Lucas’s Hobie Pro Angler, a Lowrance testing platform

Navico product manager Lucas Steward may look like he’s having fun, but he really is putting a lot of Lowrance gear through its paces. Really. When I got chatting with him during an early morning Miami demo (more on that soon) and he mentioned that he does some testing aboard his Hobie Mirage Pro Angler, I pictured perhaps an Elite-5 DSI fishfinder/plotter mounted on its deck. But it turned out that Steward had a much grander vision for his 14-foot pedal boat…

Yup, that’s an HDS10 Gen2 multi function display on the starboard rail of the Hobie, and that’s not all..

In the shot below you can also see the iPhone and memory stick dock for a Sonic Hub audio system along with the dual speakers mounted on the foredeck. It doesn’t look like the stereo separation could be very good, but Lucas reports that he can really feel the bass…  

And here you can see both Broadband Sonar and Structure Scan transducers mounted on the Hobie’s carrying handle with RAM handlebar mounts. If Steward weren’t changing transducers frequently, he says he’d use the special Lowrance Scupper Mounts designed for fishing kayaks (note that he hosts that page’s video)…

Yes, there’s side looking sonar on what’s only slightly more boat than a kayak. That means there’s an Ethernet connection from the LSS black box below to the HDS and there’s also that tiny NMEA 2000 backbone so the HDS can talk with the Sonic Hub black box. I don’t know if this equipment accounts for that sizable largemouth bass seen at the top, but this this sure looks like a good rig for testing waterproofness among other things. Incidentally, Lucas says he can run this whole system for at least 8 hours on this AGM jet ski battery (he loves “testing”). Has anyone ever seen so much electronics on such a small boat?