Marine Electronics Journal - September/October 2010

Naturally, commercial fishermen have a lot of experience with fishfinders. “They know what they want: a machine that will give them a good indication of bottom type—the difference between hard bottom and sandy—and good fish discrimination. They don’t care for fancy graphs. They want to be able to see schools of fish and identify schools of fish,” says Pete Marston of Seatronics in Gloucester, MA.

He says that recreational fishermen will
“pretty much put anything on and it will
work fine for them. Any decent color
machine will find strippers for you.”
When it comes to chartplotters, offshore
commercial fishermen favor PC-based pro-
grams. “Most commercial fishermen are going
to PC plotting packages with P-Sea WindPlot,
[ECC] Globe or MaxSea,” says Marston, “and
the higher-end boats are going to Olex at
$6,000.”
The PC monitor they choose usually isn’t
the more expensive marine-grade unit. Fish-
ermen can go to Best Buy and purchase a 20
inch monitor for less than $1,000, says Brod-
erick. And it can be bought with a three-year
service plan.

PCs, however, are rarely found aboard recreational boats, especially inshore vessels. “You can’t put a PC in a 22 foot center console easily without it getting very expensive,” Marston notes.

Inshore commercial fishermen are also not apt to rely on PCs, at least in New England. “For plotters, they all want simplicity. Very few are willing to learn new tricks. They don’t want to have anything to do with the com-plexities of raster, vector charts and 3D. They want to be able to make a mark where they put a string of gear and no other fussing around,” says Nate Howe at Hamilton Marine in Searsport, ME.

It’s the owner of a recreation boat “that’s interested in all the bells and whistles. Things to play with. That’s what attracts them,” he says.

Chatter vs. stealth

A definite difference between recreational boaters and commercial fishermen is their attitude toward communication electronics. Recreational guys love talking and don’t seem too concerned about who is listening in. Commercial fishermen generally aren’t interested in having multiple listeners and thus think more in terms of stealth communication.

Actually, fishermen have always wanted to

keep their movements as invisible as possible. Before scramblers, boats that worked together had cryptic codes to indicate where they were and whether or not they were finding fish. Of course, any veteran fisherman hearing the conversation could quickly figure things out. So a secret wasn’t a secret for very long.

Another ploy involved switching to a prearranged channel once you heard a “code” word or phrase on the radio. A fisherman and his buddies just hoped no one else was on that channel.

Now fishermen are “looking for ways to scramble communication. You never get that with recreational guys,” says Howe.

“The most common question we get is,
what’s an inexpensive, discreet form of com-
munication?” says Marston. “Fishermen like
to be able to tell the guy they are working
with ‘fish are here,’ without anyone else
knowing.”
Thus scramblers with VHF radios are a
necessity. Fishermen also use CBs or 10-
meter radios for boat-to-boat talks when they
“don’t want the average weekend warrior lis-
tening in,” Marston added.

Broderick says that when Sound Marine
Electronics outfits new $3 million to $5 mil-
lion scallopers and draggers, “We put CBs on
them as fall-back equipment.”
When it comes to VHF radios, commer-
cial fishermen generally aren’t afraid to spend
their money. Broderick, who outfits fishing
boats as far north as New Bedford, finds that
owners of offshore boats will drop close to
$1,000 on just the antenna, coax cable and
labor to install it, as well as $500 for a VHF
radio. “They want a main brand with DSC, PA
and everything. For them it’s worth it. Some-
times they are using it 24 hours a day,” Brod-
erick says.

Commercial fishermen have also grown to accept and appreciate a form of satellite communication they didn’t want to have anything to do with when it was first introduced. That’s the satellite-based Vessel Monitoring System, or VMS, that many fishing boats are required to carry, which allows the National Marine Fisheries Service to track boats to make sure they aren’t fishing in restricted areas.