TnRiver46

So my shallow water boat is one that my grandpa gave me, a Cherokee aluminum 1957 model. I've always known this boat was as tough as nails, but I had no idea how truly tough it is. The wood in the transom has been rotten for about a decade but I just keep on fishing because there's no flex back there and it looks like a giant pain to replace the wood (I've replaced transoms before but the metal reinforcements on this boat are crazy strong). I saw on another forum where a guy had just replaced the transom on a crestliner deep v with 115 horsepower and I jokingly posted that he should help me with mine next. Sure enough he sent me a PM and said bring it over. He starts cutting the heads off these rivets and trying to pound them out and drill them out. 1.5 hours later we haven't got the first one to move more than a millimeter and there's 30-40 of them back there holding it together. He makes a comment that he has never seen rivets like that and asks me how many have come out since 1957. I answered one and he was completely shocked. He said his 90s bass tracker has lost a dozen or more. He says this must be the rivets that hold airplanes together. So I snap a pic and send it to my buddy in the air Force and he says "oh yeah those are cherry Max structure rivets and they are a huge PITA. They are on the planes I'm working on right now." Confirmed: my boat is as strong as an airplane. I also talked to an old timer that said a lot of companies that built planes in WWII switched to building boats after the war. Transom rebuild might get finished by 2022........ You can't even disassemble this boat with angle grinder dremmel metal punches and titanium drill bits....... Also: the original floatation is 100 percent intact under all 3 bench seats. This boat used to sit tied up to our dock 24/7 and was always full of rain. When I was a kid I would bail it out about halfway then start fishing. The phrase "they don't make them like they used to" is an understatement in this case So my next thought is try a smaller drill bit and just work on it for days and days. They aren't cupped so the bit kept jumping off. Any suggestions??

I'm not advocating this by any means but my buddies sank a Jon boat back on good Friday and as it was going down, one of them put on a life jacket and threw the other to Ryan and said "you're about to need this." It's a far better plan to already have it strapped on. I wear my styrofoam one in my kayaks all summer long, just think of it as a sauna session.... There's a lot of things out there in this crazy world that can kill us, I just try to keep my faith in the right place and use good sense as much as possible. I really don't even like paddling too far from the bank, flipping a kayak 1/2 mile from land seems like it would suck

I have been swimming about once every couple hours here recently, it sure helps. Until that pesky flesh eating bacteria gets on you......

It’s seems both will stay alive in bucket for a very long time but on the hook they always get eaten. It just seems the big brown bass really like to eat the stone rollers more

Kudos to you for turning him in.

The only way to know for sure is to ask the fish

According to his wife he is never sick. She also apparently was more effective than the doctors at diagnosing what was wrong..... A real shocker there...... I had a friend of a friend contract the same infection swimming in folley beach, SC recently

Chubs are good but stone rollers are better

Y'all should fish a winter smallmouth tournament with 65 lb braid and see how well you place

My favorite trick is usually taking someone that mosquitos really like to bite. Unfortunately in some cases they favor me over other people but usually it works like a charm

Bug spray. Lots of it

Yep!

Do you fish Miller's ferry? We use a lot of junebug worms down there

Sounds like 80% of the lakes near me! Haha. When they have a shad buffet to chose from, sometimes something that stands out like a wild color crank or a tube jig will trigger a bite .

I know some people that tracked their habitat range pretty closely when I was in college, let me know when you do that and maybe I can help

i think the new river eventually turns into some class V whitewater! Fishing is easy when the smaller creeks dry out in summer, we caught them non stop. No size though. All you need is some kind of soft plastic and a few hooks and jigheads

It's quite diverse in these parts! I was just a few clicks north of the micropterus coosae habitat range where the pics were taken. I will have to leave all the road trips and red-eye bass to you though! I detest traveling and I'm more a fan of the micropterus dolomieu.... Haha.

That I MUST try a ned rig . My buddies go through bags and bags of them (not because fish tear them up, because they get stuck on bottom) out of the back of my boat and still don't have any more success than regular plastic worms. I did try one once, got it stuck on bottom. If you are supposed to swim the bait off the bottom, then I'll just use a grub or cheaper worm

I would have to fillet that pickerel to retrieve my frog. No shame in my game

If you caught one on the tube, I would keep toobin'!!!

Camden??? My brother works there! Didn't know people fished there haha. If y'all ever need screen printing, look him up! He looks like me and is one of the only printers up there....

I'm sure I took him in there, that's why I made sure to take him out. There's deer and dampness in 100 percent of east TN, even behind Lowe's haha. There ain't enough cutter in the world, I would have to mainline it through an IV. Luckily those boogers itch like crazy when they embed, alerting the host to it's presence

It wasn't far at all from where they live

I was also going to vote for @Bluebasser86

I'm glad you could help him because Ive never seen nor heard of that bottom fish. Pretty cool!!