Ice Fishing Flashers

While looking into other winter sports, I came across a reported sale of an “ice fishing flasher” on eBay. That got my attention. I’m a Florida boy, so not very familiar with ice fishing customs, but it sounded like someone came out of one of those little shelters and opened up the old trench coat to reveal nothing underneath. Seems like a cold and lonely setting for such exhibitionism. I was hoping we were talking about a female flasher.

I did a search for sales of ice fishing flashers on Terapeak and found quite a few sales, but no female flashers.

It turns out that ice fishermen call a sonar fishfinder unit a flasher, so my hopes were dashed. I did find a healthy market for these ice fishing sonar units, which appear more or less the same as fishfinders that we put in powerboats except that the transducer is not made to go on or through a hull and the display unit is not made to mount on a console. Companies like Humminbird, Vexilar and Marcum make sonar flashers designed for ice fishing and they are selling well. Pictured at right is the Marcum LX-7, one of the most popular new models.

Ice fishermen are also adopting underwater video cameras to have a real-time look at what the fish are doing below the ice. The Marcum VS825SD Underwater Viewing System with a sunlight-viewable 8″ color LCD display  monitor looks like it would be both interesting and useful for bass fishing, fishing under ledges, and for inspecting the submerged parts of boats that live in the water.