Thinking Outside The Box - Innovations For Pier Fishing

I was just wondering if you guys had any ideas for new commercial products that might be beneficial to pier fishing. I'll start with a futuristic notion - Drones.

Amazon is literally toying with the idea of using drones to drop off packages. Why couldn't drones/remote controlled aircraft be used to drop your bait 100 yards out into the gulf? Yes, I can forsee the downside of gulls swooping in, but that could be remedied by utilizing a (patent pending) cigarminnow box.

Another idea is (fishermen may already be doing this in some places) with the recent advances made in LED technology, you can really light up the water! A weight below a light (to keep the light immobilized in the middle of the water column), then a 30 - 40 ft extension cable up to a battery on the pier might produce some excellent night fishing action. I know - If the fish get tangled up in the light-cable it would be a mess, but no solution is going to be perfect!

That's just a couple of ideas - what do you all have?

An Australian company has a small rc boat that launches from the surf and takes your line out as far a 2 kilometers and you release it with the remote. I have never seen a reel that held that much line but it would make kings and cobia reachable from the beach.

I would like to come up with a way to put an underwater camera near the bait by attaching it via a second rod, and then catching the strike action of the fish in film in first person.

What box? I didn't see a box.

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Originally Posted by Viking Guy

I would like to come up with a way to put an underwater camera near the bait by attaching it via a second rod, and then catching the strike action of the fish in film in first person.

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Ive seen videos of people doing that on youtube. Im not really sure how they did it but it really showed how a flounder strikes

http://i1102.photobucket.com/albums/...ps015e9e3c.jpg

I would think the drone bait delivery would work great until someone threw over the line while in flight, and if the pier would allow it!
No pier rule against drones!

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Originally Posted by chillinfish

An Australian company has a small rc boat that launches from the surf and takes your line out as far a 2 kilometers and you release it with the remote. I have never seen a reel that held that much line but it would make kings and cobia reachable from the beach.

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I have a r/c fishing boat and I will tell u from experience at the bent leg we were hooking up on jacks with poppers left and right so I decided to have some fun and pulled a popopper behind this little boat and not only did the jacks not come near it but it literally turned the bite off like the flick of a switch. .

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Originally Posted by fishchaser1003

Ive seen videos of people doing that on youtube. Im not really sure how they did it but it really showed how a flounder strikes

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I think I saw a video like that awhile back. Was a guy on a kayak. I "think" he attached a Go-Pro to an extension straight down from his 'yak, but I could be wrong.

I watched one video where someone tried something similar and a squid attacked their camera and took it into the dark depths.

Off topic but I did cut the bottom out of a duck decoy and put it in top of an $18 r/c jet ski from KBToys. Worked great! Called it Robo duck Quess what, saw the same thing advertised and in person (a friend bought one) in macks prarie wings catalogue for $100. Guess what there's was called....uh hu! Did think of putting a big fishing hook on the bill and using it to retrieve. That would have put my friends black lab out of work though!!!

On the drone idea, did consider a r/c helicopter but figured the winds at the pier would be tough to handle!

Drone + camera + feed to smart phone for cobia spotting?

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Originally Posted by Pierless

Drone + camera + feed to smart phone for cobia spotting?

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Tom,
We might be able to pull that off next spring.

The thing about a R/C drone is it will have limited range and they aren't cheap for the good ones. Plus if you lose control of it and it crashes there goes a nice camera and drone. Plus by the time y'all figure out how to control it Gainer, Peaches and Wilson would have done spotted a fish. Freaking cool idea though.

They can try and spot it all they want but they can't drive a stationary pier to it

Bonneville Dam Slingshot Fishing For Sturgeon - alaska fishing videos Here's the giant slingshot for sturgeon.

I think Rube Goldberg was the old guy with the White Beard...................

If Gainer,Peaches,wilson had a boat they could fish together on in a couple yrs cobia would be extinct.

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Originally Posted by fish killer

If Gainer,Peaches,wilson had a boat they could fish together on in a couple yrs cobia would be extinct.

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Sorry, but no.

No offense, but I can't picture Wilson in a tower. Scary thought.

