craigdritchie

Just be careful you don't wind up inhaling a bunch of crap, especially if you don't know what's in the floor to begin with.

Dave - um ..... no. Still vertically jig in open water, so sorry friend, they need to stay here in the sunny south. Well, not very sunny today but you get the point.

Steady there Bill. You can vertically jig out of a boat too. Ice fishing? Been there, done that, got the frozen t-shirt. Never again, not even at gunpoint.

Quetico tackle sounds right. And yes, Dave, that's the bait. I have a few of the same ones, including a few in the same colour too.

T.J. you'll have to locate his next of kin, since so far as I know, Red owned all the rights to his program and took that to his grave. Ownership of the programs would pass to whoever inherited his estate. I don't believe he and Lois had any kids, so it may be a complicated search requiring the help of a lawyer. Last time I spoke to him, a year or two before he died, he was working to find a distributor to sell DVDs of his shows, which strongly suggests that he owned them, not CTV. If memory serves, he did something like 250 - 260 episodes of The Red Fisher Show, so somewhere out there, there is a huge pile of old 16mm film waiting for the right person to come along and make something out of it.

Yup, except the Airplane jig pre-dates the Rapala by about 30 years. I bought my first Airplane jigs from the Outdoor Stores in Toronto back in the mid 1970s, years before Northland bought the company that produced them and acquired manufacturing rights. I believe they were originally made by a small company located near North Bay, but am not 100 percent certain. In any case, they're excellent lures. As mentioned, use a barrel swivel about a foot up your line from the lure to avoid line twist problems.

It's hard to beat the crock pot for roasts. But they come out best if you can cook them on low heat for 10 - 12 hours. Venison or, better yet, wild boar is just unbelievable when it's had time to slow cook.

Good effort, but that letter will go straight into the blue box.

Gotta love saltwater fishing! There's one more experience for the bucket list. Thanks for posting that Dave.

Great news, but I'm sorry to say this still won't stop several hundred people from bonking them anyways, thinking they're coho or chinooks or Atlantics or whatever. How many posts do we see every year where someone caught a silver fish and they're asking what the heck it is? Sad, but true fact --> a huge number of Great Lakes anglers simply cannot identify the fish they catch. It's pathetic, and completely unacceptable, but true. The new regs will reduce the number of rainbows killed by charter boats, which is a big plus, but I won't be surprised to see all kinds of people still killing in five rainbows a day otherwise. Hopefully the COs will spend a little more time at the ramps and weigh stations this year to get the message across.

I'm presently fishing some rancid old spawn from 1999, which I found over the summer when we cleaned out an old freezer. It looks disgusting and smells even worse, but catches fish just fine. Bill's right - in cold water, the stinkier the better.

Absolutely. Freaks of nature aside, the maximum size a fish will attain is determined partly by genetics, partly by the environment it lives in.

Consider HDS Gen 2 touch screens as well. More info in this thread.

Lots of terms being tossed around in this thread, and it's worth clarifying a few things. "Snow tires" and "winter tires" are not necessarily the same thing. "Snow tires" have a more aggressive lug tread than the average summer-use tire, so they give better traction in loose snow. Otherwise, they're chemically identical to regular summer tires. "Winter tires" are made from a different chemical mix than "normal" tires. It varies from one manufacturer to the next, but most have a high percentage of silica in the tire material. This allows them to stay soft and elastic in freezing temperatures, which gives you better cornering, better handling, much better traction and substantially better stopping power - even on dry pavement. Because normal rubber tires contract in the cold and become harder, your stopping distance increases as the temperature drops - even on dry pavement - and it can increase by as much as 25 percent! "Winter" tires mitigate this. People who say "I don't drive in thick snow" don't understand that winter tires are intended to work on dry pavement too. Quite honestly, the difference between winter tires and all-seasons is like day and night. I live in the GTA, and I was amazed when I tried winter tires. Having more silica in the tire material gives better traction, but the trade-off is that being softer, they won't last as long as regular summer tires. This is especially true if you run them in summer, during hot weather. Most have a max tread life of around 80k, but if you run them year-round, it's more like half that. So use them only in winter. Before someone asks, yes, you can have "winter snow" tires - that is, snow tires that are made with lots of silica in the rubber. But not all snow tires are necessarily also winter tires. If you drive in varying conditions and that's what you want, you need to read the label before you buy. "All season" and "all terrain" also mean different things. "All season" may have more silica than standard tires, but not nearly as much as winter tires do. "All terrain" usually describes properties in the tread pattern, like snow tires, but are chemically standard. Winter tires are the law in Quebec because they save lives. Why not just offer insurance discounts to people who use them? It doesn't help if you get killed by someone who didn't buy winter tires. You're still dead. Does the discount still matter?

