Hydrowave - Fact or Fiction?

Total Score: 8.00 - GREAT

Introduction: When I joined TackleTour roughly eleven years ago, I was stoked. How lucky was I to have the opportunity to combine two of my favorite past times in fishing and photography with a third - my passion for sharing information about new and exciting gear with my friends. Unfortunately, what I discovered was the deeper we get into tackle testing, the further we remove ourselves from the very basic, and seemingly simple task at hand of actually catching fish.

Thanks to Jeff Kriet, we decided to give this unit a try.

Don't get me wrong, we still manage to catch them, but the review process for any particular piece of tackle can be very long or very short depending upon, and not limited to at least two very important factors: 1) the opportunity for our team to get on the water together, and 2) The actual bite that is or is not happening at the time. That's partly why you see us fishing the gear we test in such unconventional ways. If only there were a tool to tip the scales in our favor so we could make the most of our time on the water fishing and testing gear.

Installation is simple with the speaker fitting right on the trolling motor with these supplied zip ties.

Last Fall, I spent some time on the water with BASS Elite Series Pro, Jeff Kriet. I was attending the Spro/Gamakatsu writer's conference and we were paired together on the very last day during the annual turkey shoot. It had been a tough bite all week - as it usually is when you get a bunch of media members out on the water at the same time - and that morning was none too different. I noticed Kriet had a Hydrowave unit on his boat so I asked him to turn it on to which he replied, he was just about to do that.

The only trick was fitting it on the trolling motor along with my depth finder's transducer.

We continued to fish down this particular weed line, then about fifteen to twenty minutes later turned back up to cover the same area again. Perhaps by coincidence or maybe because of that Hydrowave unit, when we turned back over the area we just covered, the fish started to bite! That was enough to convince me to give this unit a try back on our home waters.

A slight offset of their alignment allowed for the cable to clear the transducer.

Construction/Quality: As boat devices go, the Hydrowave unit is relatively small measuring four by four by one and half (4 x 4 x 1.5) inches. The speaker unit is bulkier than I would have thought and about the same size as an average sized depth finder's transducer. Assembly and construction of the unit and its speaker is good. It's hard to expect much from a device such as this that's built to sit on the deck of your boat in the sun all day long.

Once installed, it's a matter of turning it on and selecting the noise pattern (Power Pattern shown here).

Installation of the unit is very straight forward. The unit sits in a metal bracket and is held in place by two knob screws on either side. Simply detach the unit from the bracket and find a convenient spot on your deck for mounting. There's plenty of cable to run from the speaker unit to the device itself, and the wires to run power, split off from that same cable. You may or may not need to run extra wire from your battery or fuse box depending on how things are set up in your boat. I had some pre-existing wires run from the fuse box to the depth finder on my front deck, so I tapped into that. All in all, installation took maybe an hour with most of that time trying to figure out where to put the unit before I began drilling any holes into my deck.

There are several supplied patterns and which one is the right choice in your situation is anyone's guess (deep bait shown here).