A Different Kind of Fishing

Last Updated: Feb 26, 2008 - 11:24:49 AM

By Dan Anderson
Feb 1, 2008 -
 

Dennis and Tammy Watters of Moro, Illinois are a highly successful husband-and-wife team on the semi-pro crappie tournament scene. Their skills at spider-rigging or long-pole trolling and figuring out the best ways to add crappies to their live well have put them on the podium at some of the country’s most prestigious and profitable crappie tournaments.

But it’s their expertise with their Humminbird-brand fish finder that put their phone number on speed-dial for police departments and search and recovery teams across the country. They travel tens of thousands of miles each year to help authorities find missing objects under water, and often the bodies of drowning victims.

Finding More Than Fish
“We got into (underwater searching) by accident,” explained Dennis Watters. “On our very first trip on the water with one of Humminbird’s side-imaging units, we found a submerged car.”

 

The Watters were experimenting with their new sonar unit in an area of a local river where an old lock and dam had been dynamited. The rubble and currents created an excellent fishing hole, and they were fishing while learning the ins and outs of their new fish finder. Unknown to them, three years earlier an elderly woman had driven her car into the river in that area, and disappeared.

“There’s a casino on the river in that spot, and they had security camera videos showing the lady’s car slowly rolling through the parking lot with her slumped over the steering wheel, and going through a fence and into the river,” said Watters. “They assume she had a stroke or heart attack, and passed out at the wheel. They had divers in the water for days, they used grappling hooks off and on for a couple weeks, but because of all the rubble from the dam, and the strong currents, they never found the car or the woman.

“Three years later, on our first pass through the area with the new sonar unit, we found the car,” said Watters. “We used the GPS on the unit to mark the exact spot and called authorities. They recovered the car, and the woman was still in it. Her family was finally able to bury her and have some peace.”

Thus began a part-time career for the Watters of helping search and rescue teams find missing vehicles, drowning victims and solving water-based disappearances.

“We’ve found sunken boats, cars, trucks, school buses, and saw an airplane at the bottom of one lake,” said Watters. “Heck, we stumbled on vehicles in three different lakes when we were out fishing and not even on a search mission, that had bodies in them when the authorities recovered them.”

Searching in 3-D
Watter’s expertise with his fish-finder is a combination of the sophisticated technology available in the unit, coupled with his knack for interpreting what the display reveals.

 

“It takes a little getting used to, the way the image is displayed on these units,” he said. “Most fish finders give you a vertical cross-section of the water under the boat, with objects and fish displayed as some sort of mark on the screen. The Humminbird unit gives you a 3-D underwater picture, with the boat in the middle of the screen so that you’re sort of looking both ways from the boat, from above. Once you get used to it, it’s absolutely amazing what you can see and find.”

Watters has “imaged” objects as small as handguns. When called to search for submerged vehicles, he frequently finds other cars or trucks that authorities didn’t know were in the water.

“There are places in rivers and lakes near cities where people tend to dump stolen cars or trucks,” he said. “It’s not unusual to find two or three other vehicles in a spot when we get called in. The sad thing is that there are often bodies in them, either suicides or foul play.”

The sensitivity of Watter’s sonar unit allows him to find drowning victims in places where divers are unable to operate.

“Here in Illinois, there was a drowning below a dam,” said Watters. “There was a lot of rubble, a lot of current, and it was a dangerous place for divers to work. The divers had done the best they could for eight days, but when they called us, we found the body 10 minutes after we launched our boat.”

Watters and his wife ask only for fuel and lodging expenses when they travel to search and recovery scenes in distant states. Their reward is knowing their efforts help families resolve what are often tragic situations.

“Every search is a challenge and I enjoy that aspect of it,” said Dennis. “But there’s a sad side to it, too, because if we succeed, other people often have to deal with a lot of grief. Overall, we feel good about what we can do to help people resolve a bad time in their family’s life.”

First and Foremost, a Fish-Finder
Watters emphasized that while they and their fish-finder have been involved in hundreds of search and recovery operations, its primary purpose is to help them catch fish. And it does.

 

“The Humminbird is one of the biggest reasons we’ve done so well on the crappie tournament tour,” he said. “Other fish finders kind of tell you how deep the water is, and maybe what sort of bottom structure there is, and gives you an idea if fish are around, but this unit lets you actually look at things sort of in 3-D. I can look at a brushpile and actually see the fish hiding in it, and know exactly where to put my baits. I can pull up to a brushpile, use my trolling motor to quietly move around it, and see if there are fish around the pile and exactly where they’re located.

“I don’t guess at where to fish any more,” he chuckled. “With this sonar, I know exactly where the fish are, how deep they are, and have a real good idea how big they are. The big problem is that all the other pros are getting side-imaging sonar units, too, so my secret weapon isn’t a secret anymore.”  rpm