Way north bass guy

Sorry to hear about that. Hope things work out as good as they can for your mom.

I agree with Scott F, and will add that the stern saver boards work great. I have two mounted on my boat, you can screw and unscrew as many times as you need to get the transducer in just the right spot, without drilling a pile of holes in the boat itself ( as long as you don’t use too long of a screw ?).

That’s funny, but also, sadly very true.

Look on the bright side, at least you still have that boat to use. I’m sure there’s lots of folks that won’t be able to afford the gas for boats this year, never mind the boat payments some of them likely have. Mine’s in my garage, all shined up and loaded with gear ready to go, and the ice just came off the lakes here this week, but all the public ramps are closed right now, and the marinas are also closed as they’re not considered essential services around here. Gonna be a while yet before I’m floating anywhere.

I have a My Wedge that I use for my 140 Suzuki, had it for about 5 years now and it works great. Also stores in the boat super easy as it’s smaller than a bottle of water.

No offence, but what exactly are people doing that they are worried their pfds are being exposed to the virus.

Here in Ontario, as of last night we have all our public spaces closed ( parks, sports fields, beaches, boat launches etc. ). Thought I was gonna get the boat out this weekend, which would be about a month earlier than last year, but by the looks of things I guess I’ll have to pull out the ultra light rods and go for a hike in the woods with my son for some brook trout for the foreseeable future. Sure does suck, but I guess it’s better than getting more people sick.

I live about 5 min from where he grew up, know quite a few of his relatives. One of his nephews owns and runs the local sports shop, my wife worked with him several years ago and I’m in there often to get my skates sharpened, looks just like Bobby.

The smaller lakes around here are still ice covered, although not for much longer. It doesn’t matter though, because I just got back from a drive to check out Georgian Bay and it’s clear sailing as of today ?. Still have a bit of stuff to load up in the boat, but as long as the weather isn’t too terrible next weekend, we’ll be chasing some trout.

One of the best days of the year for me today, brought the boat down the hill from winter storage at my shop and gave her a good bath, then tucked it away in the house garage to start loading gear and getting ready to hopefully float it next weekend for some trout.

I have a similar layout boat, Smokercraft Pro Mag 182 with a 140 Suzuki, and I’ve also had bass boats in the past. I can say there is absolutely nothing that I can’t do with this boat that I could with my bassboat, and would even say I can do much more with this boat. I use it on smaller lakes as well as Georgian Bay, for everything from shallow frogging for largemouth to downrigging for salmon. Trust me, you can catch just as many bass out of this kind of boat as you can out of a “bassboat”, maybe even more if you fish big water and need to make a long run across 4’ rollers.

Took a drive down to the town docks yesterday ( Georgian Bay in Parry Sound). There’s still a bit of ice out there, but it’s open at the river and I can see a fair bit of open water a couple miles out in the bay, which means it’ll likely be all open in about two weeks. I’m bringing the boat down from my shop/winter storage next weekend and into my heated garage so I can start loading up and sitting in it at night, dreaming of a spring trout fish!

Last skate of the year. All the rinks have been closed for a couple weeks so I missed the last few nights of hockey this year. The lake behind our house was about as perfect as you can get for outdoor ice today and it’ll be melting starting tomorrow so we had a good last skate. Nobody else around for miles so my son and I had the whole “rink” to ourselves.

I read an article about a year ago or so from I think In-Fisherman, about just such a study done on pike being hooked and broke off. Can’t remember where the study was done, but they basically purposely hooked pike in certain parts of the mouth with treble hooked lures, and released them in a large pond ( I think that’s where the pike came from in the first place). It seemed that after a few days almost every fish was able to either shake the lure loose or rip it off on a branch or weeds, and some just kept it on like jewelry and kept on feeding like it wasn’t even there.

We’re on year three with it. I built it with some windows I got out of a reno, and some extra stone I had sitting at my shop. We start our winter lettuces around labour day, and just planted our tomato seeds about two days ago. By May when we’re ready to plant outside, the entire top shelf is covered in all sorts of maters, zucchini, cucumbers and herbs. It sure is nice in the dead of winter on a cold sunny day when it’s -30C to step in there and feel the heat, and smell the dirt. If you close your eyes, it almost feels like summer.

Gonna be a couple months before we’re planting outside here, but we’ve been harvesting about 6 different varieties of lettuce since December from our greenhouse, and now that the sun is getting stronger, we can’t eat it fast enough. I can pick a huge bowl full that would make about 6 big salads every day, and don’t even make a dent in our crop. As for work, I work by myself. Spent last week going by snowmobile across a big lake to spend every day in a summer cottage building a fireplace, and now it’s warm enough I’ve started my outside work, which right now consists of a bunch of small brick chimney rebuilds. I’m the only one on the properties, So I’m not catching anything or making anyone else sick, and I have enough work lined up to stay busy halfway through summer already.

Just a other good way to “social distance” ones self.

Good stuff! I do the same thing every spring with my son. We go about 2 miles up and down the road to the lake around our place, and it just disgusts me how much crap we find every spring. We went for a walk this afternoon, but there’s still enough snow here that you can’t get everything, so we’ll wait a few more weeks till the “red wagon of refuse” comes out of the shed.

Our kids start their March break here in Ontario tomorrow, for one week. At 4:30 this afternoon, my wife was notified by the school board ( she’s the local high school librarian) that all Ontario public schools will be shut down for the two weeks following the end of March break, to try and stop anyone that may have travelled over break from spreading anything at school. For us, it’s not the end of the works as my wife will be home as well and paid while she stays home with our son and I work my normal job, but any families that have two working parents are not gonna be so lucky, now they have to try to find daycare or stay home unpaid to look after their kids.

As a kid we always fished from one of dads aluminum boats, or older fibreglass runabouts. Also used a canoe a fair bit. One of my dads work boats we used as teenagers was a 14’ steel flat bottom with a 18 horse Nissan, caught a ton of fish out of it but it was sure loud if you dropped something on the bottom ?. When I was 18, I bought my first bass boat, brand new 1998 Triton 17’ with a 130 Yamaha. It was the first year they were sold in Canada and I got the 12th one ever sold here. After a few years of fishing tournaments, I upsized to a Lund Pro-V with a 200 Optimax, and continued tournaments and did some guiding. After a few years I “retired” from guiding and sold the Lund, and a few years ago got another big deep-v Smokercraft. I also still have a canoe, and a 12’ tinny that I use on smaller lakes with my son.

The view from my “office” for the next week or so. Building a fireplace in a porch at a cottage that’s water access, no roads around at all, but of course up here it’s still “ice access” for another couple weeks so my snowmobile is my commute vehicle.

Temperature like that shouldn’t hurt them, the only thing that might be a bit of a pain would be under certain light conditions, you might get some glare that you couldn’t change the angle of the screen to see it better. Both my units are on adjustable mounts, and I do enjoy the ability to adjust them as needed if the sun is bright.

It doesn’t have to be that long of a wait. Three hours north of me bass season is open all year. And some of the lakes have almost zero pressure any time of year, as most of the guys around there are only going for trout.

I’ve had great success with the Gamakatzu dropshot/splitshot hooks in size 1 the last couple years. I’ve caught a ton of smallmouth up to 6lbs, and that tiny hook really sticks and holds well.

Is your transducer mounted level. If it isn’t, it’ll read way “off”, and not be able to see certain areas. Should be level both side to side as well as front to back. And by level, I mean level with the lake bottom, not the boat hull. This can be different with every boat, depending on how it sits in the water at the speed you’ll be mostly traveling when scanning.