Americana Outdoors E-Magazine - April 2019

we just followed them down to the south. This is really more like a tactical type of fishing than what we were doing the night before in the house. In the house, we were sitting there with the furnace running and we were nice and warm and just reel- ing them in one after another on Livescope. But today we’re out trying to drill holes and follow ‘em with Panoptix to get in front of the school of bigger crappies that are out here. These crappies are just so pretty, they’re so good eating, but these bigger ones here we’re throwing them back and I think that’s kind of the right thing to do, put these bigger crappies back and let them make some more crappies. That is definitely what we’re out here for. You really wanna be careful with the fish, it’s so cold out here on a day like we had fishing on the ice, you don’t wanna keep those fish out of the water too long so their eyes and fins don’t freeze up. You owe it to the fish to kind of take care of them when it’s this cold out. Of all the great technology we have, I feel like that new flasher page is one of the most exciting things. We needed to refresh our flasher screen, essentially. And make it more ice fishing friendly and more up to date, and so these guys did a lot of testing and gave a lot of great feedback on what we needed and were able to come up with a flash- er, but we also got the two side windows on each side of the flasher that you’re able to zoom in on literally just using your fingers, pinch to zoom. You can slide that whole window up and you want to target one fish, because it looks like a real nice fish on the screen, and you can zoom in within a foot of that on the one side, and I mean, target within a quarter inch of where you’re jigging that fish up or down or whatever they want. We kind of downsized from the night before and we used a small tungsten jig. And the reason that’s nice is that tungsten jig will drop really fast for you, so you know, we’re fishing deeper water, 30 feet of water, and you need a small jig to get down quick. But you also need to have the feeling of that jig

Garmin’s Danny Thompson poses with a large crappie be- fore quickly getting it back in the water.

Garmin’s Panoptix Flasher Screen is configured with the the flasher in the middle and two side windows that you can enlarge to isolate the EXACT fish you want to go after.

Using a small tungsten jig was key when fishing for crappie that were down deep.