Dabluz

Seems to me that I get almost 20 km/h with a 32 lb thrust electric motor on my 14 foot Sportspal canoe. I took the reading with my GPS. When I was using a 9 lb thrust Minn Kota electric motor, I could get 10 km/h when I was alone in the canoe. A 2 h.p. gas engine has more thrust than a 32 lb thrust electric. Increasing the h.p. to 3 h.p. does not add all that much more speed. However, the 3 h.p. engine will give you a higher speed if the canoe has another person and more equipment on board. I get almost 30 km/h on my 14 foot aluminum boat and 7.5 h.p. Evinrude. However, the speed is a lot slower when there are 2 or more people on board. I have a 9.9 Chrysler that I want to check. The last time I tried it out, I was alone and I was getting about the same speed as the 7.5 Evinrude. However, when loaded down with more gear and another fisherman, I think the 9.9 h.p. Chrysler will be faster. The old Chrysler needs a new prop and I did a tune up (in a barrel) so I'm hoping that speed will have increased quite a bit.

I would like pics too. Best bet is to post your photos to a site like photobucket or imageshack and then just send the http to your photo or photo album. This way, a person can zoom the image etc.

I snipped away a bit of your posting but left the spoon harness. Spoon harnesses are extremely popular for brook trout in my region (Saguenay, P.Q.). However, the best results come when there is more distance between the spoon and the baits. As I said before, almost all of my harnesses are made with heavy mono of 14 to 20 lb test and then I add a longer leader of smaller mono for the snelled hooks. I like about 20 to 24 inches of light leader material in front of the 2 or 3 snelled hooks. The walleye and especially the brook trout hit the bait hard. The blades and beads or the spoon does attract fish from further away but when the fish are about to bite, many are shy and that's why the often only nip at the last hook. There is always the fact that the lighter leader material behind the blades or spoons will break when snagged on bottom and if there is any loss, it's only the hooks that are lost.

I make my own crawler harnesses because I cannot find any harnesses that use quality hooks. I use Colorado spinner blades almost exclusively because I want lots of action at very slow speeds. I bought some great beads at Walmart a couple of years ago. They are called "miracle beads". Wow, they look like cat's eyes and when a light shines on them, they glow like a cat's eyes. They are 6 mm in size. I do not use fluorocarbon because of weak knot strength. Instead I use clear mono leader material in about 14 lb test. I guess even 20 lb test would do just as well. I tie a good swivel above and below the beads and blades then I add my 2 or 3 snelled hooks using 10 or 12 lb clear mono. I tie the snelled hooks to the bottom swivel. I vary the distance between the blades and the snelled hooks (6 to 20 inches). I found that walleye seem to prefer it this way or maybe the walleye I fish are more skittish. Anyway, I fish log infested waters and the depth varies greatly in the river where I do most of my fishing. If I do get snagged, I only lose the hooks. My blades and bead set up is in one package and the snelled hooks with long leader are in another package. There is no chance of tangles.

Yes....you register a bunch of waypoints and inscribe the depth at these waypoints. Then link the similar depths with a pencil and eventually, you will have a contour map of the bottom of your lake. Of course, the more waypoints that are registered, the more accurate your contour map will be. There are free programs on the internet where you can register your waypoints and then store them until you return to that particular body of water. Then you can reload your GPS with this info or you can even send them by e-mail to a buddy. He does not have to have the same GPS to use this info. One of the first free programs that you should check is called "Easy GPS".

By all means, buy a second battery. Buy a deep cycle battery and use a switch to either recharge your cranking battery or deep cycle battery. However, when you get home, recharge the deep cycle battery with an intelligent battery charger. Be careful as to which battery charger you use because not all battery chargers can recharge a real deep cycle battery. The cranking battery is not as difficult to recharge. As for the solar panels....forget that option. You will need too many panels to be able to recharge any battery. Solar panels (a wall of them) work great at the cottage when you only go to the cottage on the weekends. A bank of real deep cycle batteries, solar panels and a good computer controlled charger costs a small fortune. To recharge a deep cycle battery that needs a bit of juice to top it off, you will need at least 2 or 3 amps at 14 volts. This means 30 to 45 watts of power.

