immortl

I thought the Beam deal was a wireless link... Guess that wouldn't make sense though, the glasses need to be powered. I'll check it out, likely have more change windows coming up. Everybody wants to upgrade all the things these days.

Sitting on a loooong change window all day and night. I've been poking around. The AR glasses are powered by the phone. I cannot find a 'splitter' USB C cable that sends out video/power AND takes in power to charge the phone. Others have searched for similar for Samsung DEX use cases with portable USB C monitors but I have not found anyone that was successful. So far my ideas are either... a) charge phone as necessary (I already have fast charge USB ports installed on the Kayak) when moving from spot to spot. b) use a fast wireless charger rubber banded to the phone to charge phone while using the AR glasses. One person reported doing this with a usb c travel monitor and the wireless charger was able to hold the phone charge steady. I'm thinking the glasses ought not draw more power than a portable monitor and likely draw less. Definitely something that would need to be tested.

Looks like the Lowrance Link App will screen mirror via wifi to phones/tablets. Looks like you can control the head unit via the 2nd screen device as well. Possibilities.... And I use an Android phone. So between us, we ought to get Lowrance/Garmin and Apple/Android figured out. It really does seem much more straightforward than the article let on...

I think this would be a hell of a lot of fun to try out and putz around with. In the overall scheme of the kayak cost and electronics cost, it's not all that much. It's on my list but with things going on, I won't get around to it till later this summer. I can see a lot of the points raised above, but understanding how Augmented Reality works vs Virtual Reality, I think it could be quite usable while still maintaining awareness of surroundings. Discussion is good and there is lots of theorizing, but in my experience, arm chair theorizing often differs from real world experience. It's worth testing things out when possible. I fall back to my experience with multi gun shooting. Arm chair pundits in general say manual pump action shotguns are the most reliable because they are manually cycled, nothing mechanical to gum up the works. Yet in real life, under stress of a bad situation or stress of a timer running, the person themselves rush and fail to cycle fully and will short stroke it, ending up with an empty chamber. I saw this happen over and over. I'll take my inertia driven semi-auto Benelli over a pump action all day every day. But I digress and this is a fishing forum. When I find time to putter around with this and my Lowrance gear, I'll share my experience and results. It may all be figured out by the time I get to it.

Funny! I was referring to the 'trick' of stop pouring money into the kayak. I was figuring on using contacts, but I can't see close in with those any more. I wear progressives as a daily driver. I like the prescription lenses option, a lot. I believe those are also the AR glasses I was looking at. This is why I like discussing projects with others. You went about a different way than I was thinking. I've been trying to see if Lowrance HDS Pro has a video/HDMI OUT. It seems there is an HDMI IN to display phone content on head unit, but I'm not sure yet if there is an HDMI OUT. I haven't put much time into research yet. I need to dedicate some time to it, and now I'll look up the wireless options. That is much nicer, even if tethered to a phone in my pocket, than the cabled version described in the article.

When you figure out the trick to that, please share it.

Excellent. Don't forget to check for firmware updates for the everything. On my Lowrance gear, there were updates for the head unit and also a separate update for the FFS/Active Target 2. Good call on the loose cables initially too, in my opinion. I did similar and went out a few times. Once I decided where most things were going to end up, the kayak came back into the house for another round of rigging and adjustments. The final rigging was delayed with the unexpected passing of my wife and then the holidays came so the kayak was put out in a cargo trailer. I need to bring it back in to the house for a few final tweaks and then get out on the water with it for some mental peace of mind and to learn the FFS and down and side scan features better. I've never fished with electronics before, but I'm really enjoying them so far. For a future challenge, I recently read about one of the Pros linking their head unit FFS display to a pair of AR glasses. The article was light on details, but I started looking into it and it doesn't seem all that difficult. I'm thinking if I could see the display of the head unit while looking out over the lake, without having to look down, that could be cool and useful. That's likely a later this summer or fall project though.

Yeah, I had to use the double front doors, and move some stuff in the hallway, and rope my brother into helping me horse it into the house. Getting it in and out was a process. Still a little more rigging to do, so we'll be doing it again one of these days.

I used the front living room as my workspace when rigging my kayak. Just had to relocate the coffee table and there was just enough room to walk around it while it was up on stands.

My getting to be old eyes appreciate the 10" unit and wish I went for the 12" unit. For looking down while standing, I'm considering a 16" unit but that likely won't happen this year, maybe next year.

