Billy V

Nice fish John! Congrats!!

Sounds good - just let me know when you'll be on Cayuga next spring. I'd love to ride along!

Now is the time to come see this boat if you're interested. I'm having season-ending hip surgery on Aug 27th, so it'll be hard for me to show the boat for a few weeks after that. It will be in the water through mid-September then will be stored in Sodus for the off-season.

Happy Birthday Eric!

Sorry its taken me so long to get back to you guys on this - I've had a crazy couple of weeks on the road and haven't had a free moment to get back to this until now. I met with the Humminbird folks earlier this week and they've asked me to have each of you who've had an issue with your 700 series PM me with your first and last name and your zip code. I will forward that info to them and they will then look into each of your cases individually. They are concerned that you guys have had issues and want to personally look into it further.

We used to have an older 15# Shark on our probe rigger and it spun countless times and wrapped line around the cable and cost us quite a few fish (and lures) over the years. This issue hasn't happened once since we switched over to Troll Rite rigger weights.

YT's right - THAT spoon kicked butt in May but then it's faded out for us. I'll give it a whirl a few more times this year before officially deciding that it's over with on my boat!

It definitely happens with some of the 15lbers. I think it was the older ones that spun & tumbled.

DW SS Midnight Special DW Shiznit DW SS Glow Frog NK Die Hard NK Copper NBK NK Lazer Glow Spook DW SS Feelin' Erie DW SS Gator NK Seasick Waddler DW SS Green Glo Alewife

Jack, I've had it down over 200' with no signal loss at all. The probe attachment is NOT fragile whatsoever. I'll admit that I was on the fence about it when I first saw it last summer because it was different than anything I'd seen before, but truth be told it works really well and is very easy to put on and remove from the cable. I like the attachment a lot now and can't imagine having to go back to the old way of attaching the probe with crimp sleeves and having to modify releases to make them work with the probe. Check out the video at the bottom of this page that shows some more details on the unit: http://store.cannondownriggers.com/prod ... emp_System I'm not 100% sure but I think the head unit is water proof. Hope this helps.

Ive been using it all season and it's fantastic. It hasn't skipped a beat all season long. It's MUCH improved over the old version and in my opinion is the best coated-cable probe out there.

Bumpin' it back up.

I've put an email in to the Humminbird brand manager to see if there's something going on with the 700 series. Is it just that the unit is losing bottom? What exactly is it doing when it "crashes"? Is it powering off completely? My 955C and my 1157C have both been flawless, so I'm wondering if there's a software glitch in the 700 series. I'll let you guys know what I hear back.

SOLD pending payment.

I have a brand new 12lb black faceted Shark for sale. $60. Local pick up in Ithaca. PM me here or email me at [email protected].

Confirmed. It does fit.

Shadster, I'm 99% sure that it will, but I'll have to confirm it with Cannon.

Gregg, The new riggers are rated for 250 fpm with 20lb weights.

Yeah what the heck is up with that? I sure hope it's not the start of some back-door wind turbine project. When YT and I saw them they were a few miles West of Ginna.

Yes, you can use your current boat-end connections with the new riggers. Polar Bear - I hear you there! But we use that holder at times.

Thanks Gregg, we'll look for you out of Sodus the rest of the year!

The counter on those riggers can easily be re-set. It more than likely just slid out of place. The re-set it just slide it out away from the housing and dial it back to zero then put it back in place making sure that the gears line up with those on the rigger.

We pre-fished the tournament on Friday and found lots of hot brown trout action West of port so we knew where we were headed on Saturday. We also got a call from our good friend Yankee Troller and he was on a hot King & Laker bite down by Ginna, so we had that in our hip pocket in case the browns didn't cooperate. When we got to our spot on Saturday we found that the temps had slid out just a tad bit deeper than we had found them on Friday and once we got our program dialed in the rods began popping. We boxed our first 10 fish by 10 am and then had to grind for almost two more hours to get the next two. We headed to the scales just after noon on Saturday and when all was said and done we sat in 16th place, but we were only 18 points out of 2nd place - a gap that could easily be made up on day two if we had a good day and some of the teams above us faltered. When we headed out onto the lake on Sunday we found that Mother Nature was in one of her moods again - West winds and 3-5 foot waves. Not good! It took us a bit longer to run to our spot from Saturday and when we got there we found that the wind had piled warm water in tight and that all of our fish and bait had disappeared. Luckily for us we're running a Humminbird 1157c with a thru-hull transducer, so I can pick up fish and bait when we're up on plane. I used that to our advantage on Sunday as we spent an extra few minutes working deeper and checking the screen for bait and fish. Once I found what I was looking for I set us down and we began fishing. It didn't take long to find the fish, but they were all condensed into a very tight area about the size of a football field. We began making loops through our spot and on every one of our first 7 or 8 trolls through the spot we picked up a fish or two. Eventually that pod of fish and bait began to move as more warm water piled in so we spent the last few hours looking for them. We boxed fish number 11 at about 10:30am and then it took us an agonizing 2.5 hours to get our final fish of the tournament. The last hour or so of that grind was especially painful as we all knew that the clock was beginning to work against us and we had lost our temp, bait, and fish yet again. I began pushing us out deeper and further West than we had been all day and we finally nabbed a 3 lb brown just before 1:00pm to wrap up our day. There were high-fives and congratulations all around the boat after that. Mission accomplished! Now all we had to do was go weigh in and see where we ended up. On the way in I talked to a few of my friends who were fishing the event and found that most of them were having a hard time filling their boxes. That's no surprise as the conditions were especially tough Sunday. We knew that we were lucky to have filled ours like we did. What I didn't know until the weigh-in was over was that we would be the only boat in the field to break the 200 point mark on Sunday - a fact that helped us leap over all but one team and landed us in second place. My friends Tom Burke and Andy Bliss from Cold Steel had just enough of a lead over us on Saturday that they were able to edge us out by less than a point for the win. Congratulations guys - you deserve it! While we would have loved to have taken the win this weekend, I have to be honest and tell you that we are all delighted with where we ended up. We stuck to our game plan of 12 fish each day and after Saturday's 16th place finish all we really wanted to accomplish on Sunday was to get our 12 fish and move up into the top 10. Finishing second was a most welcome surprise! We used a simple 6 rod program all weekend long. We ran three riggers, two divers, and a leadcore down the chute - all pulling spoons. Our best spoons all weekend long were a Dreamweaver Super Slim Midnight Special, a Northern King Die Hard, and and regular Dreamweaver Lazer Glow Spook. Our downriggers accounted for close to 90% of our catch this weekend. The chute rod took the rest of the bites and for some reason our divers only took one shot over the weekend after being red hot on pre-fish Friday. Go figure. We fished 70 FOW on Saturday and 90-95 FOW on Sunday, and when we found 60 degree water we generally found bait and receptive fish. Best down speeds for us were 1.8-2.0mph on Saturday and quite a bit faster than that, 2.5-3.0mph, on Sunday. I gotta tell you that our new Daiwa Saltist reels were a decided advantage in fighting these browns this weekend. Their drags are super smooth and the high gear ratio really helped the guys keep tension on the fish. Here we are with our box of fish from Sunday: We had a great time and are already looking forward to next year's Pro-Am series!

Nice job Ray! I can't wait till my boys are old enough to fish these events with me.

Congrats to Cold Steel and Spoonfed on their wins in Sodus this past weekend. Here's the final scoreboards - of course the results aren't "final" until the Pro-am Committee posts them on their website, but this will give you an idea of who placed where.