michaelb

I agree with wearing sunglasses and that polarized lens help cut glare and see into the water. But they are probably not going to make a meaningful difference fishing from the bank on a river. So they may help you see a foot or two deeper or a little further out, but you aren't going to be able to see deep off the shore. The difference is mainly when looking down from above, so standing on a boat, kayak, or paddleboard.

x2, t-rigged weightless if that isn't clear. Assuming we are trying to catch as many fish as we can. If I am fishing for fun, I would go with: RI skinny dipper in white, on a VMC swimbait jig head. Paddletails fish faster and cover more water than senkos. So if it was windy, I have a hard time controlling senkos on my kayak in the waves and wind.

Yes, obviously you can rig up stuff lots of ways. the OP should get outriggers on his canoe and cart to carry everything to the water. But you aren't portaging a canoe with a motor and outriggers and bolted seats and rod holders. So while it all works, you are taking away one of the major advantages of a canoe: getting to water that isn't off a parking lot. Also, if you are miles from the put in and off shore, and rolling in heavy waves, you are going to probably want to be in a kayak. Since once that canoe swamps you are in a lot of trouble. But two strong paddlers in a properly loaded canoe can move along pretty well, and I assume a motor works too. So there are choices and options and tradeoffs with each type of boat.

I love canoes, own two, and have tripped extensively with them; I also have 5 kayaks + 3 paddleboards. Canoes are excellent for hauling gear and people and dogs. You can portage a canoe and a canoe is generally easier to get to the put in than a kayak, dramatically so on rough and uneven ground when a cart may fail or struggle. You can drag it upstream and run tiny creeks and swamps. But they are mediocre for fishing. They float which is good and they can hold your rods sort of on the bottom. But you are seated in a canoe and twisting sideways to cast. Canoes are harder to anchor and they love to spin in the wind in always the wrong direction. Kayaks are generally miserable to have to carry, so any distance you want help or a cart or both. Fishing kayaks weigh a ton and are beasts to move, and dragging one through rocks and stumps and trees and mud puddles is not that much fun. No one seriously portages a kayak any distance voluntarily. Kayaks can be rigged with lots of gear including anchors. They generally handle wind much better and sit on tops are self bailing and if you are nimble enough, you can self rescue in deep water. But for fishing, the biggest and most obvious factor is: you can stand on a kayak. This is a game changer for fishing, both in terms of your comfortable level and in terms of what you can see in the water. Even if you fish sitting down much of the time, it is really nice to stand (yes, you can stand in a canoe but you really aren't doing that fishing). You need a kayak cart to get to the water no matter what. Your rigged up canoe with the motor and all, could be more easily handled with a cart. There is no reason to get a kayak if the motivation is ease of moving from the parking area to the water. Many kayaks can handle trolling motors. So if you have an extra $1000-2000, and want to try a fully rigged fishing kayak, the fishing would probably be better than the canoe.

Bass are easy to catch. I am allowed to say that here? Ice out/early season I do the same things I do any other time of the year: Senkos + paddletails. I don't use spinnerbaits early, even though there was a thread last year telling all of us to try them (didn't work for me). I am mainly targeting pike early in the year, which is mostly trolling husky jerks. Bass hit those regularly. It surprises me that smallies like shiny things, so they hit Mepps and spoons too.

You can definitely get a used kayak on craigslist or other online site for $150 and fish out it. I have bought several over the years. This will likely be a kayak you sit in, and won't be rigged for fishing; but really you can fish out of just about anything that floats (and isn't a touring or whitewater boat). I don't love shopping craigslist though, there are usually something sketchy or far away or unappealing about the seller. The best deals though are driving around on the weekend in the spring, for garage sales or if you can drive near or along lakes, out in folks front lawns with a for sale sign. I can't buy any more kayaks, so I no longer stop; but I am sure I will violate that rule again soon.

I haven't had any luck on topwaters at ice out. Not to say they don't work, it could just be me. I think of the fish as deep and slow at ice out. But it may also be what those terms mean. If the water is now warm and the fish are shallow, I don't think of that as "ice out" anymore. Ice out water temps are in the 30s or low 40s. On a large lake in the north, ice out takes a month or more, and the water takes another month or so to warm up after that.

I like Sufix Advance Mono best of the mono lines I have tried. So it handles better than siege and does have less stretch than elite; also better than pline cx and cxx. Those are the main mono/hybrids I have tried over the years.

Boomstick's list looks fun. I haven't fished any of those places. But to talk about Lake Champlain a bit more, if you can make it all the way up here: Button bay: the lake is gorgeous down there, and the fishing should be very good. Grand Isle State Park: also gorgeous, big water, and probably great fishing too; very popular Burton Island: do you have time to take a short ferry to a Island? Great fishing and scenery Knight Island/Woods Island: can you paddle to camp??? I looked at the list of Vermont State parks and wonder about the Connecticut River. I only see Wilgus State Park. Never heard of it, but they have a video on the front page about "kayak fishing". My guess is fishing the river would be great too.

