Way north bass guy

Another issue could be if the transducer is not set level across, it could be not reading correctly. If it’s on the stern, it’s a simple fix with a small torpedo level and loosening/retightening a couple screws.

Took the kid out for a few hours this afternoon, managed a handful of pike this size and about 30 bass. No big ones today but still lots of action.

I wonder where he would mount the new 360 mega transducer on that rig. Probably just hang it off the tail I guess.

Yeah but be careful, make sure you only sell one half of paired organs. A guy can only really need one lung, kidney, leg, ear, etc. right?

If you have even a tiny shred of handyman ability, the design I made takes literally 5 min to make and costs pretty much nothing if you can find a couple scrap pieces of wood.

Just the standard mixing paddle works well for me.

A kitchen-aid mixer on low works real well also. Just drop it in and turn it on. Takes about 30 seconds!

My 12’ tinny did the same thing, so I took a piece of plywood and cut it about 18” long by 6” wide, and cut a curved edge to the bottom so any weeds would slide off. Then just screwed it to a piece of 2x2 and use a c-clamp to hold it on the back of the boat while in use. It hangs about 6” below the hull of the boat when installed. Works perfectly, boat doesn’t spin or wag around at all, and it cost about $5 ( for the clamp).

Took the kid to the culvert across the road from our house for some panfish. Ultra light rod and some fresh caught worms did the trick, only thing is, we didn’t get one perch or sunfish, and usually we catch dozens there. Nope, today it was all smallies, he caught 6, and our best 5 would’ve gone about 18-19lbs! The culvert is about 20’ deep as they dredged it out a couple years ago when they fixed it up, so I guess the bass came in from the connected lake and just lay in the shade in deep water waiting for food to drift by. It was a pretty exciting half hour, and we even got to watch a 4lber come up and engulf a huge moth that was skittering across the surface about 2’ from where our legs dangled off the culvert. My son then promptly dropped his worm down and caught the same fish ?. This guy wasn’t even the biggest one!

Finally able to add to this thread, as today was our opener. Started a bit late, didn’t get on the water till almost 9:00 and were off by 1:00 but we still managed about 30 bass. Mostly smaller ones, but I did get one decent one about 3lbs or so. Almost every fish came on a frog, and they were choking it today! All in all, a decent start to the season for my son and I. This was a brand new frog at the start of the day ?.

It’s not that bad. Soft water usually starts in April, and there is great fishing for pretty much every species of freshwater fish you could ask for here, and if I really wanted to, I could head about 3 hours to where there’s year round open bass seasons. Plenty to keep the rods bent until bass season opens around here, and due to the short season, we have some of the finest bass fishing you could find. Most days, there’s hardly another fishing boat to be seen on the water.

Well, it’s finally here! Tomorrow is our bass opener around here, we’re all packed up and ready to fly in the morning. Gonna take the 9 year old to a lake we had a ton of fun on last year, probably mostly throwing frogs in the pads for largemouth, but I’m sure there will be some bedding fish to check out as well, due to this ridiculously miserable, cool spring we’ve had. Either way, the sun will be out and we’ll be chasing some bass.

One thing that works quite well for me also is the find a friend app on my phone. Not just for fishing, but I am self employed, so I’m quite often working on a job all by myself all day. At any time, my wife can see exactly where I am, at least that way if something happened ( god forbid), she’d be able to find me or at least send others in the right direction to look for me

Last year fishing with my dad for smallmouth, we were on a chain of lakes near where he lives in northern Ontario. There’s a ton of bald eagles all around the area, and on one lake we had one that would fly from tree to tree as we were working down the bank. He was quite vocal, almost like he was trying to tell us that this was his turf and we weren’t supposed to be fishing there. Well after about 200 yds of this, I hooked about a 3lb smallie and every time it jumped, the eagle would swoop down to try and grab it out of the air. It got to the point where I had to really yank on the fish to try to keep it down, even ripping it out of the air just before he grabbed it. Never seen that before.

All of the above is correct, set them well before you load and it shouldn’t be a problem. Also, have a quick check every time your about to back the trailer into the water to load the boat, it only takes a second or two to notice and remove any larger stones, sand particles etc. before you back it down. As for re carpeting , I don’t think you would ever need to replace the wood on a one year old trailer, just remove the old carpet and install the new stuff and you should be good to go.

