Way2slow

Sound like I might be putting a fishing seat on that small deck, "for the next trip". Right now, my plan is to us the four on each side, but probably move them up to the front bench, and vary the rod/pole lengths. Using a 6', 7 1/2', 10' and 13' on each side. If that don't work, I've put my transom mounted TM on also, and I will put all of them on one side and drift sideways. It that don't work, I'll just be bass fishing this trip. The main problem is the lake I'm going to is 100 miles, so I usually go for at least two days. Which kinda sucks when I used to live five miles from the boat ramp. There is a closer lake that's only about 45 miles but I'm told the crappy fishing on it is not very good, mostly all you catch are small, hand size, and I've never liked bass fishing it. Another thing I don't know is when they start schooling up around the tree tops/Christmas trees people put out. I have no plans of fishing with minnows. Just going to be drifting/trolling for them with small jigs. I know there are hundreds, if not thousands of those things that have been "planted" just in the backwaters I fish. I see them on the side scan all over the place. This lake does not have much in the way of bank structure, and no boat docks, thank god. Sometimes the DNR will go along in places and cut a few trees down so the tops fall into the water but it's most bare banks, so you have to know how to fish what's under the surface.

OK, this is what I've come up with so far. Now, these are the tall rod holders I ordered to clear the seat backs on the pontoon boat. I didn't like the mounts they came with, so I ordered the Driftmaster mounts. That left me with 8 extra mounts and I didn't mind them on this redneck engineered project. I actually have 8 more of the short Driftmaster's but will need to order mounting brackets for those, since I used those mounts on the pontoon. So, if I want, I can order those 8 mounts and have 16 rod holders. I have the aluminum to make four more brackets like those I made, but how in the world would you fish that many rods in a boat by yourself. I've always believed in the old saying, "if the fish are not biting, you don't need but one rod, if the fish are biting, you only need one rod". If you look, you will see little silver dots all the way up that top rail, about every 20", so I can go all the way to that deck on both sides One other thing, the Driftmaster and those Chinese rod holders look alike, but they are not directly interchangeable. The Chinese rods are larger, but I made the Chinese rod holders so they would fit the Driftmaster base mounts, and they will also still work in the mounts that came with them.

Wow! That's a few more than I envision for the time being. With those eight hanging straight off the bow, are you doing that drifting or trolling backwards or are they just going back underneath the boat. From the research I've done, it seems 0.3 to 0.8 mph with 4# to 8# line is the most common speed so I guess they would be down deep enough if going forward, if you didn't have much line out. Like I said, this crappy stuff is all virgin territory for me, I've been reading what I can find on the net but as they say, there's no better teacher than experience. I've just finished making my brackets. I'm only putting two rods on each bracket with four brackets total (8 rod holders). I've put rivnuts along the sides of that top rail about every 20 inches. I have not put any on the bow because for the time being, I don't have plans on putting a seat up there. After this first trip, those plans might change. If I do one, it will have to be offset off that deck some to give enough room. I've already got the stuff to do that if I see it becomes necessary, I'll just have to get me another seat to go up there.

Making and installing rod holders today and have never used them or had them on a boat and looking for suggestions on how and where to put them. I have eight of these individual rod holders with the mounting brackets Driftmaster T-Bars Spider Rigging Rod Holders | Bass Pro Shops but will make my own bar to mount them on. Anyone that uses them and have suggestion, it would be appreciated. Would you put four like the picture or maybe two or individual. I would assume they will be located in a convenient spot to get to them without getting out of the seat.

I have a 28 SPL (basically the same as a 30 but only weighs 128 pounds) I converted to a short shaft I could put on it and add stick steering so I could move to the front bench seat for better weight distribution. If it turns out I am using the boat more, I will probably do that, but in the past, the boat may go a couple of years and not get put in the water and sits upside down on the trailer. The 28 would have to be a permanent mount so flipping it over wouldn't be possible. We will just have to see how it goes and if I get back into fishing more. I'm actually going to try some trolling/drift fishing for crappie in a couple of days, (should have started two weeks ago) something I have NEVER done. I've caught one crappie in my life and that was a four pounder I caught on a spinner bait bass fishing. I bought hundreds of dollars' worth of tackle a few years ago to try them, but have never brought myself to actually do it, and know absolutely nothing about it.

