Q. DRONE FISHING 101

WORDS & IMAGES: Jacques Venter*

It took nearly a hundred years to finally crack the digital code on stable flight for modern-day drones – eventually achieved in 2006 by China-based Frank Wang, the founder of the DJI company. He did this on the back of his Hong Kong engineering student project, creating a model helicopter flight controller for autonomous flight.

Today increasing numbers of shore based anglers are using drones to deliver their baits just about wherever they want them to be. When looking for a fishing drone, here are factors to consider before you buy:

• 1. What size is the typical bait you want to fly, no use to buy a 3,5kg payload drone if you almost always fly baits of under 1kg, a smaller drone will fly longer with a much smaller battery giving a substantially better user experience.
• 2. Would you like it waterproof? It is not essential but nice to have in case of emergency; and you can fly in the rain and not stress about the sea spray.
• 3. Do you want high definition live video so you can possibly see the fish? Several drones offer cameras but have terrible 480 live view resolutions making them useless at spotting fish.
• 4. If you want a camera it should be on a gimbal that you can control remotely so that you can look forward to where you are flying to, and then down to where you are dropping the bait.
• 5. Does it have an App with a map view showing the position and orientation of the drone? This can help al lot when you are 400m out and struggling to see which way the drone is facing. This same map should also give coordinates so that you can drop repeated baits in the same location; the best is to have the ability to save way points just like most boat navigation systems.
• 6. Flight time: the longer the better as it gives you more bait drops per charge.
• 7. Speed: the faster the more forgiving it will be in the wind and the less power it will use to fly against any breeze.
• 8. Release type: fail safe auto release is a must-have in case of reel jam or bird strike. Many drones have gone down because of reel jams and the inability to release the load fast enough.
• 9. Auto return home. This is a must-have as many times you are on fish before the drone is home, so it must be able to fly itself home and land while you fight your fish.
• 10.Telemetry is essential – you need to know how far, how high, GPS satellites and drone battery power. Guessing these will sooner or later cost you a drone
• 11. Would you want to use it for videos on other family trips? Then a more compact drone with a better 4K camera may be the answer, like the DJI Mavic 2.
• 12.If it is waterproof, can it turn itself upright if it happens to flip over in water?
• 13.Lights, bright ones – when flying early morning or late afternoon they help a lot and also serve as warning to other aircraft.
• 14.If waterproof are both the motor bearings accessible to lubricate without dismantling the drone or motors?
• 15.Lastly, local support and parts. This is a fairly complicated piece of equipment; you would want to have it serviced locally and not have to ship it abroad when something goes wrong.

When you finally take the step in getting a drone take some time to learn how to fly it. If it is a DJI it will be very easy as they are made for the masses and are sold in supermarkets without any expert advice. All the other bigger drones need a bit more getting used to although they can essentially fly themselves, but it is best to go and practice in a field before going down to the beach.

KEEP LEGAL

Read up on the local drone laws; In South Africa here are just the basics:

• max distance line of sight 500m;

• Max hight 46m above ground level (this is for hobby use – for professional use it is 400ft/ 120m);

• Do not fly over people, or property that is not yours;

• Do not fly within 50m of a public road, building or people;

• Do not fly within 10km of any airport;

• Do not fly at night.

RIG IT RIGHT!

Learn to rig the drone right, many people have lost their drones due to doing it wrong and following the wrong advice.

• Always use a dedicated drop-loop to attach the load to the drone;

• Never use a release that loads the drone even slightly off center; loading any one or two motors more than the others loses a lot of power and stability;

• Never overload the drone;

• Never fly on a low battery;

• Make sure your home point is saved before takeoff;

• Make sure you did the needed calibrations;

• Check your craft: are the props on right and tight? no warning lights, battery level, is the line attached right? is it safe to fly?

• Is the load at least 3m below the drone? Shorter will result in a pendulum action that sooner or later can and will sink the drone.

DRONE FISHING …THE BEGINNINGS

The popularity of Drone Fishing is growing globally as a totally new facet of Angling. The first quad copter was designed back in 1907 by inventor brothers Jacques and Louis Bréguet, but it was incredibly difficult to control with the analog controls of the day, and it took nearly a hundred years to finally crack the digital code on stable flight, achieved in 2006 by Chinese based Frank Wang, the founder of DJI. He did this on the back of his Hong Kong engineering student project, creating a model helicopter flight controller for autonomous flight.