I think craigslist may be hit or miss depending on where you live. I have looked for kayak deals for 10+ years on craigslist, and they just don't seem to pop up (I have bought kayaks though on CL). So rigged fishing kayaks are listed used at 1000+ so not a deal at all, and the other kayaks are river boats and touring boats and plastic tubs. Does the weight of this boat matter at all, ie are you going to be able to haul it on your car/truck and get it in the water without difficulty? Does small waters mean you have a shore launch or are you carting or carrying it? If weight doesn't matter, I would look for a shorter (10' foot or so) and wider 34+ boat. Since you won't need to paddle far, and not paddling far and standing means the seat comfort doesn't matter nearly as much. But being able to stand and fish is worth searching and holding out for.

We just had a post pop back from last year, but they aren't discussed here much. They are definitely not a scam, and I think my rods are pretty nice, so they may be comparable to other $100 or so rods in terms of quality, and I got them, and I assume you are looking at them, as buy one get one free. So they may be one of the better deals in the $60 range. They seem to have a nice range of powers and weight and lengths as options, and so I will look at them again down the road (the problem with buying two for one rods is that means that I will have to upgrade or replace one of more of my reels to go on the new rod). What rods are you looking at?

Sometimes I go a whole half mile. But that is because the fishing is good and I like that spot. But if I am paddling 3-5 miles is a good range. Any sustained paddling of over a mile or two on open water with wind and waves does start to get tiring (plus takes 30 min to an hour); I would rather troll and that slows me down even more. If I am planning an overnight or multi day trip, I would plan for 8-15 miles depending on conditions. I am looking to upgrade to a much lighter and nicer paddle, and hope that makes padding those longer approach distances (of say 2-3 miles) more manageable. I also study maps to see if there is any way to drag my kayak to a closer launch point.

What kind of water are you paddling/fishing? So rivers or lakes and whether you will have to travel long distances over open water, etc. That can make a big difference on the choice of kayak. I have never seen the emotion stealth pro, but at 11'8" and 32" wide, it may track and paddle pretty well, but it also doesn't look like a fast boat or an open water boat. I think you will be able to stand and fish on it, but 32" is on the narrow side, so while that makes it paddle easier, it means that it won't be as stable for standing as kayaks that are really fat, so 35" wide or wider. At 85 lbs it is going to be a beast to lift, so car topping alone will be a serious challenge, and you may want a truck or trailer. I like the open deck for fishing and the gear track. there are many other boats to consider in the $800, as that is top end for cheap kayaks and the bottom end for nice kayaks. So maybe look at the Jackson Bite or the Kaku Wahoo 10.5 as generally similarly set up boats?

I think this is a really cool knot and I did practice tying it. But I can't get out of my head that in that illustration and instruction, the wraps are going the wrong way around. This knot doubles up on the hook, which is good, but as shown, it crosses the line at the hook. If the wraps went over the line in the illustration (instead of under as shown), the double lines on the hook would be perfectly next to each other and not crossed. There must be a reason for this I know. But the palomar and san diego jam are similar knots that have much support in terms of discussion about how they work.

I just bought a tatula, and don't think I will ever have a long enough leader to matter. But I am curious about how and why this happens? How does a knot travel better through a small hole at an angle vs going through a large slot at less of an angle? Is it catching on the vertical edges of the bottom middle slot? The tatula's vertical slot where the line lays after casting looks more narrow than the width of the hole of my other reel.

Just to state the obvious, and maybe this is already clear, but are you buying actual name brand senkos (in some version of black), and t-rigging those weightless? I would try that first before anything else. There is a thread here on how to catch bass and I think it starts with this.

Jagged tooth tackle seems to have tons of hooks, including 25 packs of trebles. http://www.jaggedtoothtackle.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=1099

Safety to you and others on your boat would be the other reason. I'm mostly on a kayak, and hook up with pike both intentionally and unintentionally, and having a mouth full of teeth and trebles swinging around wildly between my legs is something I avoid. It is way easier to release a fish on single hook, particularly if there is at most one other single hook outside the fishes mouth. This is less true with bass (which are easy to release), but still true. I bought a bunch of inline singles in various sizes and so one of my winter projects will be to decide which trebles I am going to replace with singles and which I am going to remove entirely. I will probably leave the front treble on some lures (like a jerk bait) and replace the tail treble with a single. I hate lures with 3 trebles. I am not convinced that the middle treble does anything useful. I would love to see a statistically significant study that shows fish hooked up on a middle treble that wouldn't have been caught on the front or rear hook.

