Got shown an old school trick for reading river bottoms last week

I been running a dredge on the Mississippi for about 12 years now, and a 70 year old retired guy came by the yard to drop off some old parts. He watched me studying a depth chart on my tablet and just laughed. He pulled out a beat up paper map from his truck and showed me how he marked sandbars and hidden snags by just looking at water color and current ripples on the surface. I tried his method the next morning at a spot near Baton Rouge and it beat my fancy sonar readings by a mile. The sonar would show me a flat bottom but the water was telling a different story about a buried log. I still use the electronics for the paperwork but now I spend way more time watching the actual water before I start digging. Anyone else ever have an old timer show you something that made your high tech gear look silly?

2 comments

2 Comments

nancycooper1mo ago

You're putting a lot of stock into what one old timer showed you on a single morning. In my experience, those surface tells can be really unreliable when you're dealing with muddy water or shifting riverbeds. I've watched guys swear by reading ripples and ended up scraping the hell out of their dredge heads on sandbars they swore weren't there. Sonar has its own drawbacks for sure, false flats happen all the time, but at least it gives you a consistent baseline to work from. Your mileage may vary, but I'd rather trust a tool that measures what's actually below me than guess based on what the top of the water looks like.

roberts951mo ago

Hear me out on this one - you're both kinda right but missing the real problem. I've been running a small operation on the Klamath for about five years now and the thing that gets overlooked every time is how much the bottom composition matters more than the depth or the surface signs. One time I had a spot that looked perfect on sonar, nice flat bottom at 12 feet, textbook gravel bar reading, but when I dropped the dredge in it was solid clay underneath a thin layer of gravel. Wasted a whole afternoon trying to work it. Meanwhile I've pulled gold out of spots that looked like trash on the screen and the water was muddy as hell, but the old guy who showed me how to read the current seams was right about where the heavies would settle. The real trick is combining both methods and then also drilling down with a test hole first before you commit.