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I use 5-10ft without much loss in production.

That's what I do, one off each board on each side. I find I need to be careful when running a dipsey on a 2+ setting on the same side as my 300 copper though. And NEVER turn while letting the copper out. I use rubber bands as my releases.

Thanks John, I agree, the season is just starting to heat up!

THE CURSE IS BROKEN!!!! What a beautiful weekend! We finally broke the Sodus ProAm curse and had BEAUTIFUL weather all weekend for the Sodus ProAm. We arrived at the lake late Thursday night and got a few hours of sleep before heading out to prefish on Friday. We started out in the morning at 100fow about seven miles East of port, hoping to get away from the boat traffic. I had just setup and was putting the 600 copper in the rod holder when it started smoking! That ended up being our biggest fish of the weekend at 23lbs. We pointed the boat North knowing we had one spot with fish. It then took another hour before we doubled on lakers. That would be our last lull. From then on, we hit a fish about every half an our with multiple doubles. We never circled, just pointer her north until we hit ice water in 650fow. We would hit fish about 70-100 down and retire the lure into a box of what worked. Our team was a machine going 12 for 15 with our biggest six averaging over 20lbs. We really felt good for Saturday. Friday night was the Captain's meeting at the firehouse. It was good to see some old friends that were in town for the tourney as well as to meet some new ones. Then the wind blew overnight. The lake was pretty calm on Saturday, but our water was gone. The water temperature was a good ten degrees cooler and we threw every lure that worked the day before at them. We found the ice water had moved in to 400fow and we headed back south and tried our shallow spots again. Theresa finally put out a silver dodger with a blue fly on the 170 1setting diver and it smoked with a decent king. We switched up to a silver program, but couldnt find anything but skips and a real nice steelie. In retrospect, we should have probably just tried to box steelies, but we figured with our box Friday a lot of people would have huge boxes. Some did, many did not. Sunday, our team was split, half wanted to go back to our area from Friday hoping fish had woken up, the other half wanted to try spots from last weekend. Last weekend's spot won out. We arrived 4 miles west and the screen was loaded. We had a beautiful screen all morning, but they just wouldnt bite. 130fow and 180fow. We finally started hitting steelies on our 600 coppers over 130fow and concentrated on them. We managed four legal sized fish and a laker and threw a bunch if skips back. A black and silver spoon did most of the damage. Two of our steel were over 10lbs. We never had a single king bite. We finished 11th I think, missing our goal of top ten by six points. We had a ton of fun though! If you have never fished one of these tournaments, you really should try it! The Sodus one especially has a great atmosphere and is worth trying at least once. The Sodus ProAm was well run and a big pat on the back to everyone involved in making it happen. It is not easy to run a tournament, but they made it look that way! We now we need to regroup and get ready for the Salmon Slam weekend Aug1-2! Hopefully, we saved all our luck for it and BFF!