eye-tracker

A lot has changed in the past few years - a few things you will need to do with your boat and as the operator is meet the Transport Canada rules and regulations for a Small Commercial Vessel. As a minimum you will be looking at the following: ROC-M VHF Restricted Operators License Marine First Aid Certification Small Vessel Monitoring & Boat Inspection Program Certification MED. A-3 (Marine Emergency Duties Certification) SVOP (Small Vessel Operator Proficiency Certification) I highly recommend you talk to a few charter boat operators that have met the Transport Canada standards to get a feel for all the details involved including commercial boat insurance. I would also recommend you check out the OSGA. Good luck and start working on that business plan... -s

If it is Wabigoon Lake you will want to try Gold Berkley Flicker Shads. They worked great last summer when I fished the PWT Can-Am. Lots of noise and flash on that bait. If it was me fishing up there at this time of the year figuring your surface temp is in the mid to High 50's I would be going slow live bait rigging with FinTech Tech Sticks, pitching Nuckle Ball jigs along steep breaks or using slip floats in the back bays (back lakes) near spawning areas. -s

If you can post a picture of the screen it will help us trouble shoot a little better. If you are getting vertical lines it is interference of some sort. Also is the transducer new or from an older lowrance unit? I have added some screen shots with settings from right out of the box. All I did was select the fishing preset mode of Shallow Water as most water I fish is less that 50 feet. Here is a HDS screen image I took in shallow water yesterday. I am using the auto mode with the shallow water preset. And it seems to work great with no tweaking. Here is a screen shot from a recording where I was jigging walleye along the base of a hump. The reason the depth shows no number is it is blank during the recording playback. Once again I am using the shallow water preset and all auto modes for the best results. I find with the HDS units the presets along with the fishing modes work the best with only a few manual over rides or adjustments. -sheldon

Lots of lenses out there to do all sorts of different jobs. One thing I always recommend to people that are just moving into SLR cameras is to get the fastest glass you can afford. Fast glass will allow you to control depth of field and shoot in most lighting conditions. One lens that every Canon owner should have is: Canon EF Lens - 50 mm - F/1.8 - Canon EF -s

Ben, Don't have the boats out yet? -s

If it was one sonar unit I would figure it is a issue with the unit, but both doing a strange thing sounds like a common ground issue. I would check over the wiring and make sure all your grounds are connected. DC acts very strange when you have a faulty ground. Do your bilge pumps, live-well pumps or anything else hooked up to the same fuse block act strange? -s

I have a story about GULP alive, I am a tournament walleye angler and I spend lots of money on live bait (leaches, minnows and crawlers) as we fish with live bait in tournaments. As we all know live bait works, but last season when fishing the Professional Walleye Trail Super Pro Can-Am event in Dryden Ontario I was faced with fishing only artificial bait for the first time. I have always used GULP or PowerBait as a topper to keep live bait on a jig or live bait rig - so I had confidence going in. Rolled into town a week early to pre-fish and asked the local bait shops if any one fishes with GULP, the answer was a firm no. They also proceeded to inform me the walleye only eat live minnows. After a couple of days on the lake I started to dial in a pattern where the walleye would take GULP Alive leaches and crawlers on slow death hooks, spinners and rip jigging. Each day on the lake produced lots of fish (Walleye, Pike and Bass) and we often moved into an area where locals had no luck with live-bait, but we produced fish with artificial bait. At the end of the day it will come down to technique and fishing locations, bait is only one part of the equation. To make a long story short, when the tourney was complete the winning weight for the tourney broke the lake record for total weight... so do an internet search on the PWT Can-Am in Dryden and read up on the winning patterns. Best part was I saved money as I did not have to purchase a couple of flats of crawlers, dozens and dozens of minnows and leaches. Not to mention I did not have to carry all the equipment to keep the bait alive all week in hot summer weather. I still like my live bait in situations where I want the live minnow to swim around or a ribbon leach to slither through the water under a slip float (mind you the new GULP floating leaches work great under a float) for those tough days when the walleye are in a negative mood. When I am on the move pulling bouncers with spinners or slow death Gulp Alive is pretty hard to beat. Good fishing... -sheldon

That is funny jamie, The first thing I noticed was the boards on the port side where not on the right angle or distance back for the image and suspected a doctored image right off the bat. :D :D -s

Pam, You should try contacting many of the Artist Groups in Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council. I am sure you could work out some kind of twining program where city artists can show your group around. In return your Artist group can invite them up to Timmins as a return favor for spectacular fall art. A few clubs you may look up are: The Arts and Letters Club Forest Hill Art Club The Don Valley Art Club When I studied Fine Arts at York University the amount of artist resources and funding in Toronto was phenomenal. I still feel it is one of the top cities in the world for supporting the arts. Good luck... -sheldon

The Brokeh on the lego man is all lens. It was shot with a 135L series lens, with a very shallow depth of field. -s

As a recommendation on the software I would stay away from photoshop at this point and spend your money on Adobe Lightroom2. Your workflow software is very important, the new version of Lightroom has me doing all my edits within the software. I think I have only open photoshop once in the last 4 or 5 months. -s

It is great to see the older episodes on the web for those that don't subscribe to WFN in Canada. -sheldon

I use the Uni and double Uni knot for everything, that way I only have to know one knot . It is great all around knot for everything from a hook to adding leaders to super-lines. -sheldon

The BASS Elite Series entry fees for I believe eight tourneys this season is around $55,000.00 US. -sheldon

LEW, Last season MinnKota fixed the interference issue with the built in transducer that had been plaguing them for years on their bow mount motors. I did run a test last season and noticed you get half the targets on the built in vs. the Lowrance add on transducer. So if you can live with less detail and only use the front transducer for depth the built-in will be fine. Otherwise I would recommend going with the lowrance bow mount transducer for the best detail of targets. -sheldon