Just got a boat a few months ago and it came with Garmin striker 4.  fish finder never used one before been reading about them and I keep reading about fish finder identifying just about anything on sonar as a fish is there some advice you can give me about this subject thanks!!

11 hours ago, Wurming67 said:

Just got a boat a few months ago and it came with Garmin striker 4.  fish finder never used one before been reading about them and I keep reading about fish finder identifying just about anything on sonar as a fish is there some advice you can give me about this subject thanks!!

Got one for Christmas haven't been able to use it on the water yet but the demo mode is good and it gets good reviews. Fish show up as arcs on sonar, unless you have the fish ID on

Thanks for reply

Objects have to be mostly linear, horizontal, facing parallel to your direction, and stationary relative to you as you pass over for them to make classic looking arcs. So...not many things in the water do that, usually not even most of the fish themselves. Arcs are nice to see but fish sitting still aren't usually feeding. What I really want to see are multiple ribbons and streaks moving all around the water column.

Keep the awful "fish ID" feature off! It does over-identify lots of stuff. You want to be looking at the actual sonar data yourself, because you actually know things about fish behavior and the computer don't, which is why you can interpret it better.

23 hours ago, Neil McCauley said:

Objects have to be mostly linear, horizontal, facing parallel to your direction, and stationary relative to you as you pass over for them to make classic looking arcs. So...not many things in the water do that, usually not even most of the fish themselves. Arcs are nice to see but fish sitting still aren't usually feeding. What I really want to see are multiple ribbons and streaks moving all around the water column.

Keep the awful "fish ID" feature off! It does over-identify lots of stuff. You want to be looking at the actual sonar data yourself, because you actually know things about fish behavior and the computer don't, which is why you can interpret it better.

Thank you for the advice appreciate the time