Efficiency is the name of the game in tournament bass fishing. Maryland pro Bryan Schmitt knows that as well as anyone. That’s why he loves to use his forward-facing sonar, but not necessarily for hunting down bass in open water.
Live sonar has been the proverbial talk of the town the last several years around the sport, much of the discussion — positive and negative — focused on how the technology is helping anglers find individual bass that have never been targeted before.
There is one aspect of forward-facing sonar that is often overlooked. In the same ways anglers have been using side-scan and down-scan to find targets for years, forward-facing sonar has become one of the best ways to also make effective casts to those spots.
That is why Schmitt keeps his Garmin LiveScope hooked up and ready to go at every event he goes to, regardless of the fishery.
“I enjoy finding something on that ‘Scope, whether it is a tire on the bottom or something else and making that perfect cast to it,” Schmitt said. “It is part of my daily routine no matter where I’m at. Even if there are bass out chasing bait, there are always still some bass that will sit down on a piece of cover.
“Lining up on a piece of structure, aiming the LiveScope, not seeing any bass but seeing the structure and then as my bait is approaching it or falling to it and seeing a fish come up to meet it is really cool.”
Targeting specific pieces of structure using forward-facing sonar has resulted in a number of important fish catches over the past several years. Justin Hamner targeted brushpiles to help him win the 2024 Bass Pro Shops Bassmaster Classic. At the 2024 St. Croix Bassmaster Open at Lake Eufaula presented by SEVIIN, Easton Fothergill located a rocky sweet spot midtournament with his live sonar, and his first cast to the boulders resulted in an 8-12 largemouth that helped him win the tournament.
With new rules and a diversity of fisheries in 2025, this strategy will play even more during the season.
“Obviously, the floaters and the suspended bass are really easy to see,” Canadian pro Jeff Gustafson said. “And there is a time and a place for that, but most of the time a lot of the Elite Series guys are looking for cover and places to put their bait.
“I would say Hartwell and Tenkiller are places finding cover with live sonar will come into play,” the 2023 Classic champ added. “Those are places with a lot of rock and timber in the water.”
For Schmitt, the 2022 Elite at the Upper Mississippi River stands out. Other Elite Series pros were taking off their forward-facing transducers because the grass was bogging down their trolling motors and collecting on their transducers. Schmitt, however, kept his Garmin LiveScope intact, which proved to make all of the difference as Schmitt hoisted his second big blue trophy at the end of that week.
“Through my experience with tidal waters, I know how critical a little log or something right outside the grass or in the grass can be,” he explained. “With how low the water was that tournament, I knew that if I could find stuff like that, it could work.
“However, I ended up finding a clump of grass that was isolated, and when I turned around and looked at it on the ‘Scope, it was alarming how many bass were there.”
From there, Schmitt was able to fish grass edges by making perfect, precision casts to those edges and those clumps of grass. Some of those same tactics came into play at the 2023 Knoxville Bassmaster Classic, where he found isolated pieces of wood cover to notch a runner-up finish.
“The cool thing about the Mississippi River was, the current is sometimes so strong that you can’t see a bass on the structure with LiveScope, but you can make a really good cast because of LiveScope, and it would be rewarded with a bass. I had an almost identical philosophy at that Knoxville event. The water was clear, and I knew they were gonna be sitting back.”
LiveScope has provided Schmitt with many revelations on the tidal fisheries he calls home. For years on the Potomac River, Schmitt would pull up to what he thought were several rockpiles and land several key bass. It turns out, they were not rockpiles at all. They were the stacks of a sunken barge.
He has also used it to increase his success around grass, something he was already proficient at doing without forward-facing sonar. Schmitt can see where the grass thins out, gets thicker and also find isolated patches of vegetation he would not have otherwise seen. Those variations and subtleties make all of the difference.
Even when he does catch a “random” bass on a Z-Man ChatterBait as he is cruising down a grassline, he can whip around and find where that bass came from and see if there was anything special about that spot.
“Back before ‘Scope, it was all about casting to find something different,” he explained. “Now, even when I think I have found it, the LiveScope shows me, ‘Oh, there is even more.’ I am learning 10 times the amount I used to. It isn’t easy, but it will show me if I’m in super thick stuff or if I’m getting to the clumps. Over the years of feel I have, combined with seeing it is a big deal.”
Gustafson uses his forward-facing sonar in similar ways. He looks for grass with it, but the 2023 Classic champion notes that finding wood, particularly stumps, is a key piece of the puzzle — especially around the spawn.
“That is one of the most common uses,” he explained. “Guys are zooming around throwing a jig or a Neko rig at the stumps. Sometimes the bass are bedding, sometimes they are just sitting there.”
In smallmouth country where he resides, Gustafson says many of the smallmouth hunker as close to the rock and boulders as they possibly can, making it difficult to pick them up on his Humminbird MEGA Live 2 sonar. This includes regular stops on the Elite Series like Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River.
Once he makes a cast and the bait starts to sink down, that’s when some of the bass will reveal themselves.
“Lake Ontario last year, I was out on these vast flats looking for hard spots and little clusters of rock,” he said. “I needed to have a good event to make the Classic there, and I did. I owe a lot of that to finding some sneaky spots. Nothing that was on the map, but if you could find a little isolated rockpile out in the middle of nowhere with a bass or two, and hit enough of them by the end of the day, you would have five nice ones.”
Has bait selection changed?
The simple answer for both Schmitt and Gussy is no, but they do find themselves adding to their arsenal. When Schmitt finds a productive grass stretch, he will use a ChatterBait and swimming worm just like he has at any other point in his career. Once the action slows, however, he has learned to slow down and “clean up” with a drop shot or a Neko rig.
When he is searching for bass in cover, Gussy employs a unique strategy. He rigs up a 1/4-ounce Ned rig and lets it sink to the cover.
“I can drop it on these different types of cover pretty quickly and know if there are fish there. When we are practicing, I don’t really need to catch them, I just want to see them,” he said. “I feel like a lot of anglers just think of a Ned rig as a limit-getter bait. But I think I have caught my biggest smallmouth, my biggest spotted bass and 6-pound largemouth with it.”
Nuts and bolts
Schmitt and Gussy use a similar color palette, a blue background where the return on cover and bass is red. In the Garmin setting it is called “Blue.” For Humminbird, the palette is called “Doppler.”
“I like that because the hard spots will stand out a little better,” he said. “I also crank the sensitivity up pretty high for MEGA Live 2, up to 18 or 19. The higher you put the contrast, the clearer the picture you will get. But, you lose detail, so you aren’t going to be able to see your bait from as far away. So if you have the contrast lower, you will have some fuzz on your screen but you can see your stuff a little better and get more detail on the bottom.
“In all three brands, you see guys using it and the picture doesn’t look that good, but that is intentional. They want to have as much detail and they can see through the interference.”
Even when he is fishing shallow, Schmitt will keep his live sonar in the regular mode rather than switch it to Perspective mode.
‘You caught that bass next to what?’
In the midst of finding plenty of sunken boats, Schmitt claims he has caught a keeper bass next to a sunken toilet.