On second thought, leave him on deck---he doesn't need a tower.

there was a fellow(Big Brandon) that tested a tower a couple years ago, lets just say it didn't go well and they needed rescued out in the gulf .....big guys and towers don't mix well (at least on smaller boats)

I think a medium size quadrotor with a rig to drop baits way out is the way to go.... charge $1 a run and the pier house could make a small fortune... Have it drop your bait after you deposit you $ in a lock box at the end. The quad could have a bait release button that the fisherman could use and drop his bait when ready to avoid blaming the pilot for erroneous drops. I figure 6-10 king fishers a day at $10 per fisherman would be enough to pay for the machine the 1st month. Then its all profit.... We could buy one and keep it at the pier for our own usage..... FPS Russia on youtube has a quad rotor demonstration that could be used for net boats, googans and the "pets" in the shallows...

you're right DHR gainer don't catch the babys he kills the bigguns.

Here are a couple innovative ideas

http://i1102.photobucket.com/albums/...ff/ShotRod.jpg

http://i1102.photobucket.com/albums/...psf88f2c7a.jpg

Fin, can I get those @ J&M ;-) LOL

I think an insulated cart like an ice-cream vendor's street cart could bring out bait for a price from the pier-house. On second thought, skip the bait just bring out the cart with ice cream or other refreshments.:drunk

lorans screwed fishing up enough lets concentrate on what we have ! if someone is kicking butt stop fishing and watch every thing he does !if they are not there we cant catch them .have fun n fish hard .

Doc, I have to go along with you on the loran. I started charter fishing with the old loran A which worked with varying degrees of inaccuracy, but required a good working knowledge of the bottom formations for you to be able to locate any structure. You could give somebody an A reading, and due to the variation from one machine to the next, there was a good chance he wouldn't be able to find the spot. Loran C changed that---once the numbers got out, the spot was gone, fished to death as one person gave it to the next. All progress is not always all good.

So who was it that shared the pier numbers ~ :rolleyes:

http://images.sodahead.com/polls/002..._6_xlarge.jpeg

Well that explains it.

We over fished the pier and now there's nothing left.

Probably Haywire's fault. All of those robust reports of his giving away the secret location on the Octi.

A friend of mine from Rockford is showing up tomorrow,You can recognize him by my red tractor supply cart with a blue56 qt. cooler on it,,heh heh that narrows it down to 50 folks.Told jarrod to look up the wire,,Hoping mr wire doesn't suggest that fished out spot..

Maybe one out of the box ideas should deal with habitat. If this was deer hunting, we'd be talking about food plots and cover and other best-practices for growing the herd. What's the difference, even when we're talking about saltwater species? Doesn't it still come down to food and habitat? Could rich habitat, vertical artificial reefs (covering different parts of the water column) and no-angling zones in the areas where these zones exist help? I know - who wants more laws, right? But maybe these new super-reefs could be designed in areas where nobody is fishing now anyway, because the area is relatively devoid of game fish? It's the 21st Century! We should be able to mark a no-angling zone using coordinates and the increase in fish stocks should allow us to increase the limits that the angler takes home! After all what good is a great idea if there's no benefit to the fisherman?

Yes and no.

Habitat (more of) yes.
But so-called NO FISHING ZONES are a farsicle invention of the NO FISHING PERIOD wacko movement.
It appeals to the emotions of people but the science doesn't back it up.
No Take Marine Protected Areas (nMPAs) as a fishery management tool

And this is just in relation to 'reef' species such as grouper, snapper, etc.
Pelagic species (mackerel, cobia, etc.) are even more free ranging which renders nMPA's even more impractical from an effective fish stock management perspective.

PP - Yeah, I'm just trying to think of ways to make fishing better/more productive. HowZa bout supplemental stocking for desirable species, like Cobia? I know -- the science isn't behind supplemental stocking, either. Is there anything other than the current limits and seasons that science DOES support? And has supplemental stocking been tried on such a massive scale?

Cobia are easily farmed for sale. Could they be farmed for release?

Certainly they COULD, but would it take, on a large scale? I think that it would be very cool to have a situation where cobia swam in schools of 100 or more! There would probably be a downside risk but marine biologists would likely be able to predict what those might be.

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Originally Posted by bodebum

Cobia are easily farmed for sale. Could they be farmed for release?

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They are. Just not in Alabama far as I know.

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Originally Posted by fish killer

you're right DHR gainer don't catch the babys he kills the bigguns.

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You need some tissue for that all that brown stuff on your face.

There were some released in Mississippi a year or two ago. Saw it in an article. Was something like a couple thousand released. Babies to grow up in the wild.

On the subjects of flying R/C drones, flying them around isn't hard. Fighting the ocean breeze and landing it back safely on a loaded octi would be difficult and would be enough to "earn your wings". Not sure it would be worth chancing a couple hundred bucks not including the GoPro.