Let me just say, it deserves a lot of respect. If you don't give it that respect, you're probably going to find yourself in a whole lot of trouble. One of the biggest problems is the bow lift starting off with just me in the boat. Being a tiller, and sitting in the back, I weigh 180, 6 gallons of gas a big AGM battery that weighs about 70 pounds and a smaller battery for sonars, it's very ass-end heavy. I'm hoping that 100 or so pounds I added with the TM and little deck will help that. Plus, I plan to put the little electronics battery up there. I used to put the TM battery in front of the front bench and may still have to do that. One other little deal I made was that bracket under the seat on the front bench. Using those brackets you buy that just side on will dump your butt or scare the crap out of you when you lean to one side to get a fish or something. I made that one so there's a large screw near the bottom and a hole in the bench seat. Slide that one on, screw that screw into the hole and it don't move. Don't have to worry about it tilting over sideways. The back seat is on those slide rails so it locked down but can be moved to one side to operate the tiller.

I made that years ago, just bent it out of some flat steel. That's for a small Lowrance with down scan I put in it when I first got it. Since I didn't use the boat regularly, and stored it flipped upside down on the trailer, I did that so I could just slide it on and off when I wanted to use it. The Garmin transducer is mounted on the TM. I will say, they didn't make that motor much fun to get the cable through it. Actually, going through it was not a problem, the exit out the back was the problem. Getting it so there was not a tight bend at the back took a little trial and error. The last think I wanted was to start breaking wires in the $300 transducer cable. As for the merc, I think the main thing is, at almost 75 years old, one should not be picking 135 pound motors up almost chest high to hang them on a boat. Another one of those times my 35 year old brain wasn't listening to my 75 year old body.

Since I sold my Javelin, and decided using that pontoon when fishing by myself sucked, I've been working on making my 1436 jon a fishing boat. Still have some to do yet but getting there. I have come to one major conclusion on one thing. I'm getting too dang old to be picking that 25 and sitting it on and off the boat. It took most of the strength I had to lift it onto the transom. Taking the 9.9 off is no problem, but that 25 has gotten a whole lot heavier for some reason.

Lets see, I turn off alarms, fish ID, auto zoom and a whole bunch of other stuff, but not the power. The power gets turned off when I turn the main power switch on the console off, and have forgotten to do that on a few occasions

Depends on if there are two or three terminals on the switch. If there are just two, don't have enough info to help you. If there are three, you probably have it wired wrong. One would be the common, one would be a normally open (NO) and one would be a normally closed (NC), The NC terminal would let the TM run when the switch wasn't pressed, the NO would let the motor run when the switch is pressed. and the common is the hot terminal the switch is switching between the NO and NC

I have a 17" HP laptop, with the I7 processor I've been using for a bunch of years. It was getting when you opened it, you have to move the screen back and fourth a to get it to clear up, where the contact points are so worn. I figured I was about time to retire it and ordered that XPS. I got the 13 because the 17 was so big sitting in my lap, and it was bigger than the Surface Pro 3, should have gotten a 15. The HP doesn't have touch screen, and I need at least one with touch screen for signing documents etc.

That $1,500 POS only has one ThunderBolt connector. To make it where you can connect anything, you have to buy their $300 docking station. When I ordered it, I didn't realize the all the limitations it has. I had a surface pro 3 I hated and cracked the digitizer on it and wasn't willing to spend $175 for a new digitizer to repair it. Ordered this Dell XPS-13 2in1 touch screen with 11th gen Core7 processor and darned if I don't hate it more than that Surface. I'm thinking about giving it to my granddaughter and trying again, but not with a DELL.

Well, I was going to post a picture, but it's getting almost possible for me to sign in without getting that Oops something went wrong. This is my Dell and it doesn't have and SD slot for the camera's SD card. Forgot, I said I got a 1/4 sheet BC, I already had a small piece to do some of it. That's the cutout laying in there for the door, but not sure I'm going to put it on. OH, and don't depend on Lowe's color charts for picking a paint color. On the chart, that looked Olive Drab.

I'm almost finished with my Lowe 1436. I installed a MotorGuide X3 on the bow. That was going to need a 24" mount so I just made a small 24" deck and since there is an upward slope at the bow, I raised the back of it about 3" so it would be level with the bottom of the hull. I used a 1/4 sheet 1/2" BC plywood from Home Depot and fastened to the boat with 1/4-20 stainless steel rivnuts and 1/4-20 stainless screws. Five across the top in front and four down each side into that round rail that goes around the top of the hull. I put four rivnuts in a piece of stainless-steel plate and fastened that under the deck to hold the TM. That way, to take it off, I just screw out four socket head screws without having to worry about holding anything or those rubber mounts ripping out. I put several heavy coats of Polyurethane on any wood on the underside, and several coats of a 10-year Deck coating on top with the anti-skid sand stuff added to it. All connecting points were donee with 1 1/4" angle. It's rock solid and should last the rest of my lifetime. Since the boat has no storage, I figure that would give me a small amount of dry storage as well as a mount for the TM.

