Fish Finder Training

Yeah it would be great to see some screen shots. Like here is a bait ball, here is a fish, here is some junk etc. ...

I'd also like to know what the colors mean on the screen. ...

Fish are always black I think on the screen. Vegetation is green and the bottom is brown. I'd like to know what a rock shows up as.

It is going to depend on your unit.  Fish on my screen are generally blue lines, the most dense returns (bottom and dense bait balls) are red, vegetation is blue/green/yellow. 

I suppose we could start sticky threads of representative screen shots from the most common manufacturers.  I often save screen shots from my H'bird.  The .PNGs are very small files.

What is the advantage of color FF compared to black n white? I have the H'bird 365i GPS/FF combo and installed transducer with H'bird transducer install kit. Works great, but how can you find out if what it's showing on the screen, is actually what's down there? It bothers me when I seen FISH FISH FISH, but I'm not catching anything.

What is the advantage of color FF compared to black n white? I have the H'bird 365i GPS/FF combo and installed transducer with H'bird transducer install kit. Works great, but how can you find out if what it's showing on the screen, is actually what's down there? It bothers me when I seen FISH FISH FISH, but I'm not catching anything.

Color can be used to more easily distinguish a wider range of return densities.  Lots of NWKA use BW units to great effect. 

Last week I was out for lings and was seeing a ton of both fish streaks and FISH ID marks on my H'Bird.  Nothing I was offering was being accepted.  I tried various lead head sizes with various sizes and colors of scampi and grubs.  At exactly 6PM, 2 hours after low slack they started hitting EVERYTHING I had offered earlier.  It was like the "bite switch" was thrown.  Caught rock fish after rock fish for an hour until I headed in.  Yes, they all went back into Puget Sound.

Sometimes the fish are not biting. 

I'm a newb myself and the best info I've read about how to read your fish finder came from this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Sturgeon-Lingcod-Rockfish-Halibut-Pacific/dp/1571884211/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339544326&sr=8-1

There is a whole section on how to make sense of your fishfinder.  The best piece of info I got from it was that when you see a arch on your screen, the depth that it's listed at isn't entirely accurate.  A better way of thinking about it is it's that far away from your transducer.