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Fishing with a drone


28 Jun 2022 00:00:00 | Update: 28 Jun 2022 00:44:46
Fishing with a drone

The giant trevally, a stubborn and powerful apex predator, is one of Hawai‘i’s most coveted game fish. Hiding out in coral reefs and caves, the fish is tough to see when fishing from shore. But Brandon Barques, a 35-year-old construction worker in Honolulu, knows how to find it.

Watching through the video feed streaming to his phone, Barques sends a flying drone carrying a fishing line out over the surf, searching for large sandy canals and depressions in the seafloor. When he finds the right spot, he triggers the drone to drop the line. Then he calls the drone back—and waits for a bite.

Among anglers, smaller trevally are called papio, but fish over 4.5 kilograms are known as ulua. Barques has been fishing since he was young but says he’d never caught a proper ulua until he started using a drone. In 2017, with the assistance of his metallic companion, he finally landed a 54-kilogram giant. Drone fishing is a new world, he says. “It changes the way we fish and the way we think.”

As drones have become more commercially available over the past decade, recreational fishers have discovered a new way to scout for fish and cast a line. Some newer flying drones are purpose built for fishing—they’re waterproof and can carry heavy loads of bait. Amateur anglers can even get their hands on a submarine drone armed with sonar and a light-up lure.

While some videos appear to show anglers hooking and hauling in fish with drones, most of these devices weigh only a few kilograms, making it unlikely that they could reliably reel in fish, especially heavy fish like ulua. But they can carry a hook farther than even the most expertly cast line.

Barques sees fishing with drones as just another set of difficult skills to master. “I’ve seen a lot of people give up,” he says. “They buy a [US] $3,000 drone and fish for months … and still never catch anything. So I can’t say it’s cheating.” He says drones have also made it possible for people with mobility issues, like his uncle, to fish for ulua.

But not everyone shares Barques’s excitement for these high-tech fishing assistants. Within the fishing community, some anglers are questioning the wisdom and fairness of fighting fish with robots.

“Let’s just take all the sport out of sportfishing,” a user named slonezp wrote sarcastically in a 2015 discussion thread on bassresource.com. Others complain that buzzing drones disrupt the peaceful atmosphere they associate with fishing, with one user calling them “oversized mosquitoes.” But some recreational fishermen believe drones are no worse than other technologies, like sonar fish finders and GPS navigation, that give them an edge.

In recent years, the dissent against drone fishing has reached the halls of government. Several US states, including Michigan and Oregon, have already banned fishing or hunting with drones.

South Africa enacted a ban on drone fishing last year after researchers documented internet videos of fishers catching protected sharks, like the dusky shark. More recently, a bill introduced this year to the Hawai‘i legislature seeks to ban using “unmanned aerial vehicles for the purpose of taking aquatic life.” While an earlier draft of the bill banned the use of drones for aerial surveillance, the latest version allows it and only bans using drones to transport fishing gear like lines and bait. The bill has passed both houses and is awaiting signature by the governor.

Smithsonian

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