AKRISONER

if you are looking to catch a pile of dinks you cant beat a whacky senko up shallow. Also the afternoon is notoriously hard to fish on the kawarthas, the pressure, boat traffic and high sun pushes the fish into the abundant grass cover. The fish will always be in 7-10 foot weeds but fishing them can be really boring and miserable. The fish come back up at sunset though, they almost seem to appear out of nowhere and the topwater bite can be amazing. On buckhorn a couple of weeks back we fished a tournament and grinded out bites all day, we were frustrated and went to an area that we literally got skunked in during the pre-fish and tournament...sunset? We caught 10 decent fish in about 30 minutes all on pop-r's They were absolutely chewing.

Caught the biggest musky of my life in the river, plus a few more. There’s lots of them.

Definitely depends on how much power you have. also worth considering is how much money on fuel you will save with for example a newer four stroke vs an old two. especially with gas at 1.30+

I always said, those car enthusiasts in arizona have no friggin clue what working on cars actually entails. truthfully I feel like 90% of a mechanics job is just trying to get siezed bolts off of your vehicle.

What lake did you guys go to? Looks like simcoe in some photos and Georgian bay in others! nice fish!

Don’t run graphs off of the trolling motor battery. You are asking for a pile of interference. keep your graphs connected to the starting battery but you should also be keeping your batteries all fully charged any time you are not fishing. You may have wrecked your 3 year old battery by basically keeping it discharged for over a year. the amount of time running On the alternator is nowhere near enough to totally charge up your batteries that have had two graphs running on them for days. id personally bite the bullet and get a three bank charger and try out the old battery once it’s been fully charged and see how you go. If the batteries toast, lesson learned.

I own a star craft 🤷‍♂️ My best friend/tournament partner/fishing partner got rid of his 15 year old smoker, it was sinking, multiple failed rivets, felt like a car wreck with every ripple of water it touched. He never “beached it” or ever hit anything in it. he’s in a similar size/model crest liner now, the difference is astonishing i can assure you, neither the Starcraft or the smoker feels anything like the alumacraft I own. Or the Lund my uncle owns.

deep creep, a blow torch and a sledge hammer...thats how we get rusted on rotars off when doing brake jobs...i hope Dan doesnt see this and tell me that Im a moron for ever doing this.

yup (s)hes a barred specimen

you would have had to...until the other garbage brand just went totally out of business last year

starcraft is now basically a smoker craft...and if my experience with a smoker is worth anything...stay the heck away. Hands down the worst riding boat I have ever been in. My old man runs an alumacraft trophy 185 and my best friend has a 17 foot crestliner...both are fantastic boats. The alumacraft specifically feels a heck of a lot like a lund. Which is saying a lot because you already know how a lund looks and feels.

how long you got there partner lol Ive spent 4 years reading and reading and reading and keeping up to date with this stuff and even completing installs of Garmin and humminbird electronics, including networking them etc. At this point i could basically sell and install them professionally lol Ill add the ulterra although fancy etc with its auto deploy...is known to break...a lot The new generation of Terrova's have a spring load system that helps you deploy and stow the motor. It can get buggered up too, but its pretty darn easy to stow and deploy. The garmin force has a twin shock system that helps buffer and give you power to both stow and deploy the motor. The force is a cable drive style motor, big, powerful, and stows on a pivot vs a sliding shaft like the terrovas. They really are two totally different beasts and I think its overkill for your application.

