This summer, right after ICAST, I finally got to ride on a boat that was kitted out with both Seakeeper systems, the Seakeeper Ride, and Seakeeper Gyro Stabilizer. While I’ve seen plenty of clips online of the Seakeeper Gyro and Seakeeper Ride in action, without actually riding on a boat set up with them, I still had my doubts. So, with the famous phrase “Seeing is believing, but feeling is truth,” here’s what I felt after a day on the water with Seakeeper.
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After an early morning drive from the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando to Cape Canaveral, and entering the State Park by accident, I finally made it to Freddie Patrick Park Boat Ramp, where I met up with everyone. We were being taken out by Seakeeper Ride on their Sportsman Open 262 demo boat, with Captain Morgan Harnay at the helm. The plan for the day was to run straight out of Cape Canaveral and get out past the Splash Pad to some structure to try and troll for some fish. The forecast the night before said it would be a relatively flat day for the Atlantic with 1 to 2 ft waves with a 5-second wave period. The reality of while we were making our run out past the Space Coast “Splash Pad” was closer to 2 to 3 ft waves with a 4-second period, with an occasional bigger roller coming through.
So nothing rough besides the rollers, but just enough to really show the bigger benefits of the Seakeeper Ride system. As a replacement system for traditional trim tabs, this system stabilizes the boat while you’re on the move. Using technology, sensors, and proprietary software to read the wave motion on the fly and rapidly deploy the rotary blades to make up to 100 adjustments every second as you’re running to stabilize the ride. It honestly is an odd sensation running with the Ride system engaged. The best way to describe it is that the edge is taken off the waves as you’re moving. The software and blades work together to keep the bow as level as possible as you move, making it comfortable to stand, even at speed. I really appreciated us not slapping back down hard on the hull after going over a roller at speed. After a week of walking the ICAST show floor and an uncomfortable hotel bed, my lower back and knees really appreciated the job the Seakeeper Ride was doing out there.
So after a relatively short and comfortable ride out, we reached the first spot and set out some lines to troll along the edge. Using the outriggers, we got five lines out: one shotgun with tuna birds and a plug, two rigged ballyhoo on the outriggers, and two more ballyhoo on flat lines. We were hoping for some pelagics like mahi, blackfin tuna, kingfish, and maybe even a wahoo if we got lucky. The graph showed some marks mid-water column, so it looked good. And as the icing on the cake, Captain Morgan turned on the Seakeeper Gyro Stabilizer on top of the Ride system. With both systems engaged, we had stabilization fore & aft and port & starboard as we were trolling. Honestly, it was pretty weird how stable the boat became in just an instant. While it wasn’t perfectly still, the wave action was significantly dampened.
While all of us media guys were going “whoa” over the cool sensation of the Seakeepers engaging, we were quickly brought back to the fishing by one of the riggers popping and the reel’s clicker screaming. Then the other rigger line goes, and then so does one of the flat lines. We had run into a school of something, and with nothing jumpin’, we were hoping it was a bunch of blackfin tuna. Well, unfortunately, as we’re clearing the other two lines, that first fish pulls off, but we manage to land the other two. Both of them are bonita, or false albacore, for you guys up north. Not a great eating fish, but they put up a good fight and make for excellent bait. Also, my cats love them for dinner, so I put one on ice. After the chaos was settled, we put out all the lines again and promptly got bites on two of the lines again. One on a flat line and the other on the shotgun, which Kim did a great job of landing herself as her first saltwater fish.
After some quick photos, we sent those two fish on their way and decided to move spots. While the bonita are fun, they weren’t our target species. So we pulled in all the lines and ran south to try to find some green pastures. This proved to be futile, while we found plenty of bait as we went. It seems we had beaten the predators to the bait and had no luck after another hour or two of trolling the ballyhoos. But at least it was a comfortable ride with both Seakeeper systems engaged and the slight breeze to keep us cool in the Florida heat. Eventually, as we were running short on time, we decided to try some bottom fishing on the way back in. We had plenty of defrosted ballyhoo that needed to be used, as well as a partially defrosted chum block.
So after a quick run, we found some live bottom with life on it and turned the Gyro Stabilizer back on. Bottom fishing with no side-to-side movement of a boat is honestly great. I don’t get seasick, but a lot of my family does, and this would help them out so much. After a few circles over the spot to get the right drift, we sent down a jig and some chicken rigs to try and catch whatever was living 120ft down. All the while we were putting out the chum. We did get a few bites here and there and even caught a small black sea bass, but we really weren’t finding any vermillion snappers or red porgies as we had hoped. But we had a last-minute buzzer-beater show up with a big school of mahi show up around the boat. The chum had worked and drawn in all these mahi. So, using a chicken rig with a couple of pieces of ballyhoo, I hooked up on one and left it in the water to keep the school swimming around the boat.
With the mahi sticking around, we started putting out more chum and chunks of squid and ballyhoo to get the fish fired up some more. With a couple of the spinning rods, we started just pitching chunks of bait out to let everyone have a turn hooking up a mahi, and even managed to land a few keepers to put in the box. And while we would have been happy to mess with the mahi for longer, a few of us had flights to catch that day, so we had to call it quits for the day. So we packed everything in, sprayed down the deck some, and made for home.
While we hadn’t really caught the quantity or quality of fish we had hoped for that day, it was still a great day on the water. Especially after a week of being indoors surrounded by fishing gear but unable to fish, it was a great time on the water, made only better by the Seakeeper systems. Feeling the Seakeeper Ride was definitely the truth this day; those videos I had seen were legit. While these systems won’t make a choppy day feel like a perfect glassy one, they sure do help stabilize a boat like nothing else.
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