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Hey, that guy in the
picture intently playing his first billfish, mate poised to help if needed,
is yours truly! And I won the battle on my own, despite the 20-pound-test
line we were using. The white marlin was tagged and released and is probably
now prowling the Caribbean, our brief relationship long forgotten. Not
me; I cherish the moment, as well as this opportunity to brag about it,
justified because—you guessed it—electronics were involved.
Despite my inexperience
at big-game fishing, I realized that folks who are serious about it are
usually also darn serious about any and all tools that offer them an edge.
Nonetheless, two long days aboard a well-run battlewagon opened my eyes
to how truly sophisticated sportfishing electronics have become. That
was Simrad’s goal in sponsoring this press event off the Mexican
port of Isla Mujeres, and it worked. The experience also underlined some
larger truisms about electronics that any boater, fisherman or not, can
appreciate.
Let’s start with
my shocking discovery that our crackerjack skipper had two excellent chartplotters
at his disposal but wasn’t using either for charting. Given where
I boat, the wickedly convoluted coast of Maine, and how I boat, with a
life goal of poking my bow into every nook and cranny, knowing where I
am relative to the cold stone dangers is very important. This fellow had
different priorities (and was working in clear, simple waters). He purposely
did not have a chart cartridge in the port-side CP33 so that he could
best see the several seasons of fishing tracks and catches he’d carefully
accumulated (above). Every time we hooked up, he marked the spot (and
also wrote an entry into his log, both for backup and to create a database
of further information about species, conditions, etc.). To starboard
the ten-inch screen on the CR44 was devoted alternately to watching for
bird activity on radar or to a data display (inset above) featuring an
acceleration/deceleration graphic that the captain found particularly
helpful for setting trolling speeds and maneuvering around fish.
The man had a plan,
and man, did it work. While the cockpit crowd fought tail-dancing sailfish
after marlin after wahoo after tuna, I mostly took in the skipper’s
bravura bridge performance. While driving and working the aforementioned
plotters, he was still almost always the first to spot a fish nosing our
baits, and he was on top of the two high-end acoustic devices that were
the real focus of Simrad’s show.
One was an EQ60 dual-frequency
sounder, and the other a SL35 searchlight sonar, reportedly the first
to be installed on a sportfisherman. Both systems are PC-based and displayed
on large, high-resolution (1,024x768 pixel) screens. You wouldn’t
know it from Simrad’s yacht products, but the company has been developing
its own commercial-grade PCs, custom keyboards, and software for some
time—and it even offers its own brand of monitors. In fact this trip,
and supporting these particular machines, was a day at the beach for acoustic
product manager Mike Hillars, who spends a lot of time in far-less-friendly
waters helping professional fish harvesters learn even more complicated
gear like trawl-mounted sonars and pingers that plot net positions in
3-D. Hillars taught me that Simrad’s acoustic devices have been all
digital for almost 20 years, another tech fact that the company seems
oddly shy about.
Next page >
Sounders and Sonar, Part 2 > Page 1, 2,
3, 4, 5,
6, 7
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