09-19-2002, 12:45 AM
[size 4]As far as how to mark a fish, you will have to be moving fairly slow to accuratly toss a marker to a fish location. I dont believe you finder has a fast track feature on it so you will need to boat slowly around the area you are fishing, when you see a fish on the screen, just toss out a marker. Now, determining what is a fish and what is not, will only come with use, as will dertermining what type of fish is below you. What you see on your screen is a sound returned from a fishes swim bladder. A fishes actual body is made of such a high water content that it is difficult to seperate from the surrounding water, so what you are seeing is the sound return off the air inside the swim bladder. Now, each fish has a similar but different anatomy. Swim bladders on a 45 inch musky and those on a 10 inch walleye are different so they will appear differnet on a screen. Some guys say kokanee salmon are different enough that they dont get seen by many fish finders. This is where you will get what you pay for, I use a lowrance lcx-15 mt. The power, and pixels, as well as the quality of the listening end of your tranducer will all help you to see fish better by picking up even the slightest returns, and give you a very clear difference between the type of sounds being returned by the various objects under the water. Some locators have excellent power and quality in the transducer but skimp on pixels, so you get good info up to your screen but the screen turns it into a blob and you cant tell anyways, others have good clarity through thier pixels but are underpowered so they return weak and unclear images to the screen. Basically you have to learn to use YOUR finder. It will be different than mine, but once you learn what a fish looks like on your screen, and how to pick him apart from the bottom or other structure and cover, you will be able to use it to your advantage, just dont give up on reading it and turn it off. Learn how to read it, and it will make you better. If you want or need more info, any of the sites like eagle, lowrance, garmin, should have a bunch of helpful info on using fish finders, or you can contact me through e-mail. I am no expert, but I may be able to help.[/size]