He says that in some instances he’ll drop his bait and fish it while still looking through the scope. Dobson has used his to identify deep grass types and bottom content changes, and even to spot bass on deep grass or structure. Obviously, water clarity would limit the effective viewing range, but there are plenty of clear-water impoundments throughout the continent where it might have similar uses. Editor’s note: This story was first published in July of 2017 and updated slightly in June of 2021.)

Dobson says the bathyscopes he’s encountered have only a clear viewing lens with no magnification. The funnel shape of the Flogger expands the viewing range, and by extending his arms and tipping the cone side to side, Dobson can see out 10 yards or so to the side. Using no-stretch braided line above his fluorocarbon leader and fishing with a drop-shot both help with the hookset. The drop-shot hook is very fine and requires little pressure to penetrate. It also hooks the fish in the jaw or side of the mouth most of the time, which is desirable over the larger tube hook he uses because, according to Dobson, the tube hook sometimes hooks fish deep in the roof of the mouth, where it can cause unnecessary injury. At Champlain, anglers were not allowed to cull fish that were starting to expire and couldn’t swim away. He says the drop-shot was much less likely to cause that type of severe or mortal wound, which protected the fish and negated the possibility of having to keep a fish that he otherwise might have been able to cull. Fix your length of pipe and the corner section together. Seal the join with the sealant to make sure it's watertight Chapter 11" (PDF). Wet Paper. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-09-11 . Retrieved 2008-09-25. Under the time constraints of a tournament practice and competition day, it’s important to have an efficient search system, particularly if incorporating a bathyscope into the process.

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Timeline of diving technology– Chronological list of notable events in the history of underwater diving equipment Use the sealant to fix your sheet of glass or plexiglass over the short end of the pipe. This is the end that will go into the water, so make sure it is fixed in place and watertight. A length of downpipe, any diameter, round or square. The longer this section of pipe, the deeper your periscope will go. If you are planning to use it with a camera, make sure the lens will fit down the pipe for ease of use. You can buy this from a DIY shop or use offcuts from other projects. I think a lot of guys can see beds, but they can’t see if the fish is actually in the bed,” Dobson says, referring specifically to smallmouths. “Up here in the northern lakes in Michigan, a lot of fish will spawn deeper than 8 feet. If it’s flat calm and sunny and the water is clear, you can see the bed, you can see the fish on it and you can judge the size of the fish. When you get beds deeper than that, say up to 12 or 15 feet, or you get ripples or drops of rain, it’s much harder to see them and judge their size. When you drop that bathyscope in the water it basically takes the glare and ripple off the surface. Once you get a trained eye and you do it enough, you can kind of gauge the size of the fish.” A plastic tub/bottle/pipe - the taller this bit is, the further away from the water your face will be when you're viewing the underwater world - and the wider the base, the more you'll see in one go. A traffic cone shape is ideal; a bottle will work well too.

The float is filled with gasoline because it is readily available, buoyant, and, for all practical purposes, incompressible. The incompressibility of the gasoline means the tanks can be very lightly constructed, since the pressure inside and outside the tanks equalises, eliminating any differential. By contrast, the crew cabin must withstand a huge pressure differential and is massively built. Buoyancy at the surface can be trimmed easily by replacing gasoline with water, which is denser. [ citation needed] Auguste Piccard, inventor of the first bathyscaphe, composed the name bathyscaphe using the Ancient Greek words βαθύς ( bathús), meaning "deep", and σκάφος ( skáphos), meaning "vessel, ship". Not to be confused with Bathysphere. Bathyscaphe Trieste before its only dive into the Mariana Trench The Trieste in 1958 The market is dominated by some manufacturers such as: Osculati, Reef Tourer, Educational Insights. You can buy a bathyscope, but we think it’s much more fun to make your own. It’s also a lot less expensive because it’s free!

Scott Dobson, who’s also from Michigan, is one of the anglers who adopted the bathyscope for bass tournament fishing. He used it extensively to finish ninth on Champlain, where the tournament days coincided with a surge in deep smallmouth bedding activity. Modern devices for finding bass usually require some sort of battery power source to use them in a boat, but at the 2017 FLW Series event on Lake Champlain the device that got the most attention from fans who followed along was a big orange cone that anglers were peering through while leaning over their gunwales. Artist's rendering of the bathyscaphe Trieste, the vehicle that carried Swiss scientist Jacques Piccard and U.S. Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench on January 23, 1960. The Trieste descended to a depth of 10,916 metres (35,814 feet), the deepest dive on record. (more)