It seems like a great set up for finesse but I am not the one to ask, since I don't have anything nearly that nice. But I do know the Adirondacks. For your lake, are we talking cold and crystal clear, and deep, with a rocky shoreline lined by downed trees? I am sure it is beautiful and the fishing sounds great. You are fishing the shoreline, which makes sense, and catching tons of fish. But I would think the larger smallies are hanging out on the deeper drops. You mention senkos which is a great idea. This seems like a perfect situation to try wacky rigged senkos and let them drop. But there may be a practical limit to how deep you can fish that way (I find weightless senkos work to around 10-12 feet) and to go deeper than that, you may need to try something else, like a jig or drop shot. Your ML rig should be good for these techniques too, at least to me (if jigs worked, smart folks here are going to recommend upgrading to something MH next).

I just bought a 150 and so it is sitting new in a box. I definitely don't want to read about sales. This is going to be my heavy pike reel, so I picked the 150 for the added line capacity in case I decide to use 20 lb mono (I am going to spool it with 50 lb braid) + the longer handle. I am not sure if there are other differences internally with the 100, that can be hard to figure out in the blizzard of info about these reels. The 150 has aluminum side plates and the 100 may or may not, but I am not sure that really matters; both have aluminum frames. the 100 is lighter and smaller and so probably the better all around choice.

I am much cheaper than many folks here, and I think we should save your money, at age 15, and so you shouldn't really spend 120 or 150. I like our abu vengeance rod (I know Michigander does not, and so over different years they may not be the same thing). I don't see a silver max / vengeance combo; or a black max vengeance combo. I don't think the differences between those rods and reels are enough to really make a major difference. The silver max vs black max I think is just for flipping; I would get the black max since I think those are good cheap reels. Basically, for your budget, I would get a combo that costs under $80, and maybe closer to $50-60. If you want to upgrade the rod some other year, you can move the black max/silver max/pro max to that better rod. there may be other brands with decent combos, but sort of hard to be beat the black max in that $50 price range.

I bought two rods with the BOGO last year. I like them and I do think the overall quality is very good for the value and price. I don't have any high end rods (or gear) though to compare; the thought of dropping a $300 rig into the lake off my kayak is just too much. I got the 6' 6" creature in MH as an all around extra rod and it is great for that. I got the 7' heavy kratos rod in part because it is hard to find a heavy rod that is not over 7'. As a hybrid rod, it has more of a moderate action, and so I am still figuring that out in terms of what works best and how to use it. The winn grip and detailing is very nice. That is my pike casting rig; I have a brand new tatula 150 in the box to put on it and so that will get a lot more use this spring/summer.

Cold hands can be bummer, sorry about that. Way up north, this is ski season, so I do know winter and snow and cold. It can be hard to fish in gloves. You may want to think about a system, where you have inner gloves that provide wind protection and dexterity, and then an overmitt that is warm and puffy (and you can put a heater inside those). I don't have these, but if money is no object, I think Outdoor Research makes very nice gloves. Ice climbing gloves are thinner and are designed to provide the ability to use tools. The regular storm tracker gloves are medium to thin gloves with really nice leather and maybe fishable. So assuming the heated battery option is the same design, this could work? https://www.outdoorresearch.com/us/stormtracker-heated-sensor-gloves-271545 Also, in place of the cheap chemical warmers, you should buy one or two USB rechargeable ones. I have this one and it does work and does definitely get warm and stays warm for several hours. https://www.human-creations.com/product-page/energyflux-ellipse-5200mah-rechargeable-wrap-around-hand-warmer-usb-external-b

I'm with Jigfishn10 and A-Jay and think the Megastrike strikeback spinnerbaits, with the articulating hook, are well worth trying. They increase the chance of getting a hook up on the initial strike (better than a trailer) and they also definitely help hold the fish on the hook, including if the fish starts jumping. I always have a leader on one or more of my rods (for pike) and so only use spinnerbaits that have a closed loop. In the past, I liked the booyah pikee for that reason.

This is not my area of expertise at all (I mostly kayak), but I have a 75 lb mooring for my boat and 150 lb mooring for my swim raft. Both with long heavy chains and shackles, etc. It just does not seem practical at all to think about hauling this sort of set up for a week vacation. I don't know how deep your water off the dock would be, but either mooring is very heavy and awkward and hard to move. I would not want to load one on my boat and drop it into the water. First, that can be very dangerous as heavy chain is pulled overboard, but also, there is a serious risk you damage or scratch your boat doing that. You cannot hold it off to the side of the boat and drop it in. You are not going to be able easily pull it back out from on your boat either. I have done both of those things from my plastic swim raft, but it is a beast to get up out of the water. So, I usually walk them in the water with someone else helping. So I would have a system for tying off (including the things pictured here) and then pull the boat out if bad weather is expected, as others are suggesting. Are you going to a spot without internet or cell service to check the weather? You may find that the local NWS offers hourly wind predictions including direction.