A piece of nostalgia ?

[ioiosoiwork]

Current E-Bay posting

http://www.ebay.com/itm/300826235881?ss ... 1431.l2649

http://www.ebay.com/itm/300826235881?ss ... 1431.l2649

[panfisher]

Interesting piece of equipment. Looks like it would prove to b effective on lakers. Particularly those massed schools seen hugging the bottom sometimes at 300fow in the summer. At least i am assuming those might b lakers, as I have never been able to "get anything up" from there with regular spoon or ff rigging. Have pondered some still jigging for those, which seems extraordinary on the Big O.....

[Sk8man]

Very similar to my victrola rig down cellar but with different motor /orientation. Very effective for jerking copper on bottom oriented fish with old Pfleuger #4, and 5 's. My arm still hurts from remembering it :>)

Les

[ioiosoiwork]

............Well it's for sale for what I got into it.... $41.00 I bid on it for a friend & won .....now he doesn't want it

[Sk8man]

One of the things you need to know but can't tell yet is the strength of the coiled spring in it. It has to be strong and in good shape in order for the thing to work properly. If it sticks a little WD40 often works wonders. Use a light oil for maintennce because grease will harden up in coller weather. Those units in good working order can be very deadly on lakers in particular in the Spring in shallower water with just the copper and no sinker but can also be used deeper (e.g. winter fishing) with weights with spoons (heavy ones directly attached to the copper wire (so you can feel everything on bottom when you drag it over it) or light flutter spoons with a short leader. The setup in the pic on ebay is set up with a small "flasher" rig which uses a short leader with spoon, twin minnow or peanut behind it with the weight dragging the bottom stirring things up and getting the lakers attention - often down deeper. It will work on any of the Finger Lakes but areas of the lakes where there is a cobble or stone bottom is best to get the "feel" of the bottom to know where you are at. You also need to perfect the "jerking" technique (usually a couple short strokes followed by one long one) to have success and it takes practice.

[ioiosoiwork]

..................it's for sale

[Sk8man]

Marty,

It looks like a good unit for some lucky dude but I already have a victrola rig (with copper wire), an A and S automatic reel (used with monel wire) and way too many other "toys" according to my wife (and she also thinks all my hobbies are "expensive" :>) These units are getting harder to find in good condition so for anyone out there "heres your chance" to experience the thrill of having a gigantic lake trout on the other end of a direct wire contact....no pole or other stuff ...just you and the fish and it is VERY exciting when it happens. My biggest was a 12 pounder on Seneca and I had quite a few over 10 lbs over the years too. The one tip I'd have though is to surely wear a leather glove or cut just the thumb and forefinger out of a pair of leather gloves to handle the wire....otherwise if it snags on bottom or a really big fish makes a run for it you could lose a finger....and that is the truth. The most successful folks I have ever known for lakers have been copper pullers (and other than still fishing with live bait (and perhaps very experienced "jiggers" ) it is the most deadly method of fishing for them.

[ioiosoiwork]

Pfffffft ! what do wives know ........as he quickly looks around to see if his wife is reading over his shoulder ...Damnit Sk8man, your making this "thing" another piece on my boat !

[Nessmuk]

Marty,

If the spring is good it looks like a nice piece of equipment. If I got stuck with it I would put it back on ebay or list it in the LOU classifieds or maybe take it to a swap meet. I'd be interested in it but I don't have the Ben Reno boat to go with it

[Sk8man]

Still laughing....:>)

[ioiosoiwork]

SOLD

[ac holmes]

It sure brings back memories for me on Seneca Lake in the late 50s and early 60s. I eventually got my hands on an Old Town 14 foot boat with a transom for a small motor and a big, high bow. It was lapstraked planked with cedar and fastened together with thousands of tiny brass machine bolts, rather than rivets. It was a great rough water boat, heavy and stable and I never worried about wind and waves at all. I fished copper with two pie plates bolted together on a center spindle and a cranking handle. When we caught a fish we hand lined them in and let the copper pile up in the middle of the boat, and then let it back out carefully. I don't remember any problems with tangles or kinks with the solid wire we used to use. As mentioned, Pflueger #4 with a #5 hook in the spring (no leader) and a black Twin Minnow on a 10 foot leader in the summer, always dragging bottom. Woodard's Hardware in Watkins Glen had a whole area of the store dedicated to this tackle and method of fishing and us kids would save our money all winter to get what we needed for spring fishing. I knew some of the old timers had the Victrola rigs, but they were way beyond the reach of us kids. I know that a lot of Lakers ended up at the back door of the old Jefferson Hotel at night, and local Lake Trout was always featured on the menu (my mother was the #2 chef there for years and years). I quit fishing the lake in the early 70s because the bottom was heavy with a bright green slime and it made no sense to fish the bottom because the lure would instantly be gobbed up as soon as it hit bottom...kinda like the fleas nowadays in some ways. No more slime now...I heard it was an algae bloom from phosphate run off, but don't really know what it was. Copper was a deadly way of catching Lakers and getting skunked was not part of our fishing experience very often. There was 8 or 10 guys who fished all the time on the South end, most memorably "Blacky" Colunio, (he had lost an eye in WW2) and "Piggy" Cherock...maybe some of you remember those guys, Piggy died last year and Blacky, a long time ago. I have learned to fish the Lake differently these days after returning from CA, where I lived for several decades, but it really isn't any more fun than pulling copper in the good old days. All in all, the lake is probably a better fishery now with the Salmon and Browns, but I wonder what it was like a hundred years ago.

