It's a rare day when someone calls to say he's sending marine electonics screenshots that gave him goosebumps! The someone was Peter Braffitt of Gemeco Marine and Airmar Technology, and while he certainly has a business interest in high-performance sonar transducers, he's also a straight shooter. Besides, isn't that screen above pretty darn amazing? It was taken aboard the handsome 80-foot Merritt-built sport fishing boat Speculator en route from Beaufort, North Carolina, to Bermuda. They not only held bottom the whole way -- even in 17,624 freakin feet of water (or 5,372 meters or 3.3 miles)! -- but they may have spotted fish at great depths too...
Do you too wonder if the Colonels dressed like that as they fished off their steam yacht in 1933? Actually I didn't even know that there once was a giant bluefin tuna fishery off Scotland until this morning when I read Airmar's new blog about an expedition that starts tomorrow. The company already had a crack tuna fisherman on staff in the person of Bertrand Picarda and now they've teamed up with a gentleman from Inverness who fishes a handsome 40-foot Rodman 1250 Fisher Pro..that now has some new holes in its bottom...
Yes, there was some jocularity in Miami about the manliness of the new Lowrance StructureScan HD transducer, once it was whipped out by Lucas Steward (of tricked-out Hobie Pro Angler fame). But more impressive than what an SS HD user gets to show off at the launching ramp is what they'll see on screen. Navico has managed to give StructureScan more range and improved resolution while also simplifying its use and keeping the price the same (at about $600 for the new transom transducer and LSS-2 module)...
Navico product manager Lucas Steward may look like he's having fun, but he really is putting a lot of Lowrance gear through its paces. Really. When I got chatting with him during an early morning Miami demo (more on that soon) and he mentioned that he does some testing aboard his Hobie Mirage Pro Angler, I pictured perhaps an Elite-5 DSI fishfinder/plotter mounted on its deck. But it turned out that Steward had a much grander vision for his 14-foot pedal boat...
I'd already gotten some details on the several interesting new products Garmin is announcing today -- and was excited about sharing them -- but it wasn't until late last night that I had any inkling about Garmin's acquisition of Interphase Technologies, a pioneer in phase array forward looking sonar (FLS). Wow! The deal means that Garmin will soon have a new and unique arrow in its quiver of MFD network sensors and that FLS for fishing and navigation will get some of the attention I think it's always deserved. It's not just that Garmin will market the Interphase technology better, but that the technology will no doubt be easier to use and to afford when integrated with Garmin displays. It will probably work better too...
I sometimes wonder how the smaller marine electronics manufacturers will get along as more and more boaters seem to go with systems centered on do-it-all MFDs from the Big Four brands. So it's good to read on the Si-Tex home page that the company turned a profit in its first year under new management. The trick seems to be filling niches that the big boys have largely abandoned, like the new standalone SDD-110 Digital Depth Gauge above, which will drop right into the hole left by a venerable Datamarine Offshore Sounder and only retails for $349, excluding an 'inexpensive' transducer...
Despite a fair bit of reporting on MIBS 2011 (Google search here), I failed to discuss what I saw during the back-to-back demonstrations of chirp fishfinding just before the show. In a word, it WORKS! All the writers -- many of whom do a lot more fishing than I do -- seemed to agree that they'd never before seen the target resolution imaged by both the Garmin GSD 26 and the Simrad BSM-2. And in some cases -- like the fishy wreck near the Miami Harbor entrance above -- we got to see both implementations of chirp in almost identical situations...
So now a CHIRP war is breaking out. This morning Garmin announced two new black box fishfinders: The GSD 24 appears to be a $700 redesign of its previous top-of-the-line digital box while the $2,000 GSD 26 is an obvious play for the truly serious fishing crowd. The GSD 26 features "Spread Spectrum" technology, which seems to be another name for the CHIRP support that Simrad announced as part of its new BSM-2 box in September. In fact, both Garmin and Simrad will be running demos of their advanced fishfinding over the next couple of days off Miami, and I'll be taking a ride with each...
The press release characterizes the new (little 'e') echo series fishfinders -- six models in all, with the $450 550c above at the high end, and an $80 echo 100 at the low -- as "Garmin's return to the freshwater market." Which I read as "Hello, Lowrance and Humminbird!" and also as another sign of the company's tenacity. Dropping out of the hyper intense smart phone market may have been wise, but Garmin usually seems to meet competitive adversity with new models, improved features, better value, etc. They may have lost focus on the inland market for a bit, but they're back, and consider too the new xHD 4kW open array radars...
EchoPilot's 3D forward looking sonar, mentioned here last year when Kees covered METS, purportedly just started shipping, and the screen shots posted at the company site are even more compelling. That spire imaged above, for instance, represents a navigation buoy with a triple mooring system. But might this product be causing the judges of this year's DAME (Design at METS) Award some anguish? They did choose it as one of the six finalists in the Marine Electronics category, but it's got to be difficult to judge such a unique technology on the basis of screen shots, especially when they can get more hand's with some of the other other nominees...