The world of drones became a reality, with their first product the Naza drone flight controller, used by amateurs and professionals to build and fly their own drones. Parrot was first to market in 2010 with a consumer ready to fly drone, and soon after in January, 2013 DJI launched the Phantom 1 and from there on have produced numerous drone models with sales of far over 5 million drones globally, dominating the camera drone market with the best and most advanced drone technology in the world. The drone market has since exploded with DJI dominating more than 70% of the global drone market making Frank the world’s first drone $US billionaire.

Today we have drones everywhere – from night vision search and rescue, firefighting, cinematography, pest control, agricultural pesticide drones, mine surveying and research drones collecting whale excrement in mid-air in the wild as whales breathe, we even have one on its way to fly in the atmosphere of Mars.

As for fishing drones it was just the natural next step. It was not long after the first DJI drone came to market that anglers in Hawaii saw the potential of using a drone to fly their baits off the cliffs in Hawaii to where they could never cast on days they couldn’t use kites. Here drone fishing was born using the Phantom 2 and some makeshift bait release system which in Hawaii was typically tying a bamboo chopstick to the legs of the drone. From Hawaii it spread around the world to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa; in most countries the Phantom 2 was the first choice, being relatively inexpensive and dead easy to fly.

In 2012 the world’s first waterproof drone was made by AquaCopter, they unfortunately were a little ahead of their time and did not see the potential in using drones for fishing. They unfortunately closed doors in 2015 despite being the true pioneers of the waterproof drone. In New Zealand Aerokontiki in 2014 started building dedicated fishing drones from off the shelf kits and components – they were possibly the first to assemble true purpose-built fishing drones. There they legally fly 25 hook kontiki lines with loads of 2kg to 1km out from the beach with these massive 6 rotor drones that have reserve power to lift up-to a 7kg load. They are also possibly the most expensive fishing drones in the market today, selling for upwards of $6000 (R100,000) in 2015.

Here in South Africa Gary McDonogh from Hobby-Center based in Edenvale was assembling and selling racing and toy drones, and on the request of a client saw a new market to build bigger purpose assembled drones for fishing. With an aluminium H frame, a Tupperware lunch box as a bait container, assembled with standard off the shelf Chinese electronics, motors and radio, it worked and CutaCopter was born. They have since grown and now produce 2 models. Because injection moulding tooling is extremely expensive and very time consuming to produce they opted for the age old and more cost effective vacuum thermo forming of ABS plastic over wooden forms as their manufacturing process of choice to produce the low cost shoe box body design as making a new form can literally be done in a single day. In the early days the brand became popular amongst the shark fisherman in the absence of any competitor being able to carry big shark baits.

ENTER THE GANNET

In 2016, nearly a year later, I saw a viral video of Australian guys catching tuna direct from a Phantom 3 drone: they tied the line to the drone with a weak rubber band, lowered the very light drift bait to visible tuna, same as done with kites from shore and boats. The tuna would take the bait and pull in one direction, while they pulled in another and the drone finally broke  free from the band. It was not a particularly safe way of doing it, but it worked for them. At that time I just happened to have given my son a Phantom 3 as a present and that was it, we had to give it a go. The sand bank in front of my beach house stretches about 160m-180m in and it is impossible to cast over it, but the drone would make that possible.

I spent some time on YouTube and found other Australians rigging up a coat hanger to the drone – it’s just a hook that faces forward on which you hook your line, fly it out, turn the drone around and it should just pop off. I was instantly hooked! It worked great for about a dozen times and then I had a reel jam and instantly the drone was sunk; fortunately the line went into the props so I could sadly wind the dead drone back in. But what a terribly expensive day! The next day a second drone washed up on the beach in front of my house – it had the same coat hanger trick on it with the bait still attached. The coat hanger was clearly a very bad idea! Next trick was using a standard down-rigger clip, but I nearly sunk my second drone as a downrigger is not very reliable and often gets stuck failing to release.

Being an inventor by trade I set my mind to work and soon came up with a much better release – it is electric and can be triggered from the drone’s main remote. I had a guy build me the electronics and I built the mechanics and that solved it. It worked so well that I decided to start DroneFishing.com which became Gannet, and  within 6 weeks we were up and running selling internationally. At first, I 3D-printed the release bodies in sintered nylon with the Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) process but as soon as I could get moulds made switched to the much better high quality of injection moulding.