[DtD]

A very pleasant read, AC. Thanks for this piece of history. I spent all my early summers at Newfound Lake in N.H. and remember well all that you reflect upon here.

As a confirmed jigger following all the heavy duty stuff, my pleasure has increased ten fold out on the Lakes. Seems the " good ol days " are still with us.

[Sk8man]

I guess some folks would think that pulling copper is defined as a wire with a "jerk" at each end.... but ...there is nothing to compare to that familiar klink klink along the bottom followed by a "thunk" or "thud" (depending on the size of the fish)and then all hell breaking loose :>) The slime referred to by AC was the result of phosphates primarily in wash detergents back in the 50's and 60's which served a "biolimiting" factor for the vegetation. In the late 60's and 70's they pretty much stopped using it in the detergents and the problem pretty much corrected itself. Unfortunately, today's problems such as introduced invasive species (.e.g. spiny fleas, Zebra mussels and Quagga mussels) are not so easily dealt with. AC's note is a pleasant reminder of the simpler times and the inherent beauty and elegance of the "less is more" principle. Sometimes I think we get too tangled up in our electronics and fancy tackle and forget how to actually "fish" :>) ...but it is all fun! We are indeed very lucky to live in such close proximity to beautiful bodies of water like these that are second to none in terms of the scenery and variety of things to do.

[pokepole39]

now those are the good old days for those that can rig and run them right ///slow slow slow

[ac holmes]

Yeah...I still can't believe that I am an "old timer" and blubber on about the "good old days" because on the inside I am still 25 years old and looking forward to the next challenge and adventure. In that regard, I have an opinion and an idea, and next spring I am going to explore it. As follows: Lakers are bottom dwellers mostly, and I suspect there are some real big ones in Seneca. Maybe bigger now with all the changes in the lake and the abundance of bait. Mostly, folks don't fish for these monsters, on the bottom in deep water, so whose to say what's down there?

50 years ago I had a too many beers at the Eagle hotel in Lodi one night, and we locals gabbed a bit with 2 Navy divers who were doing some work on the Barge, that is still anchored off Dresden. In those days, something real top secret was going on there and they would not say much about why they were diving working there, but they did say that they saw real big lakers on the bottom (like 50-60 pounds), and those big hogs were too fat to move around much and were mostly bottom feeding in the cobblestones, digging around with their noses, and feeding off dead baitfish laying on the bottom. That encounter, as best I can remember it (given the beers), always comes to mind when I am on the water and see big marks, deep, on the bottom in the summertime.

As mentioned in the previous post, fishing the bottom with copper was done real slow...the slower the better, and every once in a while we would get something on the wire that was big and real heavy. I never got a real big fish to the boat but on 2 occasions hooked very heavy fish and never got them up where I could see them. One time the wire broke and the other time the hook was straightened out. I don't know how deep I was fishing those times because we just let out wire until we felt the bottom, but I know I had let out lots of wire and was both times fishing a black twin minnow in mid summer, real slow. I am now confident that the black twin minnow was the hot ticket because it represented a slimy sculpin which is one of the primary food sources for Lakers. The twin minnows would wear out after some use because the front lip would grind down, from digging into the bottom.

I knew a fellow back then, named Ken Howard, now long gone, who fished a lot off his cottage near Salt Point. He had a photo that his wife took at his dock of a fish that was too big for him to get in his small boat and he had

more or less towed the fish to his dock and hollered for his wife to get the camera. The photo showed the tail i/3 of a Laker that got off at the moment the photo was shot that the DEC estimated to be over 30 pounds. That is a true story because I saw the photo several times, and Ken never tired of telling the story.

Lake trout get real big in other lakes...why not in Seneca? Maybe we don't fish for them anymore. I confess that I have tried bottom fishing a little in recent years, but have not figured out how to keep the Zebra mussels off the lure. Maybe jigging is the way to explore the possibility of big Lakers. In any case, it is something to think about on a cold winter night.