So my PA14 is likely the closest I'll come to a bass boat in my lifetime so I went all in. I haven't added up the costs, but yeah, I'm easily hitting the $15k mark if not more. In my case, I want to be able to haul the kayak while I have a 40' 5th wheel RV hooked up. I have a roof rack design in mind and my brother took welding classes and I'm learning. We have picked up all the welding gear, so this spring/summer we'll work on fabricating the roof rack for the kayak. I have no interest in hauling around double trailers. When the trailer isn't hooked up, I use the pickup bed. My goal is to wander around to some of these great fishing lakes I read about and see on TV and fish them myself, staying at them for a few weeks or months at a time. We were full time RVing before my wife passed and I would like to continue in that vein, with more of a fishing and shooting focus. I have Active Target 2 on my PA14 and I am still in the early learning stages but I really like it. Currently I run the HDS Pro 10" head unit (should have went 12") on the left rail which works well when sitting. When standing though, I wish it was in front of me at my feet/knees. With that in mind I foresee a future addition of another screen on a cross bar. I'm crazy enough to be considering the 16" Lowrance screen for the increased 1920x1080 screen resolution. I did recently pick up the Dugout Dashboard Graph mount in anticipation of adding another head unit up front. I have some cross bars and mounts on hand that I could rig up, but the Dashboard mount seems to be the easy button for the PA14 while not interfering with the front hatch nor the pedals. All this said, my immediate discretionary funds are likely to be allocated to gopher hunting and a range finding rifle scope, so the 2nd screen may wait another year or so. In the meantime, I'm loving my FFS set up and am working on learning it on my local ponds and lakes. Like someone mentioned above, many times the fish I'm targeting turn out to be perch. Really need to work on differentiating the species based on schooling behavior and whatnot.

Insurance is an interesting topic that I don't know a whole lot of details about, but have learned over the years to ask a lot of detailed questions. I'm surprised to hear of those saying non-boaters gear isn't covered. I had a motor vehicle accident once and my passengers 'stuff' in the truck was all covered by my insurance but my 'stuff' wasn't. First and foremost both my passenger and I were ok, and a close second, the rifles were all ok. I didn't need any of my personal property covered, but I learned to ask. Now with vehicle, cargo trailer, motorcycle, and travel trailer insurance, I ask about what is/isn't covered and how to cover that which by default isn't. My policies all now cover my stuff, passengers' stuff, trailer contents up to X dollars, etc.. It was a long phone call with the agent, but it was worthwhile digging into the details, and taking notes as we made adjustments. The weirdest to me was the trailer for the motorcycle is actually covered under the motorcycle policy and not on its own policy like the rest of the trailers. Another odd one I've been reading into a bit is the old, "rental vehicles on your CC have insurance through the CC". I need to look into that more because the fine print caught my attention where my CC said it would be the 'secondary insurance if 'something' was waived at time of rental. That leads me to think my personal insurance would be primary? I don't know how it all works but want to figure it out. My desire would be to have the wrecked hulk returned to Hertz or whatever and walk away washing my hands of the ordeal. Doesn't quite sound like CC insurance would accomplish that. Anyways, like others have said, don't assume and dig into the details with your agent and explore the options.

I used the OneObjective bow mount plate found here.

I have a decently kitted out PA14. I personally think it is worth hooking them up together. Tapping on a location on the map, be it a waypoint I marked or a location I want to check out, and having it pop up with, "would you like to navigate there?" is just darn cool. Note - with the Xi3, make sure you're sitting down before hitting spot lock/anchor or answering "yes, take me there" as it can whip the kayak around a bit. I am a tech guy and enjoy the bells and whistles. I have them linked together via the Motorguide Pinpoint GPS gateway and I also added the Lowrance Point-1 heading sensor to assist with the directional cone display of my forward facing sonar. I have not noticed any interference issues with any of my sonars but I went a bit overboard with wiring and shielding everything. I DO have the motor on a separate battery than the fish finder, and have the FFS on it's own separate 3rd battery as well. For the 'went overboard' part all power and sonar cables are also covered with tinned copper wire mesh shielding sleeve that is grounded back to the batteries. By the time I hooked a few things together, the NMEA network block of T-connectors was getting a bit lengthy. I then found you can purchase a shorter multi tap block of sorts, like this. I swapped one in and it works just as well and is more compact than the string of individual T connectors.