Any good epoxy paint, but on aluminum, the paint is not as critical as the primer. Zinc Chromate used to be the go-to primer for aluminum, but not sure it's still available. It has been years since I've painted aluminum so do the homework on what's a good primer. The two-part expoxy primer may work but haven't used it on aluminum, so can't say for sure. If you don't sand down to bare metal, it would be best just to lightly scuff the paint on it and spray over that. Bare metal will need to be primed though.

Being rated for a 115 has nothing to do with the extra weight of the four stroke. When they first started hitting the market, manufactures had to add additional reinforcement for account for the extra weight. So, not only do you have the extra weight of the four stroke motor, you have the jackplate, plus the additional setback it gives. Then you add the weight of some super heavy deep cycle batteries and onboard charger to get the extra run time. If you add those anchoring poles, pretty soon, you've added several hundred pounds of extra weight right to the ass-end of the boat.

I haven't seen our used one of these new live image units, but generally, I don't rely on the sonar to show me bass. Unless they are suspended, schooling and actively feeding, they are generally too close to the bottom or structure to pick them out. What I depend on are the images that show those special, isolated spots that bass tend to hold close to. There are always exceptions. On lake Falcon once we passed an underwater bare hump the was full of images that appeared to be fish about a foot off the bottom. Figuring it was something else we went on by. Not seeing anything else, I went back, and we made a few casts. For about the next hour, we were catching bass just about every cast.

One thing that will help, take the jackplate off and mount the motor directly to the transom. That motor weighs almost 380 pounds, any additional setback is going to cause a whole lot of extra bow lift. Don't know anything about your particular boat, or Trackers in general, but it's possible you might have some wet floatation foam. Even with close cell foam, it can get about 10% saturated and that could add weight. That's kind of a long shot unless the boat is stored outside, uncovered, but as mentioned weighing it will answer that question. I had a Stratos 285 Pro I took almost 300 pounds of wet foam out of, but that was the older, closed cell foam. Other than that, about the only thing you can do is start moving weight forward.

I would suggest having the battery tested first. We get new s***t that's bad all the time. Next logical culprit would be the voltage regulator, those are only about $400 and easily damaged with a bad battery. May have put off buying that new one too long. One second thought, since you just replaced the battery, make sure the connectors are clean and tight.

A little gee whiz info about the Anderson connectors. For instance, the SB-50. It's rated at how much current can be going through it when it's unplugged and not have to worry about arcing and burning the terminals. It will handle a lot more than just 50 amps without heating up or worry about voltage drop, as long as you are not unplugging it under a load. For instance, I've seen numbers of SB-350's running 600 amp loads on them and not get warm. I've run as much as 80 amps on a SB-50. I will say though, for that it would be better to run the SB-75.

I'm not understanding taking it out to charge it. A couple feet of 12 or 14ga wire and a SB-50 connector would make a pig tail from the battery to a convenient location to make it easy to plug in.

I have not tried to see but it seems if you are running side scan, the images would be crossed on the display, Left would be right and right would be left because the processor is not going to know they are reversed.

Just covering the intake ports is not adequate. The Water pump can be several inches above the intake ports and is sitting there in the air, in cavitation, and can take several seconds to start pumping and is possible it may not at all. The motor needs to be at least a couple of inches below the seam where the water lower unit bolts to the midsection. At a 1,000 rpm, those dry impeller blades can start melting pretty darn quick. I was watching an episode of Lone Star Law the other day and the lady jumps in the boat and fires up that 250 Merc and then they back it into the water. I'm thinking, what and idiot, they sure didn't teach here anything about operating a boat.

Problems like that are what multimeters are made for. It lets you diagnose the actual problem instead of guessing.

FishinBuck07, all you have to do is use that one AJ posted and convert it to a ring tone. I've made several of my own. The one I'm using special version of Dixie I liked. I just recorded it and converted it to a ring tone.. OOPs, sorry, AJ's was the wrong motor for what you wanted.