Fishing a crappie jig with forward-facing sonar

Crappie Country Tungsten Jig Head

Forward-facing sonar shows you crappie and your jig in real time, out in front of the boat. How to set it up, how to present a jig without spooking the fish, and what fisheries biologists have found about its effect on crappie.

What it shows you

Forward-facing sonar -- also called live sonar or live imaging -- points a beam out ahead of the boat and draws fish, cover and your own lure live on the screen, instead of showing what has already passed under you. For crappie that means you can look at a brush pile from a distance, see whether fish are on it and at what depth, and watch them react to your jig.

Arkansas guide John Duncan, who guides on DeGray Lake, uses it that way: he points the beam at a brush pile to 'see if anyone was home' and scans piles without going over the top of them and spooking the fish.

Stay back, and cast past them

The fish you can see can often feel the boat. Experienced forward-facing sonar anglers advise staying as far away as you can -- just close enough to cast -- and casting or skipping 5 to 10 feet past the target rather than on top of it. Bring the jig into their zone from beyond them.

He also recommends not leaving the sonar pointed at the fish the whole time. Once you have your cast lined up, put the unit to sleep or turn the transducer away; in his experience, stopping the ping results in more bites.

That fits how crappie feed. In a laboratory study of white crappie, 87% of strikes happened within the forward 40 degrees of the fish's field of view, most within 30 degrees of straight ahead. A jig that comes toward a crappie's face is in the zone it hunts; one that passes behind it largely isn't.

The jig

You need a jig you can see on the screen and hold at the depth where you see the fish, with a small soft-plastic body that gives a crappie-sized profile. Watch the jig on screen as it reaches the fish, and bring it toward their faces rather than past them.

If a fish follows but won't take it, change something: stop the jig, twitch it, or pull it away. And accept the limit Duncan puts on it: 'Even with livescope, you just can't force a fish to bite'. He still runs floats and minnows alongside the jig.

Settings to start with

Good starting points: overall gain around 65 to 70% for scanning open water, and color gain high -- 95 to 100% -- so a small jig stays visible. Set the depth range 5 to 10 feet deeper than the fish you're after. Forward range about 120 feet in open water and about 100 feet around docks and brush piles. In shallow water, 10 feet or less, a perspective (look-ahead) view with a forward range of 30 to 50 feet shows more of what's around you.

For mounting, a trolling-motor shaft mount lets you scan back and forth quickly; a pole mount suits a kayak or a boat holding still; a separate turret mount lets you aim the transducer independently of the motor.

Does it hurt crappie populations?

Biologists are watching. Arkansas Game and Fish surveyed close to 1,100 crappie anglers at nine locations in 2021: those using forward-facing sonar caught roughly twice as many crappie but were more selective, while anglers without it kept 1.3 times as many of the fish they caught. The difference in harvest averaged about two fish a day, and the fish sonar users kept averaged about a half inch longer and a quarter pound heavier. The agency's crappie program lead said the agency had not seen effects on a statewide population level.

A 2025 review in the journal Fisheries summarized controlled experiments on two Kansas reservoirs that found no significant difference in crappie catch between anglers with and without live sonar, and no difference in the size of fish caught; Minnesota creel data showed no discernible pattern either. The authors still recommend that agencies prepare harvest rules that can hold up if catch rises. Keeping only the fish you'll eat, and releasing big spawners, is the simplest way to fish the technology responsibly.

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