Installing a Fishfinder on the Jackson Liska

One thing that will greatly increase your productivity and confidence on the water is a good quality sonar. Fortunately for us, Jackson has teamed up with Raymarine Electronics to offer a transducer scupper specially designed to fit the Dragonfly family of sonars. For my Liska I chose to go with the Dragonfly 7pro sonar, and the installation could not be any easier thanks to the thoughtful layout under the center hatch. Jackson has placed the transducer scupper right in the middle of the boat, under the center hatch, and provided a small channel to run your cable up to the forward bulkhead. This allows you to keep the cable flush with the floor so your tackle is less likely to hang up on it, as well as minimizing the number of holes you have to drill in your brand new kayak.

For the installation, I started with mounting the transducer in the scupper and worked my way forward to the display screen. To hold the transducer in place and provide a clean looking installation I used a Lowrance brand mounting kit. I chose this kit primarily for the flush fitting cap and the foam scupper insert to keep the cables in place. A word of advice if you choose to use this kit, the included threaded rod and transducer mount will not work. I recommend using a bungee cord tied to the transducer mounting hole and run that up to the cap, this way if you to hit anything the bungee cord has some give to lessen the likelihood of damaging the transducer.

Once the transducer was mounted simply lay the cable in the grove running to front of the tray area. I chose to use hot glue to keep it in place but feel free to use any sort of glue/epoxy you would like.

After the glue is set move on to getting the display. Drill a hole in the hatch cover at a few inches forward of the gear track. Use a small hole saw big enough to pass the connector though and utilize the pass-through cover provided in the kit to cover the hole and keep the wires in place.

Raymarine and most other sonar companies designed these units to be run on larger boats so you will have quite a few feet of extra cable to contend with. The easiest way I have found to manage this is to loop the cable up and use zip-tie to keep them together. Pay close attention however, because you do not want to kink or twist the cable too much otherwise you may damage it or cause unwanted interference. When you do this make sure to leave enough of the power cable loose to make attaching the battery easier.

Now that you have this bundle of wires neatly wrapped up, you’ll have to find a way to attach them in an out of the way location. For this installation I riveted in 2 sets of Pad-eyes back to back on the latch side of the hatch. The inner eyes are used to zip tie the cables neatly out of the way and the outside ones provide additional locations to attach any number of gizmos we fisherman/women bring with us on the water.

Speaking of the battery, I purchased the Noqua Adventure Gear 10aHr lithium ion pack to power the sonar and my Power Pole. Wiring the power is a fairly straight forward affair, the only part you will need to source is a water proof fuse holder, but those can be found at most auto or marine parts store. Connect red to red and black to black, add a dab or two of solder and some heat shrink and you are finished with the wiring portion of this project. All thats left if to mount the screen the hatches gear track and hit the water.

– James Schlingmann