Great info here. However, where I live in Quebec, the ice fishing for brook trout starts at the end of April so I can only go for a few days before the ice gets too dangerous. We are not allowed to use minnows (dead or alive or in parts). So, I do not use a spoon with my nightcrawler. I let the head of the night crawler move. However, a flutter spoon with no bait that is gently jigged near bottom gets excellent results. Yes, noise is an issue. It both attracts trout and frightens them. I use a spud to make my holes so when I chop a hole not far from my first hole, I check the rod that is already set in that first hole because my noise will often push fish towards my first hole. Yes, moving around on the ice often drives fish away so it's best to move around slowly and silently. Same when fishing in a boat....less noise is best. Another thing that will most definitely scare brook trout is casting a shadow over the hole in the ice. Ice fishing for brook trout is my favourite way to fish. Here where I live, the limit is 20 trout. I usually get my 20 trout before noon. The range in size from 10 to 20 inches. Average size is a good 14 inches. This is way more than I can eat. I fillet all my brook trout and give some to older parents but after the opening day, I only keep what I want to eat within the next few days. After my first couple of fish, I use a Sutton lure on 4 lb mono (no bait) and it's rare that I cannot release the trout I catch. Unfortunately, there are lots of meat fishermen in my region. Anyway, when trout in a lake get hard to catch, they go elsewhere and the trout that are still in the lake get large and more intelligent. These are the trout I prefer to fish for. All of my early season brook trout fishing is within 20 minutes of home in lakes that nobody wants to fish anymore. I can usually fish these lakes for a few years before people find out that the fishing is fabulous. I then go to another lake. It's true that 10% of the fishermen catch 90% of the fish. I'm lucky because for brook trout, I'm one of the 10 percenters.

From what I have read, the electric steer has a bit of a delay.

Motomaster Intelligent battery chargers do not recharge deep cycle batteries. If you still have your charger's manual, you will read that somewhere in the manual but not easy to find. I went to Walmart and bought a Schumacher intelligent charger and it works fine.

I do the same thing except for pre-drilling the holes. A good jab into the ice and the anchors start to grab the ice right away.

Since I didn't know what bearing buddies were, I checked the internet. From what I can see, they are just dust caps through which you can squeeze some grease. Prices vary from a few dollars to over 40 dollars each. Which to buy? I haven't been very lucky with my trailer. When I got my trailer, the first thing I did was change the bearings. Not long after, one of the bearings gave up the ghost and damaged my hub. Since then, the trailer has been free of trouble for over 1 year. One thing for sure, I'm going to remove the bearings in the spring, clean everything in varsol and re-install everything if I find no damage. Maybe I will take no chances and replace the bearings.

Yep.....starlings. Notice the dark breast feathers with the white centers. They make good eyes for streamers quite similar to junglecock feathers that are no longer available. Shooting the starlings is great because they are pests. Imagine if starlings, crows, sparrows and a handful of other birds had not been introduced to North America, we would see way more bluebirds, cardinals, blue jays, wrens, chickadees etc.

Good quality Lepage's PL Premium glue will do the job. A couple of years ago, my uncle used that stuff for rubber boots that had split above the foot and he still uses those boots.

Good one! I have a couple of those too. I also have a couple more.....one is a cheapy model that costs about 75 cents and another which I found over 30 years ago. It's gotten to a point where I don't really care what I use for fileting fish....I can get the job done with any sharp knife. I even use my pocket knife if I have to. I also leave those tiny perpendicular bones that are found on trout and walleye. Other people just go through them because they are usually not noticed when the filet is cooked....except when the fish is very large.

Yes.....I agree. The reason I ask is because a lot of people recommend lighter rods and then the fisherman quickly dislikes fly fishing because such an outfit is difficult to use with bass flies and on days when there is a bit of wind. If it's for bass fishing, I would even recommend a size 9 rod. You can always cast very small flies with such an outfit but you can't cast large bugs or streamers with a light outfit. Size 5 or 6 outfits are for pond or small river trout and other panfish. Sure you can do battle with a 10 lb fish with such an outfit but you first have to catch the fish.

What weight rod did you get. A number 6, 7 or 8 ??

In a way....he was right....for one thing. With the older handheld GPS units, you have to be moving to be able to use the compass. You can't stand still and just point the GPS to the north in order to go north. However, most of the newer units do have a magnetic compass built into the unit and those devices do not need to be moving to indicating where is north. The "averaging" is a built-in option with all GPS units. When I decide to enter a waypoint on my Lowrance, I push on "enter" just once and then a menu pops up. In the menu, there is the option "averaging" which I choose from the menu and push on "enter" again. I give the GPS some time to gather data and push "enter". The GPS then counts the number of positions it is recording (according to the refresh rate) and when I think there are enough points, I push on "enter" again and the GPS's computer does the rest.

Pay for water??? What's that???? What's next....air!!!

Great stuff. You could do the same thing for hunting.

Great answer. It could have been longer and more detailed and showed that involved even more information that a fisherman needs to become more proficient but then it might not have been read thoroughly.

