Hi all had my first flight over water at weekend and the nerve’s were horrible.
Especially at one point when I lost signal with the drone.
I’m guessing this gets easier with more experience
What was your first experience over water please share?
Advise that is best to keep in your mind is, The drone doesn’t know whats under it. It’s not going to behave differently because there is water underneath, it’ll just fly on its merry way. just relax and pretend your flying over ground.
stay a nice safe distance above and you will be fine.
only panic if it hits the water.
Take a look at this from @clinkadink could be an option to ease the nerves
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The DJI Minis downward vision sensors can cause problems. I wouldn’t fly my Mini 2 lower than about 3mtr over water. Had a close call with my original Mini flying along a river, all of a sudden it started to drop but I had VLOS and managed to push the right stick.
For any aircraft that relies on downward vision sensors for low altitude work, <15m or so water can confuse them. They don’t “see” the surface of the water too well, often registering what is underneath it instead.
So, if you are flying very low over water either switch them off if possible or keep a very close eye on your height. Other than that, flying over water at a reasonable height is often less problem than over land - no nasty hills or dips …
Basically - flying over water fine, flying underwater not so fine.
I’ve flown from one side of the River Mersey to the other no problem, but never lower than 100ft ASL, better to be safe, used both Mavic 2 Pro & DJI FPV from Liverpool side to Wirral side, just waiting for weather to improve to try the Mavic 3 next.
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Yep, been there, done that…
My first MP got too close to the sea and decided to land.
Low flying over water with sensors off is great though, I’m way more careful now
I’ll see your MP and raise you an Inspire 1 with X5 camera … 
There’s another reason for maintaining a reasonable altitude over flat lake water that has nothing to do with with vision sensors and is very rarely covered on drone forums because the phenomenon is not widely understood. It’s wireless multi path reflection and skip off the water surface causing time domain jitter in the digital wireless receiver in the aircraft. The aircraft receiver ends up with multiple errors in the signal serial buffer to the flight controller. Wireless systems using multi hop channel frequency selection are not immune to it either because the built in error correction that determines the integrity of the data from the channel hopping has no point of reference for what constitutes a valid signal. The aircraft receives a signal certainly but is unable to validate the signal while the aircraft goes into error correction overload. The aircraft will become unstable or sluggish in following the remote and may interpret a steady hover command as a decrease or increase in altitude. The solution is simple. Always use plenty of altitude headroom over the surface of the water so that the direct signal path to the aircraft from the controller is at an elevated angle to the horizontal plane. Basically the problem with flat water is that it acts like an electric mirror.
I won’t fly lower than 50 feet altitude over a lake and even then I usually go for 100 feet. There have been too many instances of drones descending out of the air into the deep for no apparent reason. But that’s just me. I tend to be very risk averse especially when some of the gear I’m flying costs over ten grand.
Mode 1?
Or does he mean the correct stick…to gain height again?
Dont you mean left stick. Lol 
GULP…that was a painful day.
A friend lost his Inspire in the water flying near the ‘Royal Marines’ base in Poole, I wonder if it was victim to countermeasures?
Right stick right direction, opposite of wrong stick in the wrong direction. Left stick up.
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I fly over the sea fairly regularly and there is some very sensible advice posted in the replies. To add to that, I found my nerves got better when I took out drone insurance.
I’m still very new to drone flying, and have recently tried flying over water. I too was very nervous about trying it, and still am a bit more nervous than flying over land, but have gained a little confidence from flying 5 or 6 times over water now.
Plus it’s not likely the drone would survive a drop of more than a few meters onto land, much the same for water. Having loss insurance / DJI Care (whatever-its-called) also reassures that should the drone go crazy and dive itself into the water, at least it would (hopefully) be covered. And if I drive it into the water, then it is my own daft fault!!
Also to add, contrary to others experience, I’ve flown my Mini2 3ft above the (calm) waters of a lake with no issues of it losing height or getting confused by the waters.
Tim
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DJI care refresh only covers a drone loss into water if you can then recover the drone by yourself to return it to DJI. If its lost to the deep then its a total loss.
I thought they covered any loss , I will need to ask the question to them about this
I agree, doesn’t matter if over water or land if your drone falls from a high altitude it’s pretty much going to be destroyed. Only thing is though if on land retrieving the SD card for photos/videos would be much easier than if it’s at the bottom of a lake.
This is probably a good time to mention that the subject of the latest RTF (Reason to Fly) competition is Seascapes and you can still enter a picture or video. Comp open until Saturday 23:00. Or join in the next one - still time to vote for which subject it should be 
Feeling a bit smug here - I have a Swellpro Splashdrone 4 that is totally waterproof, can land and take off from water and RTH is return to controller so flying from a boat isn’t an issue - it uses pressure for height measurement so can’t be fooled either!
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