I haven’t had an opportunity to try one yet, so take my comments with a grain of salt……
When I bought an I-Pilot last year, I was really excited for the I-Link to come out to tie the trolling motor together with the locator, but to be honest, I’m a bit disappointed in the features offered. I do think having the tracks, and spot locks on the locator and being able to control from there would be very nice, but the tolling by following a contour on the map chip doesn’t get me too excited. The map chips just aren’t anywhere near accurate enough for most lakes I fish for this to be useful. I do alot of trolling and typically fish shoreline breaks. In areas where the break is fairly steep, the depth can easily very by up to 10 feet from what the map says which would have my cranks digging bottom often times. When I manually try to troll along a depth contour by using the current “shading” available, I’m quite a bit out of my depth target much more than I’m in it. I suppose this is likely because I fish many lakes that aren’t as popular as the big tournament lakes, so the contour maps aren’t as accurate.
What did I hope the I-link would do? I had hoped I could sit down on a computer with a lake map up and plot out trolling passes which I could later re-create on the water. This would allow me to take my knowledge of the lake into account (fix known inaccuracies in the map) and plan my trolling pass accordingly. Even better yet would be the ability to fix known problems with the contour lines. Right now what I often do when the contour lines are way off is I zig zag back and forth accross my targeted depth contour, and place a waypoint right on the right depth. If you put enough of these in a row along the shoreline break, you can follow it with the I-Pilot and record a track. Doing this manually is cool, but is a chore. Having the ability to save that and not having to re-create would be really cool!
I just bought a new boat, but am passing on I-Link at this time.