Very true, about 10-15 years ago a bunch of my buddies and I used to have a little derby on a lake every spring that was full of pike and walleye. At the end of the day, from about 8-10 boats and 20 or so guys, we’d keep a half dozen of each species and have a big fish fry, and once they were all cleaned up and cooked, nobody could tell the difference between the pike or walleye meat. Once the y bones are out, they are a wonderful eating fish. Usually if I’m going to keep one, it’ll be around 26-30” long or so. The big girls always get put back.

From my experience in construction, composite deck boards are usually much heavier than wood of the same dimensions. Depending on the thickness of the boards he used ( hard to tell in the pic), it could be substantially heavier than the original decking. With all that extra weight on the boat, it could be more sluggish getting up on plane etc.

I’ll bet they’re heavy as all heck though. That’s gotta really hurt any sort of hole shot for that boat, especially all at the back like that.

I’ve run a few different boats over the years, both glass and aluminum. Currently I'm running a 2014 Smokercraft Pro Mag 182 with a Suzuki Df140. It’s a deep-v that has a ton of room and storage for an 18’6” boat, and we use it everywhere from 1’ of water in smaller lakes for largemouth to the big, open water of Georgian Bay for salmon and trout, and it’ll take on any weather/waves I can find ( been in 10’ rollers on the bay with it). The Suzuki is a tank, runs just shy of 50mph loaded up and will troll for hours with hardly a sound to it and sips the gas. For my needs, it’s a super boat choice.

And with almost no fishing pressure, and lots of room to eat and grow, they’re only gonna get healthier.

While fishing today, my 9 year old grabbed the phone and took a pic of a nice little waterfall. I didn’t even know he took it until at home going through fish pics. Not bad for a kid with dad’s phone.

Since bass season is still a few weeks away for us here, pike are a great fish to feed the need for hooksets in the spring. Almost every lake around my place that’s larger than about 100 acres has pike in it, but today my son and I tried a new one for us. It’s a 3 lake chain that stretches out for 30 miles or so, and has always been a great bass fishery in the summer, and up until about 10 years ago there were zero toothy critters in there. Since they’ve shown up in there, they’ve had the run of the lakes and with lots of spawning bays, super deep herring filled water and a ton of structure, they are flourishing ( the bass are still doing great as well). We only hit it for about 3 hours this afternoon, just quickly drove around hitting small sections of shoreline that looked good. This time of year the pike have finished spawning but the water is still quite cool ( about 55 deg today), so the fish tend to creep out of the big shallow spawning bays and set up on the first deeper shorelines out from them. This lake has near zero weed growth so the fish often use large lay-downs just like a largemouth will, waiting in ambush for near anything to swim by. So we would cruise around until we saw a section of shoreline with some trees down, then hit them with mostly suspending jerkbaits. The water is gin clear in this lake so every strike is seen perfectly ( gets both a 9 year old and his dad pretty excited ?). In 3 hours, we caught 8, lost about that many more ( mostly because we were too darn excited and pulled the bait right out of their mouths on the strike), and saw at least 20 more follows to the boat. Even though there are hundreds of summer cottages on this lake, it almost never gets fished, so I guess we’ve got ourselves one heck of a good pike spot for some years to come.

I was out pike fishing with my son today, and we “caught” a 20 footer! We were casting a shoreline close to the only dangerous shoal in the entire 15 mile long lake, when three guys in an older Champion came cruising along. They were moving at a quick idle and I wasn’t really paying attention to them at first, but then I realized they were heading straight for the rocks ( usually the shoal is marked with a jug but not yet this year). By the time I realized they were heading straight for it, I just started to wave my arms and CRUNCH! They literally came to a stop teetering right on top of a 5’ diameter boulder, that was directly under the center of the boat. Took almost 20 min of pulling from a couple directions with my boat and a rope to get them off the rock. Luckily they never hit the motor at all, but someone is gonna have some nice fibreglass work ahead of them ?. My good karma paid off though cause after I unhooked them and they headed for the ramp, I dropped the trolling motor and caught a decent pike on my second cast right after.

No, you don’t “need” any of it at all. I have a Helix 9si on the bow and a 10si mega at the console. I absolutely love how they work for me, and I wouldn’t get rid of them, that’s for sure, but I also caught a ton of fish from all my boats over the years with far less superior electronics. Anyone that thinks they must have the latest, greatest electronics to catch a bass, really needs to spend some time familiarizing themselves with a lot more other things about bass fishing first. I’ve seen some boats that have multiple graphs and the latest, greatest of everything on them, with zero fish brought over the sides.

That’s why I never, ever watch weigh- ins. So annoying and repetitive.