Sk8man

John if you don't need too many done it is very reasonable to have Tuna Tom do them. He carries the Dragmaster carbon fiber drags. They are great to work with and the turn around time is excellent too.

I think you'll love them (the drags)

Harvey they are referring to the Chamber of Commerce launch at the NORTH end of the lake. The grass in there was about 3-4 FEET thick and huge pods of it a week or so ago and worst of all it has foul smelling decayed stuff mixed in as well as silt etc. which can mess up your water intake on motors. Additionally it gets clogged on trailers terribly and that stuff would surely spread from lake to lake if someone were to relocate. It is truly a mess there.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to Hank and all the other great LOU folks out there. May you have tight lines throughout the upcoming fishing season

Agreed.

I have a great deal of respect for Keith's (Gator) take on this issue and his published work as well so I guess my above comment was a bit lacking in concept clarity. It is also apparent that there are two separate issues at hand here: the first being the prevention of additional invasives entering the watershed and secondly the reduction/elimination of the current culprits and problems which also cross the boundaries of plant and zoological entities. These certainly aren't simple problems with straightforward answers or solutions.

I think that the only way we have a chance of dealing with the current invasives is though scientific research to find their weaknesses and then initiate things to exploit those weaknesses but unfortunately these things are very costly usually and despite putting our natural resources in jeopardy (billions of dollars attached to them) our government instead seeks to monitor and control the end users of these resources much as in the so called SAFE ACT which exerts increased controls on folks that are not the problem but that happen to be "handy" to make a public claim that they are doing "something" about something they have absolutely no control of which is the illegal trafficing and criminal use of firearms.

I was giving the details so that new folks reading the post might be aware that some things or questions may not be as simple as they might appear at first glance and there can be numerous things to consider in an answer and your question is a good one. I would imagine that setting your drag as light as you can without it falsely going out might be wise too as leadcore has a lot of drag from water resistance and eyes aren't always real "ferocious" when they hit (can carry the small ones for a long time without realizing it much as in downriggers with the release set tight)

I think there may some missing details in the question - A lot depends on the gauge of the leadcore (18, 27, 36, 45?), the size of the deep diver and whether you use a leader on the leadcore and its diameter and length, and most of all the intended trolling speed and underwater currents and direction trolled. All these things (and more) will affect the depth the setup will run. If you have a Fishawk TD you could get a pretty good approximation with it but again even the weight of that device will factor into the equation. You may have things working against each other down there. For example the belly of the leadcore may either help or hurt you depending on boat speed etc. At certain higher than intended speeds deep divers can go sideways too cancelling out some of the depth and the belly of the core may carry the diver up and down in the column too.

I guess it may be a good idea to sort of go back to square one on Skinny in terms of basics. The usual effectiveness of lures and trolling techniques usually depends on trying to match up the types of things used with the indigenous bait or baitfish in the body of water. To my knowledge there aren't any sawbellies there (or supposed to be anyway) and when I have ice fished it in past years the lakers hit on shiners and fatheads considerably smaller than sawbelly size. Although there have been occasional lakers of huge size (and very old) taken from there most are pretty small in comparison to other Finger Lakes such as Owasco, Cayuga, and Seneca etc. The rainbows there at least in the streams have responded to small marshmellows drifted so Skinny is not your typical fishing situation and I even caught a small one through the ice with a piece of cut up shrimp in the past. I guess I have felt that it is not an optimal trolling lake and that stillfishing techniques and live bait seem better suited to it. With that said if I were trying flashers I'd be downsizing considerably from what I use on the other lakes and go with the smallest flashers possible and 2-2 1/2 inch lures and perhaps even drag worm harness sized spinners instead especially in the Spring. I always fished the northern part of the lake and not the south so that should also be taken into consideration.

And I can vouch for the fact that Bob did an incredible job on it and that boat now looks, acts and feels almost brand new....well worth the effort Bob put into it. Hopefully some day he will recover his brain functioning from breathing all the epoxy fumes from the other boat

Since the day I bought my present boat in 2002 I have taken it immediately after fishing to a car wash wherever I am and use the high pressure and hot water/detergent and then wax to clean it as best I can. It has messed with my decals a bit though

It seems to me that the comments made thus far are good ones and are on the mark. I also believe that looking at the origins of the problem of the introduction invasive species may be productive as well. A lot of these problems have resulted from the indiscriminate discharge of the ballast from commercial vessels transiting the seaway from far away places and the total lack of monitoring or intervention of any kind by the government or even the identification of responsibility for this monitoring from the looks of it. Targeting the end user for responsibility is in itself irresponsible on the part of DEC or the state government. There should have been existing governmental accountability for preventing and intervening in this mess long ago at the originating level not the individual end user level "after the fact". In large part the proverbial "horse is already out of the barn". If a state agency had been charged with the close monitoring of ships entering the seaway and perhaps something like enforcing the use of a non-toxic colored dye being mandated to be placed in any ballast permitted to travel in these waters allowing the detection of the discharge and then routine monitoring by duly authorized agency watercraft or planes this whole mess may have been minimized or avoided. Would there have been an expense connected with it? yes...but the commercial entities using the seaway could have been tagged with footing the bill perhaps avoiding some of these issues and heavy fines could have been levied similar to oil cleanup funds instead of holding innocent end users culpable for a problem they didn't create after the fact. Perhaps something like this could prevent or reduce the liklihood of future introductions into our waters.