I've been using handheld GPS devices for a very long time. Garmins, Magellans and now a Lowrance with a Freedom Map card that dates back to 1994. All handheld GPS units have about the same accuracy....around 5 to 10 yards. I will actually go and say that the older units with WAAS are a tad more accurate because they are less sensitive. The more recent and sensitive units gather info from the satellites but also information that is sent by the satillites and bounced all over the terrain (hills, buildings etc) that induce more errors. A satellite signal that gets bounced off the mountain 1/4 mile away means that it's signal is 1/4 mile longer than it should be. However, the more sensitive units can also pick up more signals when the user is somewhere where a lot of the signals are blocked (canyon, heavy wood cover, trees, tall buildings etc). I had an old Garmin 45 with 8 sequential channels instead of the 8 (or more) paralllel channels that the units have today. Even though this GPS did not have a mapping, it showed me which side of the road I was driving on when I put the data through a program like Easy GPS. It was very accurate when I let it do it's job. Surveyors use GPS units for extreme accuracy. Yes they are extremely accurate but they gather signals over a long period of time and the info is fed into computers. This is where "averaging" becomes important. Using the "averaging" option is of outmost importance if you want accuracy. Averaging is done by setting down your gps and letting it gather information according to it's update speed. Most of the time, update speed is about once per second. This means that it fixes a position in it's memory every second. After 30 seconds, it has 30 positions with about a 5 to 10 yard accuracy. But, if you average out the 30 positions, there is a position where the signal has passed the most often. You can see the wandering that a GPS does by immobilizing the GPS for a few seconds, entering a waypoint and then zooming in to maximum to see the tracks that were made around the registered waypoint. When I use my old Lowrance Pro for registering a waypoint, I use the averaging option and let it work for a good minute before entering my waypoint. I do this when I want to find an ice fishing hole even though a few days have past and the wind has obliterated all traces of the hole. This is very handy where I live and the ice is over 3 feet thick. I can re-open holes with my ice chisel because the ice is not as thick in the old hole.

I don't have that kind of cooperation here in my city with it's 3 Canadian Tire outlets. First of all, nobody who works there goes fishing. They sell the same stuff that I can find in any Walmart store or any little hardware store that sells fishing equipment. They are real strong on Toronto Wobblers and cheap snelled hooks.

I had exactly the same results using 15 lb and then 25 lb test Seaguar leader material. I normally use very light lines so my knots are always very carefully tied. No matter what I did, the 15 lb test Seaguar was weaker than my 10 lb test "el cheapo" which cost 7 dollars for 1500 yards. So then I decided to use 25 lb test Seaguar. It was not much stronger than the 15 lb test. If I used the fluorocarbon just for making a harness, the harness would break before the 10 lb test el cheapo line. I got the best results just using the "el cheapo" mono for everything. I even hauled up some of my lost lures and hooks that had hooked into the sunken wood on the bottom with my "el cheapo" mono. My first experience with fluorocarbon was with Berkley Vanish in 6 lb test. I couldn't find any 4 lb test Vanish. I spooled a brook trout reel with the stuff. I took me about 10 minutes to really hate the stuff. I was fishing from shore. I fish with just a size 8 Gamakatsu Octopus hook and the head of a nightcrawler. I need to use light line if I want decent distance when casting. Anyway, the stuff was way weaker than my 4 lb mono, It also had very weak shock strength. It sank (something I didn't know at the time) so I couldn't let my bait rest on the bottom at all. The sinking also increased hanging up on bottom by a tenfold. The only thing that I will admit is an advantage with fluorocarbon is the fact that it could be more abrasion resistant. However, in my 60 years of fishing, abrasion has been the least of my problems. I have never had abrasion problems when fly fishing. Actually, using mono when nymph fishing with sinking line or sinking tip line is an advantage because the fly line can drag along the bottom while the nymph is moving along above the bottom. I've been fishing with jigs since the late 50's and early 60's....before they became popular in Canada. I've almost never had my line suffer from abrasion. I am a cheap guy and I hate to lose lures or hooks. Yet, I am a proud person and I like to catch my share of the fish or better. I am one of the 10 percenters. I still say the fluorocarbon is junk.....lol. I cannot fathom how anyone can find something good about it after all the independant tests that have been done.

In those conditions, I use 4 lb clear mono, maybe 6 lb clear mono if the lake trout average over 6 lbs. A good reel and good rod handling techniques prevent line breakage.

It's a great machine. The strongest machine ever made was a small Suzuki 250 cc don't let yourself be tricked into buying something with a huge engin. The strength of these small vehicles is in the transmission ratios. Yes, you will be changing transmission speeds more often and you may not go faster than 50 mph. If you do decide to change for another machine, you can sell the Honda for the same price you paid for it....almost.