Vent: Used to hand-line my dredge cuts, now I run DGPS and it's a different ballgame

I spent the first 12 years on the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge just eyeballing my swing with a hand line and markers on the bank. Last year, the company finally put a Trimble DGPS on my 12-inch Ellicott, and I can hold a 2-foot tolerance without even looking up. Took me three weeks to trust the screen over my gut feeling. Any of you old-timers still refuse to ditch the manual methods?

2 comments

2 Comments

jordan4641mo ago

My buddy Mike on the Illinois River had his DGPS go down during a night shift last spring. He was 4 hours into a 12-hour swing and had to switch back to hand-lining blind. He said it was like learning to walk all over again except in the dark with a 30-foot cutterhead scope. Took him two days to stop glancing at the dead screen every 30 seconds.

lee_ward541mo ago

Jumped off GPS cold turkey last fall on the Atchafalaya when my antenna mount cracked, ended up using a compass and a stopwatch to guess my position. @jordan464 is right, that dead screen habit is brutal, I kept poking it for hours like a dummy. Took me a solid week to stop second-guessing my marks on the bank.