Pete Collin

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Hello. I am on the market for a 7 foot medium action spinning rod. Preferably one with an IM6 blank, a cork handle and many guides. I'll even take a blank if you have one.

Wyoming County, Letchworth Park area

That's 4 hours away from me! Too bad.

where do you live?

Where do you live?

I'm on the market for replacement rigger weights. I will even buy some releases if you have them.

Cool article. It has been years since I caught a fish and did not know what it was.

Looked it up. You may be right. Didn't know the great lakes had them.

We were anchored off the mouth of Oak Orchard yesterday evening. Slow bite but we managed a couple nice male browns. The weird thing is that we kept seeing what we thought were breaching trout and salmon, but after snagging several, discovered that they were these big 2+ pound herring! Could these possibly be alewives? They had sawlike bellies the way alewives do. No adipose fin, so they weren't whitefish like I initially thought. I know seagoing alewives can get pretty big, but these things were mutants! The first one we brought in was snagged in the tail. It looked oval as Steve cranked it in, so he thought at first he snagged a turtle. We started calling them turtle fish. There must have been a jillion down there, becasue we could feel our spoons scraping their sides from time to time. At first they were sort of interesting, then got a bit annoying because the browns wouldn't bite, finally we relocated to try to get away from them. The turtle fish gave us something to talk about until we finally hooked some browns!

Sort of analogous to hunting from horseback!

I'm curious how the drift speed of a jet ski would compare to that of a boat, especially with a sock behind you. On the one hand, there is less crafft above the surface to catch with wind, but way less inertia for the wind to overcome. I used to use a handheld gps to mark my hotspots, on the new boat it's all up on the chart screen. Once you locate a hotspot, it is good to quickly motor back upwind once you pass out of them. The lakers tend to follow a contour. Looking back, I bet my most successful days were ones where luck had the wind blowing me right down the pipes of where they were lying. When the wind is blowing at a right angle to shore, you often drift out of a school within a matter of minutes. So you spend a lot of the day picking up and moving.

I have brought myself in during 4 foot waves in my 16 foot Smokercraft twice. Don't want to be over-dramatic. But I remember thinking that I went out to have fun, not to find myself in a fight for my life. That makes me very prudent in choosing when to go out and when to come back in.

It is, of sorts.

Well this is the fanciest tackle box I will ever own.

One step ahead of you!

I'm pretty far along with my chestnut tackle box. I want to put brass corners on it, and have to mount the hinges and latches. A few coats of varnish will make that nice grain pop!

Hello All, Since I took up boat fishing, I always sought to do more with less. I had a small boat, cheap equipment, and gear I had made or modified. I did OK with it. Part of the fun was finding creative ways to get to the fish. It's natural to eventually want to add to what you've got. As my small boat began to show its age, I wanted something bigger, safer, and better fitted for modern fishing. I searched for a while before getting my 17 foot Lund last fall. It came with electric downrigggers, two GPS sonar graphs, CB radio, Yamaha kicker, and best of all, a spot-lock bow mount motor. In the past, I experimented with anchoring in deep water. When you vertically jig for lake trout, you'll often drift over a big group of fish that you'd love to park on top of. With drift bags out, moving with the wind, all you can do is hope they bite in the time it takes to pass overhead. Staying in place is an attractive notion. I've tried using the foot pedal of my bow mount to stay in position, but it was too much like rubbing my stomach and patting my head. And on Lake Onatrio, there are no landmarks to navigate yourself into a swimming pool sized waypoint. Aside from tossing out a bouy to go by, the only other option seemed to be splicing together a 300 foot section of anchor rope so you could really work over a good area. I tried that only once. Ever hand-haul 300 foot of anchor rope, heaving for the length of a football field against mud, zebra mussels, water resistance, and gravity? A capstan would be a practical assist for that grueling task, but the cost of one is roughly the same as buying a spot lock motor. And an electric motor that can use GPS to robotically hold you in a tight position, with the click of a button, is awesome! I wanted to get an early start yesterday because it was sure to be busy at the launch. The guys in front of me helped me launch, and explained that they couldn't get their engine started, so had to pull out as soon as I got underway. I thought, "poor guys", as I thanked them and waved goodbye while putting toward the creek mouth. Early morning, flat waves, tons of recent, encouraging fishing reports. What a time to be dead in the water. This is when I noticed my fuel gauge pegged at empty. "How could this be?" I thought. I could swear I had about a half tank after my last trip. The new boat uses way less gas than my old 2-cycle. Flipping switches on my panel, I figured that either I was in fact out of gas and was damned lucky to have made it all the way in on my last trip out, or the gauge was broken, or the tank had somehow sprung a leak. If the gauge was broken, I either had enough gas for the day, or didn't but there was no way to tell. I tried rigging a dipstick to put down the gas port with what I had on hand, but it didn't work. Even with all the other boats out there, I still didn't want to get myself stranded, and have stories about this idiot who wasn't smart enough to buy gas to show up on this forum. The only way to save the day was to trailer up, fill the tank with enough gas for the day, and head back out again. I lost about an hour of fishing time. And it turns out my gauge is broken, the tank top-off didn't budge the needle. On my second launch, I met another group of guys that had to come back in because of mechanical problems. Isn't boating fun? Well I learned exactly what a help my space-age equipment can do for jigging lakers. If you park your boat right above any blip you see, teasing them with a fluke in their face until they make up their mind is just the presentation the situation calls for. I also came to appreciate how strong the lake currents can get on a seemingly flat day. When stationary, my jig wanted to belly out behind me fairly quickly unless I used a rather heavy one. One could imagine lakers on the bottom finning themselves in place, holding themselves steady in a choice lie the way a stream trout would. Spot Lock let me stay right with them, tease them, change lures, try every trick on each fish until they bit. It was a revelation. You spend so much more time with a line in the water, rather than pulling in the drift bags and motoring back upwind. I was having a lot of fun, was ready to set up a camera to make a video, until the batteries of the Minn Kota ran out. I guess they don't hold their charge when sitting idle for 3 months! Oops! Still, I was really happy and look forward to a fish-catching summer! Stats: Landed 6, missed 2. Doesn't sound earth-shattering, but I lost prime fishing time and they were still biting when I left. 3 were bigger than 30 inches.

I think I saw you guys out there. I was jigging off Wautoma. Got skunked but had a massive hookup that came off. Kept seeing silver fish jumping on the surface in that calm water. They looked like immature steelhead or salmon.

You can still find a few chestnut trees sprouted up from old root systems. They usually grow until they are a few inches in diameter then die from blight. Sometimes they get bigger before they succumb. I am a professional Forester, and have the opportunity to find these. If the landowner lets me take these dying trees, I saw them up into lumber. There really is no market for them, not enough supply to create a demand.

Hello All, I'm working on a woodshop project for my boat. It will be a wooden tackle box made from rare chestnut lumber. It will look like those old machinists' toolboxes when it's done, with a front door that swings down and a lidded top compartment. I have used an ugly old metal tackle box for the last 15 years, this will be a step up.