kept giving them all kinds of grief for not catching the fish when I was telling them right where they were! Typical day with three brothers on the boat :)

Eventually bro #1 got tired of casting lures and switched to garlic power bait on the bottom while we were drifting. Most of the fish I was seeing were suspended or near the surface in the top 10 feet or so of the water column. It was really cool to have him cast where I told him there were several fish and watch his bait fall to the bottom with two fish following it down! Within 2 seconds of it hitting the bottom, he caught a nice feisty 16" trout! That turned out to be the biggest fish of the day.

I wanted to move to a different area to do some other testing with the sonar so we started slowly trolling. Thats when bro #1 caught several more 8" - 10" or so trout - trolling power bait with a split shot behind the boat at about .9 mph. By that time stubborn bro #2 finally decided to give up trying for bass in places where bass dont hang out and switched over to power bait and a small sinker. He then started catching more 8"-10" trout as we trolled along. I think we ended up releasing 10 or 12 all together. They were all really feisty little buggers. I was having a blast watching the fish swim around on the screen as they brought them in to the boat. Several times I was also able to tell them when a fish was heading for their bait and sure enough they would get bit a few seconds later. It was awesome!

Once it started to really warm up the fish moved lower in the water and the bite died down.

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