[Sk8man]

Yes I too remember the stories of the big lakers out near the barge that divers had seen and we marked plenty of them down over 300 ft suspended though in exactly 500 ft of water. That is the depth that the barge is anchored at. Once while pulling seth green rigs out there we were approached by a tender from the barge (17ft Montauk Boston whaler) and he commanded us to shut off our little 4 horse kicker saying that they were doing acoustic (sonar type) testing and that it was picking us up. I said how far away would we have to be not to interfere and he said at the extreme north end of the lake. We were out from Dresden so I was pretty shocked and amazed ( a good 16 miles). We complied and about a half hour later he signaled us we could continue on. That was about 1980 and the technplogy then was sure primitive compared to the present day but you can imagine what they are into nowadays. When my sone was about 7 or 8 I was running three rigs with 12 leaders each (aloowed back then) and we snagged up two rigs on the cables of the barge. My son tried to grab one of the rigs and it nearly pulled him overboard. The 80 pound wire didn't have much give but finally snapped. I figured we got off easy losing 20 Suttons and bead chains cable etc....anyway you brought back some Seneca memories AC :>)

[ac holmes]

As I remember, though I am not positive, the US Navy maintained the barge and it was actively guarded, as was the nearby Romulus Ordinance depot in the old days. It is common knowledge now that the depot had nukes stored there for a long time, during the cold war. My current wife worked for the government in the 60's, and one of her jobs was representing a top secret agency in DC that documented the care and maintenance of these weapons. She once made a trip to the depot to document the assembly of some nukes. She told me the story after we moved here from CA. So it is not surprising that whatever was going on then was top secret, at both the depot and barge.

Three winters ago while I was in FL, I leased my boat on Seneca (24 Bayliner with 2 Honda 90s) to a friend who was contracting with the government to provide a rescue boat at the barge, while the Sikorsky plant (now defunct) in Big Flats "calibrated" 2 gunships that were being sold to the Turkish Government. He was instructed to stand by a mile away in the freezing weather with 2 fully suited up Navy divers, in case they were needed. No rescue was needed, but the government paid real well for the use of my boat (they required a boat with 2 big outboards for the contract). We never found out what exactly was going on, but the gunships hovered for hours over the barge, doing something electronic. Lots of wonderful stories about the Romulus depot, Sampson Navel Air Station, and the "secret" barge that the old guys used to tell. C5 Galaxies used to be in and out of Sampson airfield quite often and us kids used to love to see them flying low over Burdett and Hector.

One more mystery that may be connected to that area of the lake is that in the late 60s, Morton Salt sunk two shafts 2500 feet down into the salt beds, almost directly across from the depot. The Canadian company was called "Cementation" and they had sunk deep shafts into the earth in many places, including the diamond mines in South Africa. After sinking the shafts, heavy equipment (that run on propane) was lowered down in pieces and they began mining salt, but after a couple of years they shut the whole operation down suddenly. I knew some guys who worked there and they told me that some large chambers had been excavated by the time they suspended operations. Eventually the mine shafts were capped off and who knows what was sent down there before sealing the shafts?

[Sk8man]

Very interestying stuff. I can vouch for the fact that nuclear weapons weapons were stored at the Depot. I guarded many of them first hand at Ramstein Germany from 1964-1967 when they were transported there by Army personnel from the Depot. I was a USAF Air Policeman then and used to do everything from escorting the C-124's and C-130's that contained the nuclear bombs to maintaining the gate of the storage area where they were kept at Ramstein. I have visually seen at close hand those weapons (even inside them) and once one of the techs showed me the complex fusing system that allowed them to go off nuclear (they would go off conventionally if everything wasn't set up right). The Army guys used to keep me up on what was happening in my hometown (Geneva) etc. I used to laugh back then at newspaper accounts from the Geneva Times newspaper that my mom would send me indicating that the rumors of nuclear weapons at the Depot were false :>) It was also rumored at that time (the 60's) that the Army had stored huge barrels of chemicals and RADIOACTIVE material in caverns under the lake..... hope it is untrue or inaccurate in light of your comments....pretty scary... At present the salt caverns are according to accounts I've read being used to store natural gas or propane in massive quantities. This isn't a great situation either....

[Sk8man]

I forgot to add that yes it has been and is a US Naval testing/research barge.

[ac holmes]

One point of clarification about the Morton project...Those shafts were about 20 feet across and 2500 feet deep. Each 8 hour shift would drill, blast and remove enough debris that allowed the lowering of a steel sleeve that served as a form, for another pour of high strength, steel reinforced concrete. Eventually the shaft of concrete reached the salt bed and a small city was excavated. I never went down there but some friends who did told me it was like a crystal city and quite beautiful...dry, warm and clean. The salt wells into caverns created by pumping out brine for 100 years are used for storage as you say, but access is by way of small well pipe rather than a 20 foot shaft with elevators, in the 2 Morton shafts. I am sure that stuff went down there. I saw many big Army trucks, covered in canvas tarps, in and out of the facility for several years, but I best not speculate, because in truth, I have no idea what it was. Some speculated that the excavation went under the lake to the depot and met up with another shaft there. If we knew what is actually going on with secret government stuff, we would be amazed and worried I think.