I am almost, but not quite done with all my wiring and rigging. I was working on the final iteration of version 1.0 this fall but my wife very unexpectedly passed away the week before Thanksgiving and the kayak fell to the back burner. I think this is my first post since then... The kayak is currently stored in an enclosed trailer and I'll pull it out a tick later this winter and finish it up for some mental therapy. Then I will get out to fish as much as I can for additional mental therapy. So I did NOT keep it simple. My approach is this is as close to a bass boat as I'm going to get so I threw everything at my PA14. In nitpicky details - I used Ancor Marine Grade wiring (all tinned copper) for everything and have a mix of custom wiring and some yak power stuff as well. Also used tinned copper ends/lugs and soldered and double wall heat shrink wrapped everything. All exposed metal contacts (battery terminals, fuse block terminals, etc..) have a health coating of silicon grease. As part of the rigging, I picked up several useful tools, among which were a Weller soldering station for the soldering (goodness, with a decent soldering iron I can actually solder stuff) and a torch for soldering the larger 6ga lugs. Also picked up a hydraulic crimper to crimp those 6ga lugs. I used 6awg for the leads off the batteries to the motor and fuse block and 14awg for the rest of the electronics. I have 3 Ionic batteries in my setup. 50ah under the deck under the seat to power the Lowrance HDS Pro 10", transducer, Point1 heading deal, NMEA network (auto navigation with the Xi3 hooked up to the HDS Pro is pretty darn cool), 2 power ports (phone charging, GoPro cameras), lights, and other random electronic stuff I'm probably forgetting. 30ah under the deck to the right (to offset weight of HDS Pro hanging off left side rail) dedicated solely to the Forward Facing Sonar. And finally a 125ah in battery box that I take on and off to power the Xi3 trolling motor. All batteries have an on/off rotary switch close to the battery as well as an appropriate sized inline fuse. The run for the trolling motor also has a 60a breaker inline and I still need to put in a relay with a kill switch/key. I have a fuse block mounted on the mounting plate (inside the hull, up front, right behind the front hatch removable cargo bin). I need to look and jog my memory what is run through the fuse block. I believe it is the NMEA and main power for the head unit. I also have the Yak Power 8 circuit switch deal which I use for the usb power ports, the power trigger for the head unit and FFS unit, and lights. This switching unit is powered off the fuse block as well. I did pick up an assortment of SAE connectors and soldered them to device wires using tinned copper barrel connectors and covered those connections with double walled marine heat shrink. To keep cabling neat, I used a variety of sizes of PET expandable braided sleeving. Keep in mind this usually expands up to 2-3x it's 'measured size'. For example, if you're sliding it over a bundle of wires that is about 1/2" in diameter total, use 3/8" PET and it'll keep the wires nice and snugged together. This is the same stuff a lot of rod sleeves are made from. In my opinion, I like it better when it fits snug over the wires. On the overthinking and ultimately most likely unnecessary front, prior to the PET braid, I also ran most all of the wiring bundles through tinned copper mesh braid to which I soldered grounding wires and ran them back to the ground terminal of associated batteries. So wires/cables are covered first with tinned copper mesh braid, then plastic PET on the outside. . My goal was to eliminate electrical interference and whatnot with the sonar units. I did this over both the transducer cables, and all the power wires I ran. That said, those on this forum who know more about it than I do pointed out this was very likely completely unnecessary.

So this trout club I belong to, also allows us to deer hunt on the properties. There are many days trout fishing when you'll see a deer walk across the river. I have often half seriously joked that one day I'm going to trout fish with a bow or 12ga slung over my shoulder and see what happens.

@ol'crickety - a buddy of mine and I call it the 'knack'. Some folks have the fishing knack, others not so much. This buddy has a cabin on a little pond up on the Upper Peninsula of MI. We used to go up there every year to fish. Between he and I we would reel in northern pike all day long. Another friend of his, we'll call him Bob, would come up often as well. We could hand Bob the rod we were using with the same lure (silver/blue hammered nickel daredevil was king), have him cast to the same exact spot, and he wouldn't so much as get a bite. He'd hand it back to us, we'd case to same spot, and reel in another pike. Over the years, he did start to develop the knack a little. Now Bob was a tick OCD and man, he filleted pike like nobody's business. We loved when he came up and handled the filleting for us. If we knew he was coming up, the pike were kept in a live box off the dock for a day or two until Bob arrived to fillet them.

