I tend to spend a bit of time thinking about fishing and decided I need to know how many fish we raise that don’t strike. I used to run a GoPro off the dredge but then had to sit and review it after I got home and couldn’t correlate where we were or what we were doing when I saw a fish on the GoPro.
So I’ve bought a fully submersible, waterproof reverse camera system with a 30m cable and 9” colour screen. The tv screen can be configured for 1 to 4 cameras. Initially I’m going to try running one camera off the dredge which tends to run about 6-8m behind the boat and maybe 2m down. If it works and I can see fish back in the spread I’ll run a second one off the other side of the boat on the other side of the prop wash. The plan here is to see when we have fish in the spread. How many window shoppers we get compared to strikes and use that information to tweak the presentation or to know when we aren’t fishing in the right area. I’ll likely keep a pitch bait handy as well to feed back to any fish that don’t eat something we are pulling when they show up.
I expect to be able to see about 20-30m under water (horizontally) so if this works I should get some useful data. If it doesn’t work it will become my underwater camera for the reef. I may build a waterproof box for the camera if I’m dropping it 20-30m because it probably wasn’t really designed for those pressures but seeing the reef in real time would be helpful too.
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