My fish finder has a temp guage in it, but I just went to the hardware store and bought one of those cheap digital house thermometers that have the wire for outside temps, its about 10' long and I use it to take water temps when I'm on foot. Some are pretty small and would easily fit in your shirt pocket. I split a worm sinker and crimped it on the wire above the sender.
For an infrared thermometer, don't forget that the emissivity of water is 0.67. So you'll have to set your thermometer to that to get the actual temperature. The error is only a few degrees at normal water temperatures when it's set at the normal default (0.95 on mine), but I guess that makes a difference to you fish nuts.
I just bought a couple of new depth sounders (Eagle) for $99 ea. Have the temp sensor built into the transducer. Real nice and if you don't want to know the temp all day, just turn it off. Transducer is good to 70 mph....so they say. Have had mine over 50 and works great.<br /><br />Mark.
