Fishing
How to get the best cartography on your chart plotter’s screen
Back when the earliest digital maps for freshwater lakes began to appear on chart plotter screens, I was struck by how different they were.[…]
Marine Electronics
Fishing
Can we talk?
The National Marine Electronics Association is the organization responsible for setting standards for marine electronics, including those for communication between units.[…]
General
Keeping it clean
LCD screen brightness, contrast and resolution improve with every new generation of marine electronics. Higher pixel counts, new sonar technologies, more-vibrant colors and improved visibility under adverse light conditions let us see tiny sonar and chart details that would have been invisible a decade ago without zooming to enlarge the screen picture.[…]
Fishing
You dropped WHAT overboard?
Shortly after handheld GPS units became small enough to fit in a pocket, I remember a fellow outdoor writer lamenting about losing his. He somehow dropped it as he stepped from a boat to a dock over water 30 feet deep.[…]
General
Vacuum sealer systems aren’t just for the kitchen anymore
Eating dinner at a friend’s house almost 20 years ago, I mentioned how good fresh fish tastes compared to fish that was frozen. […]
Fishing
Super portable GPS
When the press release about Garmin’s new marine-oriented Quatix sport watch hit my inbox, I opened it with lukewarm enthusiasm — but the more I read about it the more excited I got.
Two basic advantages of a watch with built-in GPS are that you don’t have to set it manually when you cross into another time zone and it can be accurate to within about a billionth of a second or, say, within one second every 30,000 years.[…]
Fishing
Is there an electric outboard in your future?
We fishermen have seen all-electric boats come and go, but most of these vessels have been small, slow and had limited carrying capacity that make them best suited to ponds or protected lakes.
Electric outboard motors with from five to 10 horsepower are available from several makers, and electric primary propulsion outboard motor systems for open utility and pontoon boats have long been available from manufacturers like Minn Kota and Torqeedo.[…]
Fishing
Semiautomatic fish finder operation
In the early days of automatic fish finder operation, I advised serious anglers to switch to manual mode where they could tune in a much better look at the underwater world.[…]
Fishing
Lowrance introduces new touchscreen unit, custom contour mapping service
Do you have a favorite fishing area that isn’t mapped as accurately as you’d like? Now you can do it yourself with any Lowrance HDS multifunction unit, including new models with touchscreen control.[…]
General
Locating those pesky breakers and fuses
The first thing that springs to mind when an electrical accessory stops working is a blown fuse or popped circuit breaker. In a new boat this usually means pressing the circuit breaker button next to the accessory’s switch or popping the cover off a box near the console and checking the fuse or breaker that protects the now powerless accessory.[…]
Fishing
The most important electrical impulses are between your ears
Floating around for three hours with nothing but a Coleman cooler between you and drowning is enough to make a guy and his friends renew the commonsense boating habits they’ve let slide.[…]
Fishing
What the heck is trolling motor navigation?
A July press release from Johnson Outdoors Marine Electronics begins, “Continuing the evolution of GPS trolling-motor navigation, Minn Kota’s i-Pilot Link utilizes GPS technology and ethernet connectivity to achieve new levels of boat control.”[…]
Fishing
Preventing engine cancer
Galvanic corrosion can make your boat engine’s lower unit look like you ordered the special zombie edition. Here’s why it happens and how you can prevent it.[…]
Fishing
Clean your displays inside and out
Who hasn’t mistaken the shadow of a water spot on an LCD screen for a fish, waypoint or radar target? Or was it a smear of sunscreen lotion or insect repellent left by a fingertip? Hopefully it wasn’t a permanent scratch, crack, craze or other scar.[…]
General
Off-road hybrids
Anybody who runs a boat with a gas engine on the back and an electric motor on the front is familiar with the gas-electric hybrid concept.[…]
Hunting
Dog tracking made easy
A few years back I had a scare I don’t ever want to repeat. I was hunting pheasants with Brit, a Brittany I acquired through the PAWS rescue group in Austin, Texas, when she disappeared.[…]