I got my first peek at the HDS Gen2 today when John Minnie of Lowrance SA met me at Inanda for a joint ‘First Impressions’ session.
First of all, it is a slightly darker shade, both front and back. I like the darker frame as it seems to make the screen pop just that little bit more.
Start-up time is also slightly quicker, by around 6 seconds.
HDS8 – 28.1 sec
HDS8 Gen2 – 22.6 sec
The first real noticeable difference was when I started navigating through the menu while both sonar and charts were active. There was no noticeable lag whatsoever between the keystrokes like that on the first generation HDS’s
The loading and refreshing of the charts is also a lot faster than the first generation HDS’s.
Then I got my first glimpse of the StructureMap feature. It is nothing short of amazing, as you watch your SideScan data being ‘painted’ over your contour charts in real time.
Here you have a choice of either just letting the data run live with an active path of a few minutes in length, or you can select ‘Log Data’ with the option to convert to a StructureMap once recording is complete. While recording, the live data is still only few minutes long, but the entire recording is being saved either to the unit’s hard drive or an SD memory card. Once the recording is complete, you can change the ‘live’ view to the ‘saved’ view thus creating a life like chart of the bottom as an overlay on your contour charts.
This whole process is surprisingly quick and painless as it took us less than 15 minutes to do three parallel passes of around 350 meters each with a coverage range of 200ft per pass. In these 15 minutes we pretty had the entire bay mapped and were ready to go looking for fish.
Identifying key structure such as this standing timber in 35ft of water is easily detected on the 50kHz and 800kHz DownScan as we use the StructureMap to navigate back to it without having to save dozens of waypoints that ultimately just clutter the screen eventually. In this case we immediately see that it is not holding fish so we move on.
From the StructureMap on the left it is easy to see that we have passed what seems to be a steep little drop off into a flat channel bed, then a rise with some rocks on it. The two frequencies on the right confirm this, only adding critical information such as profile of channel, size of rocks, and even two short pieces of standing timber that could easily have been mistaken for fish if it were not for the DownScan. Some suspended fish can also be seen in the water column in the 50kHz view.
I noticed this large group of rocks right on the edge of an old channel on the StructureMap, so I decided to approach it from right angles for maximum profile accuracy and detail for my DownScan. Now if it were not for the Gen2’s StructureMap feature, this amazing combination of channel, ledge and rock would merely be a single waypoint or two on a blank chart. But with a life-like chart of the bottom structure to navigate by it is an absolute breeze. And what do you know, it has a couple of fish suspended just a couple of feet above the rocks.
Then we decided to follow the channel with the main rocks to our right looking for fish suspending all along the edge of the channel close to the rocks. And as you can see from the 50kHz, it was loaded with fish. I dropped a zoom Fluke into these rocks and within seconds got a tap, but missed it. The second time I was ready and set the hook properly, but my Steeze’s drag just ran with the 20lb braid and I started thinking about a possible 3 – +4kg. But as it came to the surface, with disappointment I saw that it was a huge eel, which eventually managed to chew through the braid. Certainly got the juices flowing though.
To conclude this ‘First Impressions Session’, I can safely say with a big grin across my face, that this is yet again another mind blowing feature that Lowrance has added to it’s score card. So, “will StructureMap help you catch more fish when targeting offshore structure?” … What do you think? 
I will be doing a more technical review within the next week or so, so keep coming back to check what we have found out about the HDS Gen2.
