Billy V

Saw this question on another board and thought it would be fun to see what everyone says here. If you could have only two spoons on board, what make and color would you choose?

I'll echo what most have said here. I've owned three Penn Yan's over the years. All of them (an 18, a 24, and my current boat) were plenty deep. My current boat probably has the least amount of freeboard out of all that I've owned, but it still comes up well past my knees. Here's the 24' Here's the 295 But in my opinion the 26' Penny's have the least amount of freeboard out of any of them. I definitely noticed it the first time I fished on one, but even still it was plenty deep enough and came up past my knees. I think lots of guys put the raised bars/mounts on the 265's so that they can raise the riggers up a bit. As I seem to remember, Runnin Rebel has bars like that on his and it works out pretty well.

This is a great unit and will definitely make someone a fantastic fish finder. I'm surprised that it hasn't sold at that price!

We have a new Furuno 585 with a thru hull that I'm excited about, and by the end of the month we'll have a new Raymarine C80 GPS/plotter too. We've added a couple more leadcore rigs and some more copper to the arsenal as well.

They always have a pretty decent selection of T&S stuff on the wall, even in the off-season.

I'm with Tim, 'cept I look for even colder water! But my probe is generally my deepest rigger.

There is more blowback with the coated cable due to the increased diameter, but most of us counteract it by running heavier rigger weights on our probe riggers. I like the 15# Shark, but others have had good luck with the ATOMMIK 13# torpedos, etc. Run a heavier weight and blowback just isn't an issue.

30# Big Game for us too, and no I haven't noticed more fleas on it than in years past. We also run 15# Big Game in the spring. I have a spool of 15# McCoy that I'm going to give a try this spring...never tried it but YT has me considering it at least.

Check out Traxstech. We have several of them on the boat and they're absolutely bomb-proof. You'd want to measure to be sure that you have enough width to mount the track, but if you do, they're a great system. www.traxstech.com Several others on LOU have Bert's systems and like them, and if space with a track is an issue, the Tite-Lok holders are hard to beat. Any of the three will hold up quite well for dipsy fishing.

Those are great deep spoons...80' + down.

If the spoon comes with a split ring I generally leave it on. If it doesn't come with one I generally fish it like that.

NOW you're talkin'!! Excellent idea Andy!!!!!

I love the OLD Jr. Thundersticks in sil/black and sil/orange for browns but you can't find them in the stores any more. Dave Storm, who's father owned Storm Lures for a long time has started his own company (Dave's Lures) and we've had really good luck with his KA-BOOM shiners for browns. Firetiger, black/silver, chartreuse/white have all been really good choices for us.

Somehow I knew that was going to be your preferred method Ray!

Erin, I somehow missed all of the responses to this post. Thanks for getting the Navionics folks involved. Lots of good stuff here!

Cabin fever is definitely setting in even though I just spent the weekend skiing at Stowe (which was incredible by the way...check my blog for pics of that!). But......I WANT TO GO FISHING!!! I don't know if you do this or not, but I'm sitting here going through different salmon set-ups in my head. Riggers, dipsys, copper, leadcore, big boards, in-line boards, spoons, sticks, flashers, flys, cut-bait, you name it and my mind has been going through all of the various possibilities. I've been thinking about things from an under water perspective...you know, how it looks to the fish when you drive over top of them. So my question to all of you guys is what is your go-to set-up for summer Kings? I'm not asking for your top-secret colors or brands that you use for tournaments. I'm just curious what methods of deployment you choose most of the time. We typically run all three of our riggers with spoons or flies, and then get 4 wire dipsys in the water with most likely flies. Throw in a copper rig fished off of a board and that's been our #1 set-up. But this year we'll be running more copper rigs. Every day is different and some days we run a lot of leadcore too. But most days out of Fair Haven the Kings are deep so we need to get our gear down 100+ feet. I'm curious what you guys run.

OK, that got my attention! Got any pics to share?? Congrats on the nice day out on the water!

Shoot, even I have a myspace page Ray.

I saw that too...I look forward to his participation!

Winter is a loooonnng way from being over Jax! Sweet steelie bro!

Well we'll have to have an adult beverage after the Challlenge then! We'll definitely be fishing the Challenge.

Tim, Yes, we're moving the boat down there permanently this year. We'll have a lot more room for the boat as well as shore power, water, etc at the boat. We loved Shawn's but the new boat was just too big for the marina last year and we really need shore power. We're gonna keep the camper at Shawn's so we'll still be over there too.

Fishinman, I think you're gonna see even your "regular round cannon ball at $25-30" costing double or triple that much this year unless you find some old inventory somewhere. The cost of lead has just gone thru the roof. I'm curious, how much of these rising costs do you guys think is tied to the cost of a barrel of oil????

Awesome, thanks!

I believe so. They said that the cost of materials has skyrocketed this year, but with this move they should be able to keep the price about the same.