I too am brand new to fish finders. What I have found so far this summer with my HDS PRO 10 (should have went 12")... 1. You can yes. That said, tt is suggested/recommended that you connect fish finders to a battery other than that used for the trolling motor to help prevent interference. I have my head unit connected to a separate 50AH Ionic battery and then my Active Target 2 hooked up to it's very own 20AH Ionic. The Xi3 trolling motor is on it's own 125AH Ionic. 2. Don't have the links offhand, but if you search (I'll see if I can come up with them) I'm pretty sure there is an analogous web page where you can look up if your lakes are mapped on the navionics card. Found it, adding on edit - think it's the cmaps that are built in - https://www.lowrance.com/lowrance/type/mapping/c-map-chart-explorer/ 3. YES! tap on the structure on the screen, it'll tell you the measured distance to the point you just tapped on. It's pretty cool. 4. YES/Not Sure. When you tap you can add a way point and give it a specific icon and/or custom name if you want. I'm not 100% sure if the waypoint shows on the side scan page or just the map page once created though... I have way points all over now. I do need to work on a more disciplined use of specific icons for specific types of way points. You can edit them/change icon/change name after the fact if you want.

I picked up my left handed Antares DC as well as a Stella and several other spinning reels from Digitaka over the past year and every transaction has been perfect with fast shipping. I highly recommend them and continue to order my reels from them..

From poking around on their site, Covercraft seems to be running a 35% off sale on their boat covers and whatnot. If you're looking for some new winter storage protection, might find yourself a good deal.

I don't have a full on boat, but I have a kayak that I bought a cover for from Covercraft. The one I purchased was made of the Covercraft Sun-DURA. It is weather resistant / water resistant. Moisture stills gets through. Is there a difference between the ones you're looking at with regard to resistant vs proof? Do you have a preference for one over the other? Covercraft seems to be having a large sale right now with some fairly steep discounts.

@Bankc and @casts_by_fly - I feel both of yours' pain, but it's worth it when out on the water. I need to work out a little and get a little stronger. I have an Xi3 and its addition of ~30lbs on the front of my PA14 is just enough to keep me from being able to lift the front of the kayak high enough to get it on the cart (can't quite transition it above my elbows to flip my hands and bench press it up). I unload the kayak from the truck bed, put it on the cart, then put on the fish finder head unit/connect all the cables and put on the motor and motor battery pack. I'm usually just happy to be out and take my time with rigging. Once fully rigged, I wheel it down the ramp and get it in the water so I'm not at the ramp but for a few minutes when launching. When I come back in though, I beach it, take the motor off the front, get it on the cart, then drop the motor back on the kayak (balance, the battery is still in the back) and wheel it back to the truck where I do the rest of the un-rigging. I can see the appeal of a trailer to save the rigging time, but eh, I'm happy to be out so I don't sweat it. I only have the one motor on the bow. I've thought about and like the idea of perhaps a 2nd on the back, if I was fishing larger bodies of water. But I am just getting into this kayak fishing hobby and am in NJ where most of the ponds/lakes/reservoirs are quite manageable with pedals and/or the single motor.

@FryDog62 Sorry for the delay, stopped raining a few days ago and I finally got around to uncovering the kayak (and bringing it inside so I can work through the next round of rain this weekend and finalize some wiring). Been working on some RV repairs. Anyways... The end result of your mounting and mine is pretty much the same. You have the t-slot track which puts the mount in the middle of the kayak edge but I had to work with the h-rail which pushes the mounting point off to the side of the rail.

I used the sniper marine pole on my Hobie PA14 and have been pretty pleased with it the few times I've been out. I normally use the twist handle to rotate the transducer, but when necessary, you can also just rotate the whole pole around too, it doesn't really lock into place. At first, before actually using it, I thought this would be aggravating, but it's really not and is actually useful. When I tool around the lake, it 'self rotates' due to resistance and faces backwards if I don't remember to rotate it around first. I do tend to pull it out of the water if I'm going a longer distance. One thing I did a little differently than in the videos I watched was to mount the marine board mount with its long axis parallel with the kayak instead of perpendicular. It's mounted to a hobie h-rail mounting plate where the plate is on the outside side of the rail. This keeps the pole pretty close to the side of the kayak and it's not sticking out to the side by several inches, while not intruding into the 'interior' space of the kayak. Been working pretty well for me. It continues to be pouring rain here but when it stops I'll go take a picture of how I have it mounted and will add it to this thread.

Last summer I had my rods (minus reels) in a canoe in the bed of my truck. Upon arriving home, canoe was still there, but NO RODS. I was bummed. But hey, good excuse to pick up new rods for the next 20 years.