They're not gas bubbles. Gas bubbles aren't neutrally buoyant in water, they are constantly on the rise to the waters surface, with the transducer pinging them the entire time they are in the cone. This results in them almost always appearing as diagonal lines on your screen. There was a good discussion and screenshot of this posted about a month ago in this forum section.

11 hours ago, slonezp said:

Think I'm with WRB on this one. Gas bubbles or rotten vegetation gets my vote.

They would be schooled tighter

The orange/red means a hard return doesn't it? If so then there has to be a few fish in there. There's no way air bubbles are going to give that hard of a return. Just my guess.

12 hours ago, slonezp said:

Think I'm with WRB on this one. Gas bubbles or rotten vegetation gets my vote.

They would be schooled tighter

The orange/red means a hard return doesn't it? If so then there has to be a few fish in there. There's no way air bubbles are going to give that hard of a return. Just my guess.

3 hours ago, Team9nine said:

They're not gas bubbles. Gas bubbles aren't neutrally buoyant in water, they are constantly on the rise to the waters surface, with the transducer pinging them the entire time they are in the cone. This results in them almost always appearing as diagonal lines on your screen. There was a good discussion and screenshot of this posted about a month ago in this forum section.

Agree a stream of bubbles leaking from the bottom looks like a verticle stack of fish bottom up. Gas trapped in decayed matter that lifts the a piece causing it to slowly rise towards the surface. This is why asked the question was any pieces of debris floating on the surface or did it smell like sulphur?? 

We weren't there and can only guess at what the screen shot is displaying, could be scattered fish, but they don't all show up on the HD screen.

Air/gas bubbles are very dense return to sonar.

Tom

I know a bait ball shows up as a cloud. Does single fish show up as arches too? If that's the case how do you know when your seeing a fish and seeing debris? Is there a way to distinguish between the two? 

42 minutes ago, RHuff said:

I know a bait ball shows up as a cloud. Does single fish show up as arches too? If that's the case how do you know when your seeing a fish and seeing debris? Is there a way to distinguish between the two?

Experience from time on the water....

 

 

 

6 hours ago, 12poundbass said:

The orange/red means a hard return doesn't it? 

Yes but its hard to tell without seeing the color palette, which is the harder of the 2