TECH SPOTLIGHT: Game Raiser To Advance Future SFC Competition
SFC and Game Raiser are aligned in advancing offshore sportfishing through revolutionary technological development
An often overused term in fishing is game changer. While having a conversation dockside, on a boat, at a boat show, and admittedly, uttered a few times by Robbie Floyd and Peter Miller on our broadcasts, you’ve probably heard everything down to an additional cupholder placement on a boat called “a real game changer.”
This past week during SFC’s coverage of the Hurricane Hole Louisiana Open, presented by XTRATUF, a real game changer was introduced.
Billed as the first ever electronic teaser, Game Raiser was created and developed by Patrick Van Heerden in Australia. This patent-pending technology came to life after Van Heerden noticed conventional teasers would reflect the light in every direction, including upwards. While in the flybridge of a sportfish boat, any reflections sent up to the surface are not helpful in raising large billfish like Blue Marlin, or Black Marlin like they find down in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. That’s when Van Heerden went to work on Game Raiser.
The Game Raiser device looks like a miniature version of a U.S. Navy sonar drone, but instead of a sonar, it’s equipped with a lithium-ion battery powering 12 LEDs. Arranged in 4 rows, the LED placement is designed for broad light coverage, with options for blue/green or blue/green/white configurations meant to mimic the reflections of large schools of fish.
All of the Game Raiser’s LEDs are strategically pointed towards the depths. Where the fish are. Made up of multiple compartments, the inner body which the electronics mount to is permanently sealed into the main outer body, with an electronic control panel. The waterproof, sealed interface is equipped with infrared touch pads, allowing users to manage multiple functions, including power on/off, flash speed, brightness, flash modes, start/stop, and lock/unlock directly on the device. Those flash modes include multiple flash sequences, solid-state torch modes for attracting baitfish, and can be used as a mooring light.
There’s also an action camera mount in the back of the device, so the Game Raiser can also act as a dredge cam.
So why did Patrick Van Heerden get on a plane from Australia to SFC’s TV studio in Fort Worth Texas to show off this revolutionary “game changing” device?
Simply put: SFC is always interested in advancing the sport in every way possible, and Game Raiser looks to advance offshore sportfishing in two big ways.
First, using scientific research to help raise more billfish from the depths leads to more action and competition between angling clubs.
Second, the camera platform opens up additional opportunities for perspectives never before seen in a live broadcast.
Expect to see a Game Raiser in every SFC Angling Club’s arsenal in 2026, with underwater footage helping bring the pre-bite action to life.
As part of every tournament, captains and anglers always talk about the struggle to interpret how billfish engage the spread. The information provided by Game Raiser allows for an opportunity for SFC’s clubs to analyze the actual footage, allowing them to make critical decisions to immediately impact their results.
Footage of a “window shopping” blue marlin and how it engages with a club’s setup can help determine if a bait needs to be swapped, or if there is another modification that needs to be made to adjust to the behavioral observations of the fish.
Data is crucial to analyzing competition, and to help show the full picture of the competition to fans back at home.
For reference:
Professional soccer associations like the English Premier League (EPL) collect 10,000 “mesh data” points to track players alone, not even including the ball.
Approximately 20,000 data points are analyzed during a single play of an NFL game.
In Formula 1, 200,000 data points are being collected every second from the cars during a race.
Those sports take place in enclosed stadiums, or on tracks over a few hundred acres. SFC's data will be collected from sport fishing boats hundreds of miles offshore in the open ocean.
Game Raiser and SFC are only beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible, and fans have a front-row seat.