If your boat is 10 to 16 feet long, the fish finder you want is almost certainly not the one most anglers picture. Big color displays with side imaging, networked sensors and full chart plotting solve problems a jon boat, a dinghy or a small pontoon does not have. What a small hull needs is … Read more

Side imaging sonar fires narrow beams of sound to each side of the boat rather than straight down, then stitches the returns onto the screen as a detailed picture of the bottom out to roughly 70 to 200 feet per side. That makes it the single most useful tool a bass angler can own for … Read more

Yes, fish finders work from shore, and the best portable fish finder for shore fishing right now is the Garmin Striker 4. It is the only unit in our test group that pairs CHIRP traditional sonar, ClearVu scanning, a GPS waypoint map and a flasher mode in a housing that weighs 8 ounces, which is … Read more

A kayak has no console, no wiring loom and barely a square metre of flat deck, yet you still want to know what is under the hull. The best castable fish finders for kayaks solve that with a floating sonar ball you throw on a line or clip alongside, which reads the water column and … Read more

There is almost no light under lake ice. A few inches of black ice over 20 feet of stained water cut off what little sun reaches the bottom, and the panfish that spend the winter down there are hunting in what anglers call a visual blackout. A flasher answers that problem directly, because it manufactures … Read more

If you want a single answer, take the Haswing Cayman 55. It is one of the quietest motors we ran, it steers from a wireless remote or a foot control, its 48 inch shaft fits a broad range of bass boats, and at 299 reviews it carries more real ownership history than anything else we … Read more

Choosing the best transom mount trolling motors for jon boats comes down to one number before anything else: how much thrust your hull actually needs. The rule most anglers land on is 5 pounds of thrust for every 200 pounds of boat, plus you, your tackle, and your battery. A 12 foot jon boat that … Read more

The battery decides how long the day lasts. Every angler I have fished with has the same story: they found the spot, the fish were cooperating, and then the voltage sagged and the motor got weak, so they drifted home instead of fishing the last two hours. That is why the best trolling motor batteries … Read more

Most fishing kayak specs are written for a 180 lb paddler. That number quietly shapes everything else you read: the beam width, the seat height, the capacity rating and whether the hull still feels planted when you stand up to cast. If you are a bigger angler, that math breaks down, and the wrong kayak … Read more