Forward-facing sonar can show you the fish. It can’t answer why you fell in love with fishing.
By Bill Siemantel
CLICK PHOTO BELOW TO LISTEN TO SONG
In football, you can look across the line and see the man trying to beat you.
You can see his shoulders. His eyes. His first move. You can react to him in real time.
In baseball, you can see the pitcher, the defense and the ball coming toward you. In basketball, you can see who’s guarding you. In golf, you can see the fairway, the water, the sand and the flag. You know the distance. You know the problem. You choose the tool and take your shot.
But fishing—especially the fishing I grew up with—was different.
Your opponent never had to show its hand.
There was no jersey. No stat sheet. No pregame scouting video. You couldn’t look into the bass’s eyes and know what it was thinking.
There was an entire world beneath your boat, and most of the time, you were competing against something you could only imagine.
For me, that wasn’t the frustrating part of fishing.
That was the magic.
A 14-foot Valco and a world I couldn’t see
I grew up fishing with my dad in a 14-foot Valco aluminum boat with an old trolling motor and no electronics.
We didn’t pull up to a spot and confirm that the opponent was home. We didn’t watch a fish approach the bait, turn away, follow it again and tell us—through body language on a screen—what adjustment to make next.
We just went fishing.
Water temperature. Depth. Clarity. Cover. Baitfish. Seasonal movement. Wind. Rain. Sun. Rising water. Falling water. The color of the sky and what was happening along the bank.
You had to put all those pieces together and make a decision.
Sometimes you made the wrong move and never knew whether a fish had been there. Sometimes you made what you believed was the perfect presentation and still came up empty. You couldn’t immediately separate a bad decision from a fish that simply didn’t cooperate.
That uncertainty forced you to develop something beyond mechanics.
You had to visualize. You had to imagine yourself beneath the surface. You had to think through the fish’s eyes. You had to trust your experience, your instincts and maybe that little sixth sense every longtime angler understands but can’t fully explain.
You weren’t just casting a lure. You were making an argument to an opponent you couldn’t see.
And when you were right, it meant something.
Then the opponent appeared on the screen
Forward-facing sonar changed that conversation.
Now, under the right conditions, you can see the fish. You can see your lure. You can watch the distance between them close. You can observe the fish’s movement and reaction, then adjust your presentation while the encounter is happening.
That is an incredible technological achievement.
And before anybody puts words in my mouth: I am not anti-technology.
I own forward-facing sonar. If anglers want to use it for fun, they should use it. If it’s legal in a tournament and helps them compete, have at it. I’m going to keep learning it myself, become more proficient with it and figure out how it fits my techniques and my style.
Refusing to learn a legal tool doesn’t make me a purist.
It makes me unprepared.
I still want to be competitive every time I launch the boat. If that means learning a new skill, I’m in. An old dog can learn a new trick—especially when the trick might show him where a 10-pounder is standing.
But embracing the technology doesn’t require pretending that nothing changed.
Something fundamental changed.
Fishing moved closer to the other sports.
The invisible opponent became visible. The imagined encounter became an observable encounter. The question began shifting from:
“Is a fish here, and if there is, what does it want?”
to:
“There it is. Now how do I make it bite?”
Those are both difficult questions. They simply aren’t the same question.
And no, seeing a bass doesn’t guarantee you’ll catch it. A fish on a screen is not a fish in the livewell. You still need boat control, timing, interpretation, presentation and the ability to make the right cast under pressure. The best anglers with forward-facing sonar are tremendously skilled.
But the skill is being applied to a different kind of contest.
You’re no longer only reading the water.
You’re reading the opponent.
The golf comparison cuts both ways
Golf may be the closest cousin to bass fishing. Different lies require different clubs, just as different underwater situations require different rods, lines and lures.
Driver. Wedge. Putter.
Flipping stick. Spinning rod. Big-bait rod.
But the fairway isn’t changing temperature while you stand on the tee. The flag isn’t following a school of baitfish into another creek. The hole doesn’t slide beneath a thermocline or disappear because a cloud covered the sun.
Forward-facing sonar can narrow part of that mystery. It can give you a visible target and a more measurable problem.
And maybe that’s exactly what some anglers love about it.
They enjoy watching the encounter unfold. They enjoy making an adjustment and seeing the response. They enjoy competing against a fish they can observe, just as a defensive back reacts to a receiver or a golfer chooses a club after seeing the shot in front of them.
There’s nothing wrong with enjoying that game.
The question is whether it’s the same game you originally fell in love with.
Even the professional tours are wrestling with the identity of the sport
This is no longer just an argument between two guys at the boat ramp.
B.A.S.S. split its 2026 Elite Series between events permitting live sonar and events prohibiting it, then announced that the same 50/50 technology structure would continue in 2027.