Gannet grew rapidly gaining a huge following on social media now nearing 100,000 followers. I did the design and test work and my 3 small factories made releases for all the popular DJI and other drones. At first it was just Gannet but soon many little DIY guys started to copy us, guys from everywhere, Israel, Greece, New Zealand, Australia and also South Africa. To stay ahead we innovated and made better and better releases, fail safe mechanical ones, electromechanical ones, patenting several of them to try to stop the onslaught of the unethical and inevitable copy cats.

Gannet has become so well known internationally that people now refer to just about any release system on a drone as a “Gannet”. To date we have exported to well over 100 countries –  China, Chile, Japan and Greenland now having over 20,000 clients globally fishing with a Gannet on their drones, and so have become the world leader in drone fishing by means of sheer numbers with the largest and best product range of any drone company related to fishing.

But it is not just fishing that these releases are used for; in New Zealand they are used to drop weed killers in inaccessible locations and saving sheep; in the USA they used to drop fake ducks to train hunting dogs; in Brazil we have them installing amateur radio antennas over massive trees; in Norway pulling lead lines over fjords to install power lines; dropping life vests in several countries; making firefighting fire breaks and delivering Covid tests in the USA – the list goes on and on for practical use of drone payload deployment. We have even supplied large numbers of releases to the US government and several drone delivery companies. In 2018 Gannet also became the first company to make dedicated drone fishing rods, shorter than a casting beach rod that just gets pulled flat by any big fish, but longer than a boat rod to keep the line out of the front breakers and to help lift the line when running over the rocks, yet short enough to give less leverage to the fish helping to fight a big fish much faster with less effort.

Since then several local stores and brands have joined in, making their own versions of drone rods giving anglers several options. 2018 also saw Sharkan, owned by Craig Neil join in the building of dedicated fishing drones, bigger and stronger than the DJI drones that Gannet was focused on. The principal being similar to Cuta Copter and other hobby drone makers like AquaCopter (2012) from the USA. Using off the shelf Chinese electronics, motors and batteries, combined with a custom made vacuum-formed ABS plastic frame in the right combination you end up with a very effective fishing drone able to fly baits of over 3kg to 500m and more on heavy tackle.

In China SwellPro started to produce a waterproof GoPro camera drone in December 2013 called the Mariner – it’s a clear copy of the earlier AquaCopter. In 2015 they switched and started to produce the first Splash drones with their own gimbaled camera suspended below it. They later converted that to a fishing drone by adding a line release after seeing the drone fishing market expand. They are currently the world leader in waterproof drones as they had little competition at first, but their current SwellPro SplashDrone 3+ is limited to a 1kg payload making it far less desirable to the serious sports angler.

In 2017 Rippton Mobula, another Chinese company started to develop their version of a fishing drone. Initially it was stated to be waterproof but when it finally made it to market in late 2019 in New Zealand it was downgraded to water resistant and unable to land on water. It’s a massive drone tipping the scale at 5,7kg with a flight time of just 15min despite its massive 6S 10,000mAh battery. It has a comparatively low max payload of just 2,5kg. Its mass makes it essentially useless to the South African market that has a legal max take off mass of 7kg for recreational drone use, so loading it with 2kg payload puts it out of the hobby use drone class. They have spent a lot of time and money on App, hardware and software development so we are sure to see them bring a second smaller drone to the market sometime in the future.

GANNET TODAY

In 2019 Gannet decided to also make the move and produce a dedicated fully waterproof fishing and SAR drone as after years of toying with the idea we finally decided it was time. Gannet has the best and safest drone release systems in the world and it would only be fitting that we also produced the best fishing drones, so we spent 1000’s of hours designing the body work and invested millions in the best possible tooling, with all parts custom made, nothing being an off the shelf component with the exception of the DJI Naza MV2 flight controller, a rather expensive but vital component in drones (after all DJI is the world leader in camera and agricultural drones). Their flight control systems are very stable and combined with our unique airframe with class leading aerodynamics enabled us to achieve our goal of once again setting the bar for others to try and match.

The small Gannet Pro can lift an astounding 3,8kg with its bigger brother, the Gannet Pro+, doing just over 6kg, giving plenty reserve power to fly a 3,5kg bait to as far as you want.

We launched with 3 basic models: the water-resistant Gannet Lite at only R9,999, the fully waterproof Gannet Pro at R19,999 and the powerful Gannet Pro+ at R24,500. The Gannet is the first consumer quality drone designed in South Africa, exporting globally to numerous countries.

* Jacques Venter is managing director of Gannet; Tel: +27 21 001 8852.

See also: www.gannet.co.za; www.dronefishing.com