Exclusive | Cutting-edge AI allows Long Island boaters to see through pea soup fog, target fish with precision

Capt.Eric Collins recently boated through “9/10 treacherous fog” off the inlet by Jones Beach to the point he couldn’t lay eyes on half a dozen vessels coming toward his Southport 33FE.“The weather was horrific as far as fog goes,” Collins, a marina owner and fisherman from Massapequa, told The Post.

“We refer to it in the marine world as pea-soup fog, where you could barely see, maybe 50 to 60 feet in front of your boat.”However, Collins has a difference on board that makes miserable pea-soup days much more manageable and safer — cutting-edge AI by New York City-based tech startup Viam, which enables his instruments to communicate with one another in a highly sophisticated way.“At no point was today something that I would consider an easy, navigable day,” he said.“This makes it a better experience for everybody on the water.”These advanced safety features, responsible for spotting where the six boats came from, are just one of Viam’s new offshore advances.

The AI firm is also utilizing machine learning to make it exponentially easier to spot and catch fish, serving as an industry game-changer.“What’s out there now on boats is just a picture with a bunch of green blobs on it,” Viam CEO Eliot Horowitz told The Post.“Ours is, ‘hey, there’s a 75% chance it’s a fish 300 feet to the right.” Horowitz, who grew up catching striped bass on the Long Island Sound, has seen firsthand that high-tech hardware, such as HD radar, sonar, and GPS, typically isn’t worth its price tag.He said it’s because their software interfaces are often anything but user-friendly, to the point that mariners want to smash their radios like Capt.

Quint from “Jaws.”“If you ask most boaters, they don’t really know how to use them very well.They’re hard to manage,” Horowitz said.Now, the emerging AI from Viam creates easy-to-read data from instrumentation.A quick glance at a boat’s console shows the predicted location of fish with a clear ...