jace

good one. "my greatest fear after i die is that my wife sells my fishing gear for what i told her I paid for it." that's the best sig file i've seen.

great! that's a good find then. Which model avid did you get? I have a few of them myself, mostly the longer 8.5/9' salmon/steelhead rods. I suppose they aren't the same since mine are all the older, pre "IPC technology", flat gray colored avids.

You're right. for fish finders, i think lowrance is better, especially their bottom marking capabilities. The closer to the bottom your target species is, the better lowrance seems to be at identifying them. For GPS, however, nothing on this planet beats garmin for handhelds. It has the most extensive mapping software of any of the gps's made for the everyday consumer. ...so i have 2 units rather than 1 gps/fish unit with a split screen. for handhelds, i've tried quite a few and garmin's mapping always brought me back. Right now, my pocket gps is the 60csx which is basically a non-floating version of the 76csx. I thought the 76 was just too big for the pocket. I also have the garmin BlueChart maps for 3 of the 5 great lakes which also covers a lot of the smaller lakes and rivers...each great lake is a separate pay region, if you know what that is. Amazing detail.

Is it an authorized dealer? I thought StCroix sold under the fixed price strategy. If it's not authorized dealer, you might have problems getting any kind of warranty service through them. That's the problem with buying a lot of things from ebay, sure they're the real items, but 1/2 the price on premium products is for the warranty and most items are not covered when bought from unauthorized dealers like ebay retailers.

Unless the combo has a card telling you the line is a specific brand and type, i would definitely change it. Even with info, i would at least buy a new roll and take it with me because you never know how long it's been on there or if the rod has been exposed to too much heat or whatever. For the pike, you'll want wire or heavy mono leader. you'll be fine for the other species. If you do respool with new line, resist the temptation of overlining (spooling a very heavy test), you probably won't need it unless you know you're fishing through heavy weeds. you can't go wrong with trilene xl. 10-12#. maybe 14..that's about the highest you want.

The info is not printed on factory rods because 99% of them don't make their own blanks but if you go with a custom rod and choose your own blank, the blank weight is there for you to see. StCroix, lamiglas, Pacific Bay, American Tackle and most others list the full blank specs and measurements including weight

Cool looking fish. Is there much of a market for them or were they hard to sell?

that's my point exactly which is why i brought up runners and secretaries. Painters get tennis elbow injuries as often as tennis players, it doen't have to be physically exhausting activities.. And to a previous post...I doubt bob izumi fish 14 hour days any more than Henry and Italo do. I stopped watching his show probably a decade ago because it was nothing but product schlepping from boats to trucks and other fishing tackle.

I have plenty of rods that balance on my finger right in front of the reel seat. ...if it was behind *or* on the reel, it'll actually feel top heavy. Take some of your things to a shop and try them out.

so go join a football forum and tell them that they spend big bucks on modern lightweight equipement because they need to go to the gym more. tell world class edurance cyclists like tour de france riders that they need to train more instead of spending 5-6 figures on lightweight carbon fiber bikes. tell pro tennis forum members that if they trained more, they could go back to old wooden and aluminum rackets and be just as good. serious long distance hikers are unfit and that's why they buy titanium gear and tents and sleeping bags that weight 1-2lbs. a genuine marathon runner can go back to heavy old rubber and leather shoes if only they dedicated themselves to the sport Anything we do all day involving muscles benefits from reduced weight and well designed equipment.

sure it does. your 25 Oz rod reel +1oz to my 10 Oz Rod reel + 1oz sinker. I'm still swinging 1/2 your weight. That 1oz tackle is really what doesn't matter when i've shaved over 10 Oz off the rod/reel.

