Hello Fishermen,
I’ve done many BW trips and we fish lots. I’ve always just brought my Vexilar/battery (12 volt, 9 amp) and shoot the iceducer thru the hull. Gives me depth and marks fish, but provides a fairly narrow cone and no contour. A fully charged Vexilar battery will last me 4-5 days when used wisely.
I’m considering trying a Garmin Striker 4 or similar on an upcoming 1 week June trip but am worried about battery life. Does anyone have experience or an opinion on how long a Vexilar battery would power a Garmin? We don’t move around a lot so weight isn’t necessarily a big issue and I’m not opposed to bringing 2 if necessary. I realize many of you create your own AA battery packs and I’m open to trying that too, but I’m mainly curious about a Vexilar battery’s performance. Thanks.

This thread has detailed info on the draw on the ClearVue and non ClearVue units. If you know the capacity of your vexilar battery it should be easy to figure out.

The Striker 4 without ClearVu draws about 0.3A so if you drained a 9Ah battery completely, you'd get 30 hours of runtime. With my Striker 4, I use a 10Ah Nocqua lithium ion battery that gets about 26 hours from full charge until it hits 11V. You can go a bit deeper, around 10.5V at the lowest, but I wouldn't discharge beyond that. You can only discharge deeply with AGM, li-ion, or LiFePO4. I don't know if your Vexilar battery is SLA or li-ion but I found one on Thorne Bros that was SLA. You can only discharge those about half of their capacity, so 4.5Ah would get you around 12 hours of runtime. Not horrible, but pretty poor compared to li-ion. If you are doing a weeklong trip with a lot of fishing, I'd consider 2 batteries since you said it's not a big issue to bring multiple.

I'm assuming your Vexilar battery is just a standard sealed lead acid battery rebranded with the Vexilar name.

You will get way more run time and save some weight to boot with a lithium battery. A SLA battery's voltage will drop almost immediately and sag until your unit cuts out, where as a Lithium battery keeps an almost steady voltage and drops out rather suddenly near empty.

I picked up one of these Miady 16Ah recently from Amazon for $55 and I have been quite impressed. The size is the same length and width as your standard SLA/Vexilar battery but deeper, at 4". They were out of stock for a while and now I see the price is $60, but it is a bargain in my opinion. You would need add a Lifepo4 charger as well if you don't already have one as they charge differently than lead acid. Miady 16Ah

Appreciate the responses (and these message boards!) I will probably bring both setups this trip and see what will work best for me going fwd.

The Garmin Striker 4 uses .23 amps an hour, and your battery is a 9 amp, so 29 hours of run time with this battery. That’s a long time and should be enough. Turn down the screen brightness to save more.

Savage Voyageur: "The Garmin Striker 4 uses .23 amps an hour, and your battery is a 9 amp, so 29 hours of run time with this battery. That’s a long time and should be enough. Turn down the screen brightness to save more. "

That would only be true if you drained the battery completely empty, something you don't want to do with SLA unless you want to kill the battery. Plus, the voltage will drop below operating voltage before you even drain it fully, so there's almost no way to even use the full capacity of SLA anyway. Even lithium ion drops voltage steadily, but slower. LiFePO4 on the other hand stays in its upper voltage range until it gets to the last 10% of its capacity, and you can still drain it basically completely empty without risking damage.