Today’s Throwback Thursday historical photo was featured in a July 1971 Asheville Citizen Times story on Blake Honeycutt’s deep water fishing prowess. Blake was part of a three-man team, Tom Mann and Yank Dean, that developed the first Humminbird depth finders. Of particular interest, one is to note the spelling of the company name at the time on the side of Blake’s Ranger boat (Blake was also the first Ranger rep for the Eastern U.S.). The other is the following quote from the story mentioning the “sporting” aspect of using these new electronics for fishing, a story line that keeps getting repeated to this day some 50 years later.
“You might say these electronic means take some of the sport out of fishing. Perhaps they do. You can get by without a depth-finder and even can learn the contour of the lake floor in a deep impoundment by bouncing a heavy sinker or weighted plastic worm along the bottom.
“But the average angler will not learn in a 12-hour day as much about the drop-offs, sunken islands and underwater points without a depth-finder as Honeycutt will learn in an hour.
“His Hummingbird Depth-Finder saves him valuable fishing time and enables him quickly to locate ideal places for fish to congregate. And time is precious to anglers, because it seems that none of us ever get caught up on our unfinished fishing.”