I started fishing both hands for the same reason. When i go on vacation, i fish literally 12+ hours/day, all day, every day, for almost 2 months straight...trust me when i say your equipment's balance and weight matters. So after learning to fish both hands, stripping weight off my rods and reels was the next step and it makes a huge difference which is why for both bass and fly, the only 2 types of fishing where your hands are swinging literally all day long in fairly rapid succession, the higher tech rods have the weight down to nothing. For both, you're probably making about 5-10 casts/minute, maybe more. anything repetitive causes tremendous strain, regardless of the weight, but once you add weight, it adds to the problem. ...don't think so? ask a secretary or data entry person with carple tunnel syndrome how they would feel about adding weight to their fingers while typing. ...and that's why you can get entire bass and spinning rod/reel setups that cost well over $1000 but they weigh 10oz, total, rod and reel. Typical middle priced reels weigh that much by themselves and most cheaper freshwater reels alone can be twice that. Most heavy setups and bluewater equipment, although they weigh a ton, they are either not used for casting all the time and sometimes not cast at all (trolled, bottom, whatever). Besides this, lightweight and super powerful standup stick don't go together which is why the very big rods over 80# class are heavy e/s-glass. For steelhead rods, you're going to have to fork out a lot of cash to get the weight down because even with generally lightweight components, the length of the rod magnifies it so you're going to need and want the very lightest components available. It's hard to do the first time, it was for me, but you will never look back after you do and you'll wish you did it sooner. You're going to have to find something probably built around titanium guides as they are the lightest out there. There are some factory rods built with RECoil guides...go to a store and compare them to a rod with normal guides and you'll feel a huge difference just doing a wiggle test, you'll feel the big heavy normal guides swinging the rod tip much longer than the titanium and RECoil rods...and guess what's fighting and dampening all that extra wiggling....your wrist. multiply that by a 1/2 day of fishing day after day.

So i guess i'll never be able to post pics. A lot of places i go to have a link for members to give voluntary paypal donations. I think it's a nice idea.

I don't know if i would get that myself. The first thing i thought of was this old picture....some of you probably know it.. http://www.dirtybutton.com/media/db88-donald-duck-ride.jpg

There are many reasons to choose one over the other besides safety. 1- should you decide on twin screws, two outboards is significantly cheaper than 2 inboards 2- with 2 screws, you can run a boat with less draft with the same power in the water. 3- twin screws absolutely spank a single prop in maneuverability if you have the skills and know how...for example, making the boat move perpendicular to a dock...i.e. sideways. 4-single screw will have better top end speed for 2 comparable boats due to less drag 5-sometimes single large engines, in or outboard cannot drop down slow enough for trolling without manually adjusting the engine or the right prop 6- two engines at near top speed will be cheaper to run than one that's always screaming at top rpm (gas, maintenance, etc) i'm sure i'm missing things but that's some of it.

thanks. I've only heard people talk about this place. Is it a good sized store with lots of fishing gear in stock?

what sucks even harder is there's no way you can retaliate because it's not like the baseball and hockey strike where you just screw them and leave the seats empty. Too many people have no choice but to ride the rocket, like it or not. And i don't know if something like this can be privatized because there isn't a single public transit system in the country that makes money...they're all money losers because the equipment and maintenance costs are staggering...new buses cost 1/2 million each, that's not including operating costs and maintenance. How many buses like that could your private bus company afford? I'm not supporting them because i know they're holding the city hostage with no alternatives.

wow. that's a nice fish. Although i havn'et tried it yet, I've watched a ton of carp fishing videos from the UK. Some of them are just fun, most of them are very educational like a series i got with underwater cameras to study feeding behaviour when using different tactics. Watching international fishing videos and rod building is how i get my fishing fix in the off season. Looks like a blast, i don't know why i've never gone out to try it. Anyways, thanks for the fish pic!

Is there a store in toronto that carries a well stocked rod building section? And i mean WELL stocked, not just 2 bottles of flexcoat, a big box of mismatched guides, and some wrapping threads. I checked a few stores online and coudln't find much. I wrote to angling specialties on the east side 2-3 weeks ago because i heard they have some things and got no answer. I'm actually in waterloo and we have 1 store that i can go to for some random parts. I've been getting most of my things online and it's so hard to get exactly what you need because you're never sure about sizing and colors until it's in your hands. thanks.

the horror stories sounds like what 2 of my firends went through for about 3-4 years. Nobody services their particular outdrives locally so they have to ship them down to Seattle. After many trips back and forth with huge shipping costs, they ran several seasons with a completely unreliable boat and hated it. When they fish, they typically run about 50-60 miles out (so 120 return) and that's no fun coming back with one prop turning. They figure they wasted about $20K in those years with the shipping and rebuild costs so last year they bit the bullet and spent $50K on 2 brand new outdrives that can now be serviced locally when it comes time. That's a lot of money but they coudln't be happier because they love their fishing. Those were very miserable times for them and i'm sure they're glad it's finally over....except for the lawsuit with the shop that did the servicing.