What a fish looks like on a fish finder

Fish finders are a sophicated machine and also a time and life savers when it comes to finding fish quickly, it has also has become easily available to consumers cheaply nowadays, compared to the bulk expensive machines in the 90’s and what’s more awesome is that they come with extra features like, GPS, underwater thermometer etc.

So you’re looking a small screen with different colors, yellow, green, red ,blue and brown with a bunch of numbers on the side, so where the hell are the fishes you may ask.

Well you’ve come to the right article, today I’m going to show you how fish looks like on a fish finder.

Those fish finders don’t label everything that it shows right? So it throws a pulse of high frequency sounds into the water and the sound is reflected back onto the receiver and the fish finder cannot tell what it bounced on, it paints everything on the screen with colors, so what do the colors represent?

Dark Colors represent hard surfaces or objects and light colors represent soft surfaced objects, the lake bottom with be brown.

What do they really look like?

So what color is the fish and what does it look like? Different models and makes of fish finders represent fish in slightly different ways, but they will be similar is color and shape, a fish shown in a fish finder will look like a jumping dolphin, that’s the best description that I can give you, think of a dolphin, what do they look like when they jump out of the water.

See the image below

Now, with other models and make, fish looks like small jelly fish or inverted ‘u’s and sometimes they look like long white eels on the screen.

Don’t be mistaken, a lot of times , objects may appear on screen that looks like fish and is not fish, it may be other objects, with practice you will get the hang of it.

If you’ve just gotten a new fish finder device or if you’re still new to using this thing, then I suggest that you drive around a shallow lake or bay and try identify objects as it appears on screen, this way you can know what they look like on screen and you’ll be able to do it in deep water.

Understanding sonar images  

Fish finder shoots out high frequency cone shaped sounds which hits the bottom of the lake and anything and everything that gets in the way of this frequency is bounced off,  knowing the speed and the distance the frequency has travelled, it is able to construct a picture of what the lake bottom looks like.

Interpreting the sonar images

The sonar image travels from right to left , depending on where the sonar transmitter is mounted, the right hand side is where it is mounted and it is also the direction in which the boat is moving, everything on the left is where the boat has passed

So what happens if the boat is stationary?

If the boat is not moving, the sonar image will keep repeating itself, you’ll see the same stuff over and over again.

What does fish look like

Fish is crescent shaped depending on the size, it can be small dots, anything that is not connected to the lake bottom is probably fish (the lake bottom is often dark in color depending on the hardness of the bottom)

Sonar sensitivity

You can adjust your device to pick up more details by setting it to operate at much lower frequencies and also for your fish finder to be less sensitive, you adjust it to use higher frequencies.