-38?? I knew there was I reason I don't live up north.

Absolutely has to be run on a separate battery - never connect an electric to the crank battery. These have been around for years and none of them work particularly well. The electric has to contend with enormous drag from the big engine's lower unit, so battery life is just brutal. Not even close to weedless. And it's nowhere near as maneuverable as a standard bow mount or transom mount electric. Plus, the drag from the electric on the lower unit impacts your hole shot when you run the big motor (it rides above the water when on plane). Nice idea, but it's just not practical. Strongly suggest you consider another option.

A 12 foot tinny is the best investment you can possibly make. Cheap to own, cheap to run, no headaches, countless benefits. 30 footer of any description is a whole other breed of cat. Unless it's a big freighter canoe, you're not towing it with your minivan. Or with ANY minivan, for that matter.

I didn't read all the terms and conditions Bob, but almost guaranteed one has to be a US citizen for those. Or, have a US mailing address at least. Too bad, they look enticing.

This, my friends, is all one really needs ......

I don't know if I would say Air Miles is a rip off when you redeem on gift cards, but there's no doubt you get much better value when you redeem against travel expenses. That's what Air Miles and Aeroplan specialize in. So instead of gift cards, I use those points for travel. I think most of us spend a few nights in hotels each year while out fishing. It doesn't have to be a big trip to some exotic location, it can just be a weekend at Quinte. There's a Best Western everywhere. So why not use points instead of cash? Fact is, I LOVE my Air Miles card. And, I have the gold Air Miles Mastercard to go with it, so I can double-dip. Just on gas, groceries and booze that I'm going to buy anyway, I get a couple of free hotel stays every year. How do you beat that?

I never redeem Air Miles or Aeroplan for gift cards. Both have far more value when used for travel, so I'll use them to cover my hotel costs and/or flights on trips to fishing destinations. It makes a trip west for sea-run steelhead, or a drive down to Tennessee for smallmouth and muskie in February much, much easier on the wallet.

Sweet looking broon. But six inches of ice already? Gaaaaaaa! This is why I don't live in Manitoba! Spring won't get here soon enough.

Hard to say since the cost of the new tile and fixtures can vary quite a bit. Toilets alone range from $100 to $3,000+. A simple faucet for the bathroom sink can go from $39 to $400+. Tile prices are all over the place. How fancy do you want to go? Gerritt's breakdown gives you a good outline of the scope of work, but that's also going to be contingent on there being no mold issues, and everything being up to code. If it's from the 50s, chances are that nothing (plumbing, electrical, HVAC) meets present building code standards, so that will add to the expense. And being a bathroom, there's probably some amount of mold to deal with too. Wife and I are presently renovating an older house. Haven't seen your bathroom so it's hard to say, but $6,500 do do a gut job doesn't seem terribly out of line.

Back in the '70s I took a tour of the Garcia fishing rod factory. Back then, they made four different series of rods. There was the entry-level Blue series, and the more expensive Green series. The Brown series rods were a notch even above that, and provided you had lots of money, you could go all-out and buy the top-of-the-line Black series. They were pretty sexy rods, I must admit. People swore up and down that the Brown rods and Black rods were worth the considerable extra cost. They had better feel, better balance, and all sorts of other intangible benefits. But after the factory tour, I learned that in reality, they were all the same. The only thing that was different was the colour of dye used on the blank. Handles, hardware, resin and glass cloth were all otherwise absolutely identical. On a trip to South Korea two years ago, I did a couple of other factory tours. I can tell you that not much has changed. I always buy good quality equipment, but I am very careful to not get caught up in the marketing hype. You usually get what you pay for - but not always.

I agree, anyone who thinks they need a $30,000 bass boat is fooling themselves. These days, a good bass boat starts at $65,000.