to date I have owned A motorguide Tour cable drive minkotta powerdrive v1 Minkotta Powerdrive V2 ipilot A minkotta Terrova Gen 1 ipilot minkotta terrova gen 2 ipilot Garmin Force and I have multiple close friends and first hand dealings with Minkotta Fortrex Minkotta Ultrex For your type of fishing I would most highly recommend a Minkotta Terrova gen 2 with ipilot (non link) or if you want to get crazy a Garmin Force (totally dependant on your boat...please remind of me of what kind of boat you are running...this is a very very heavy robust motor that I would not suggest for any aluminum boat under 18 feet long. Having experience with all of these motors, Minkotta has very much disappointed me hence my move to garmin this year. Out of all of those motors, only 3 have operated without signficant issues/are now dead. The Foretrex The Terrova V2 ipilot and the garmin force are the only motors that have worked to expectations with the Garmin Force being literally on another planet as far as trolling motors go. You pay for it, but its by far the best trolling motor on the market (I havent used a lowrance ghost yet but my understanding is that its comparable) That being said...i think for the type of fishing you enjoy (judging by your past reports) an 80lb thrust terrova V2 Ipilot without a link is the ideal motor for you. You dont need the link because 1. to run the link youd need a networked humminbird sonar GPS which as a whole other investment and 2. the ipilot follow contours function is based off of the use of either lakemaster or a humminbird zero lines chart card which requires you to map the lake yourself. The Lakemaster canada card simply put...is terrible. Its honestly pathetic in Canada and I would highly recommend to anyone to not bother with it. In fact its so bad I would outright consider it dangerous due to its complete lack of accuracy. Hope this helps.

dont be so critical....im a weather nut and I was following that forecast Thursday morning. 10am I read a report published by the weather network showing the main convection and wind sheer points indicating the specific tornado threat for Thursday afternoon. I then sent a text to both my brother and a good friend of mine who was camping at Earle Rowe Provincial Park warning him of the threat that afternoon, and to ensure he had his head on a swivel for inclement weather so that they would not get caught out hiking or at the beach when the severe weather inevitably arrived. The map provided by the weather network clearly showed wha areas of Southern Ontario had the most "tornado potential" and wouldnt you know it, the tornado ended up hitting dead in the middle of the area they indicated had one of the highest threats. I think environment Canada could have definitely issued a "tornado watch" earlier in the day, however the super cells that formed didnt start rotating until they were already established and moving at 50kmh. By that point they had already issued the tornado warning and sure enough it hit and caused damage. Its difficult for them to provide any more warning than they already did considering the storm popped up out of nowhere and then produced a tornado within half an hour of the storm not even existing anywhere on the radar. As much as the weather people get hated on, id say their ability to predict that happening 6 hours before is actually pretty impressive. To ask them to pinpoint the exact location is ridiculous, but they painted a reasonably narrow area and were bang on with their prediction.

we recently ran a honda Eu 2200 generator on a trip into crown land. The thing was amazing. The eco mode kept the lights on and the radio playing, we then were able to easily crank it up when we needed power to charge batteries etc. Thing hummed so quietly we put it an extension cord's length into the bush and you wouldnt even know it was there. Very very impressive and the thing seemingly weighed nothing. Hauling the one jerry can of gas we used for it to run when we were at camp for 4 days was way worse then hauling the genny. Kids making memories for sure. Awesome.

Lord knows I need it lol

This is why Garmin put a two gas shock system in the force. One for up one for down.

not to "hate" on your purchase at all, i really hope its works out for you...but man do I hear a lot of bad stuff about motorguides. Its a shame whats happening to these companies. Same goes for Minkotta lately. Long gone seemingly are the days of these things lasting 20 years.

if i could tell you what the market was going to do ahead of time...$800 would be what id use to wipe my butt...cause I would be the richest man alive

Please extend an invite to me when this happens! I need more help on the fly!

Smitty, I was referring to spraying of weeds in lakes. Quite literally dumping herbicides into the water to kill off plant life for the purpose of improving recreational boat use. It’s pretty wild.

this same factory is the one that destroyed lake okechobe a few years ago right? Politicians down there getting lobbied to allow this company to dump that fertilizer in the water ways...good stuff. lets just say im glad I live in Canada where we dont let corporations destroy our fresh water resources at a price. If you can believe it, they still "spray" weeds down there. We used to allow that kinda stuff up here too, im glad we dont anymore.

Nothing like smelling a photo. this is far too political of a subject matter to survive an actual full thread. let me just say, it’s fun to sit and say nothing is wrong, while the west faces historical heat waves, while the east gets 100 year floods every year, and hurricanes form in the spring

We got smoked…one of the toughest days of fishing I’ve had on that lake, and when we finally hooked a couple of decent ones, we lost them. im still waiting for the day when, as Dave Chong says, “everything has to go right” ive yet to have a day competitively where we haven’t lost our big fish. It stings hahaha.

Man are they fun…