MLF’s 2026 Bass Pro Tour rules limit forward-facing and 360-degree sonar to one declared period each competition day.
Those decisions don’t prove that one side is right.
They prove the entire sport is negotiating its identity.
What should the highest level of bass fishing reward?
The angler who can interpret live images and make precise presentations to an individual fish?
The angler who can build a pattern without seeing that fish?
Or—the answer I suspect makes the most sense—the complete angler who can do both?
Because if the screen went blank tomorrow, some anglers would still be extremely dangerous. And if you handed the best old-school water reader forward-facing sonar, he wouldn’t suddenly forget everything he knows about seasonal movement, bait, weather and bass behavior.
Technology doesn’t automatically erase knowledge.
But it can change which knowledge becomes necessary.
Twenty years in twenty minutes
Years ago, a good friend of mine, Mike Ross, and I had a conversation built around a question his dad raised:
Does practice make perfect, or does perfect practice make perfect?
That idea eventually became something I called “20 Years in 20 Minutes.”
Back then, if you wanted to become exceptional at something, you found the person already in the one-percent club—the person at the very top—and asked:
“In twenty minutes, can you tell me the things you spent twenty years learning not to do?”
That conversation didn’t give you their talent. It didn’t guarantee you their success. But it gave you a better starting line. You could stop repeating their failed experiments and begin refining what twenty years on the water had already taught them.
Today, “20 Years in 20 Minutes” can be a YouTube video.
A TikTok.
A Facebook post.
A complete breakdown of forward-facing sonar settings, transducer placement, boat positioning, lure selection and how to interpret what’s moving across the display.
That’s one reason I don’t buy the lazy argument that younger anglers are only good because of electronics.
Today’s anglers can compress learning curves in ways we never could.
They can study more fisheries, more techniques and more successful anglers in a month than many of us could access in years. Take away forward-facing sonar and plenty of them would still compete at an extremely high level.
The information revolution is bigger than the transducer.
And maybe that’s where some of the old-school versus new-school friction really comes from. It’s not always about refusing to learn. Sometimes it’s about realizing that knowledge you spent decades earning can now be downloaded in an afternoon.
That can be uncomfortable.
But it can also be an opportunity—if we stop defending our generation long enough to learn from the next one.
So which opponent do you want?
I’m not asking whether you own forward-facing sonar.
I’m not asking whether you think it should be legal. I’m not asking you to apologize for using it or to pretend you’re morally superior because your screen is turned off.
I’m asking something more personal:
What part of the fight do you love?
Do you love solving an invisible puzzle?
Do you love making a cast without confirmation and discovering the answer only when a bass loads up your rod?
Do you love the possibility that every piece of water might hold the fish of a lifetime—even when you can’t prove anything is there?
Or do you prefer seeing the opponent, watching its movements and adjusting your attack in real time?
Do you enjoy fishing more when it becomes a visible, reactive contest like golf, football or baseball?
And here’s the question I think every angler—old or young—should answer honestly:
If you took the screen away tomorrow, would you still know how to find the fight?
There’s no shame in either answer.
But there should be some thought behind it.
Why I wrote the song
I’ve spent roughly a year and a half working on “The Opponent You Can’t See” because I wanted to explain where my love of fishing came from—not in technical language, not in a rulebook and not in another argument about screens.
I wanted to put the feeling into words.
The song isn’t a protest against forward-facing sonar.
It’s a love letter to the foundation I came from. To that old Valco. To fishing with my dad. To reading wind, water and sky. To making one cast into a world that didn’t owe me an answer.
It’s me against the unknown—
One cast, one possibility.
That’s why I keep coming back
To the opponent I can’t see.
Listen to the song. Then tell me where you stand.
Not where somebody on YouTube told you to stand. Not where your favorite tournament angler told you to stand. Not where your generation is supposed to stand.
Where do you stand?
Are you still in love with competing against an opponent you can’t see?
Or do you believe fishing became a better game when the opponent finally came into view?
Listen Now!
No scoreboard underwater.
Just the next cast.
Play on.
Forward-facing sonar didn’t just change how we find bass. It changed whether we have to imagine them.
I’m not anti-technology. I own FFS, I’m learning it, and I’m going to use every legal tool that helps me compete. But I grew up fishing with my dad in a 14-foot Valco with an old trolling motor and no electronics—and part of what hooked me was competing against an opponent I couldn’t see.
So here’s the real question: Do you love solving the invisible puzzle, or do you prefer seeing the opponent and reacting in real time?
Read the article, listen to “The Opponent You Can’t See,” and tell me why you fish.
#BBZ #TheOpponentYouCantSee #BassFishing #ForwardFacingSonar #OldSchoolNewSchool
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