Spiel

There is no one reel type that can do it all. Baitcasters are definitely required to cover some forms of angling and I don't mean just trolling. Limiting yourself to only spinning reels will definitely cause times of aggravation and frustration and likely lost fish. But hey thats just open minded thinking.

I did have forward and reverse and was able to run up to full throttle as long as I accelerated slowly, otherwise it would slip out of gear. Once I got it apart and looked it over you'd be hard pressed to see that the clutch dog was worn out, the engaging teeth were ever so slightly worn, hard to believe it could be so much of an issue. Clutch dog is a cheap fix and from what I understand they typically fail while the gears will remain intact. Anyway changing the clutch dog immediately solved the slipping out of gear. Keep in mind though that I could engage the gears even with a worn dog and when it slipped out of gear you felt it! I was able to attain the needed parts here in Hamitlon at Bay City Marine.

I changed the clutch dog on my 25 Johnson Seahorse (1975), piece of cake if your mechanically inclinded. Make sure to get an extra detent spring (I wrecked one reassembling) and new seals and you might as well change the impeller while your at it.

I've performed the following method a number of times, including a dog's paw once. To remove fish hooks when impaled past the barb, follow these steps: Press firmly on the eye of the hook. At the same time use a cloth, string, or some type of wrap that can be wrapped around the curved portion of the hook. While pressing on the eye, pull with one quick motion on the attached cloth. This is virtually painless. Irrigate the wound and bandage. Like so........ Perhaps not a good method though if you think major arteries, veins or tendons may be involved.

Canadian Tire has an assortment of sizes available.

Then I'd say your trouble is the connection between the motor and the shift lever.

Touche.

Hmmmm, might have to change the handle to Hometownman, would you like me to look after it. Sorry I have no further advise.

Beautiful, definitely deserving of framing. I'm thinking 10 x 16.

Looks good to me.

SALMON SLIME ! ....Is that not liking cursing the boat to a musky guy.

Good job she's so cute or I'd be all over you 'bout the vertical hold.

I can relate too Cliff, was only a few years back that I watche my ole girl pull out of the driveway with Gerritt. Don't worry bout your boat though I'll make sure Wayne takes good care of her, hell I may even get to ride in her. All the best in finding her replacement. Well apparently I'll be seeing the boat shortly. Wayne just called and wants to come by the house for a dos and don'ts lesson.

Take a bow Gerritt, just don't let it go to your head.

Could we be the generation that runs out of fish? June 06, 2009 Johann Hari / The Independent In the babbling Babel of 24/7 news - where elections, bailouts and beheadings blur into one long shriek - the slow-motion stories that will define our age are often lost. An extraordinary documentary released next week, The End of the Line, forces us to stop, and see. Its story is stark. In my parents' lifetime, we have killed 90 per cent of the world's fish. In my lifetime, we will finish off the rest - unless we change our ways, fast. We are on course to be the people who wiped fish from the earth. The story begins in the sleepy Canadian resort of Newfoundland. It was the global capital of cod, a fishing town where the scaly creatures of the sea were so abundant they could be caught with your hands. But in the 1980s, something strange happened. The catches started to wane. The fish grew smaller. And then, in 1991, they disappeared. It turned out the cod had been hoovered out of the sea at such a rapid rate that they couldn't reproduce themselves. But the postscript is spookier still. The Canadian government banned any attempts at fishing there, on the assumption that the few remaining fish would slowly repopulate the waters. But 15 years on, they haven't. The population was so destroyed that it could never recover. A growing number of scientists are warning that we could all be living in Newfoundland soon. Professor Boris Worm of Dalhousie University published a detailed study in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Nature saying that at the current rate, all global fish populations will have collapsed by 2048. He says: "This isn't some horror scenario, it's a real possibility. It's not rocket science if we're depleting species after species. It's a finite resource. We'll reach a point where we run out." The species in the frontline is bluefin tuna, the pinnacle of the evolutionary chain for fish. This little creature can swim at 50mph, and accelerate faster than the swishest sports car. It has even developed warm blood. Yet every year, a third of the remaining population is ripped from the seas and slapped onto our plates. Soon, it will be gone. All over the world, from the Bay of Bengal to Lake Victoria to the shores of South America, I have heard fishermen say their catches are shrinking, in size and in number. Industrial-scale fishing only began in the 1950s. By the standards of the news cycle, this is slow - but by the standards of the planet or of settled fishing communities, this is a click of the fingers. The effects of the new industrial fishing are uniform. Professor Ransom Myers found that whenever the vast industrial trawlers are sent in, it takes just 15 years to reduce the fish population to a 10 per cent shadow of its former self. This process of trawlering is an oceanic weapon of mass destruction, ripping up everything in its path. Charles Clover, who wrote the book on which the documentary is based, has a good analogy for it. Imagine a band of hunters stringing a mile of net between two massive all-terrain vehicles and dragging it at speed across the plains of Africa. Imagine it scooping up everything in its way: lions and cheetahs and hippos and wild dogs. The net has a massive metal roller attached to its leading edge, smashing down every tree that gets in its way. And in the end, when the hunters open up the net, they pick out the choicest creatures and dump the squashed remains in the sun as carrion for the vultures. But we need fish. Our brains don't form properly without their fatty Omega-3 acids. So why do our governments allow this process of destruction to continue? Why do they actively encourage it, with $14 billion of subsidies for fishermen to keep on trawling every year? A small number of people are making a lot of short-term profit out of this destruction - and they are using this cash to ensure they can carry on hunting, down to the last fish. In 1992, an attempt to get the bluefin tuna listed as an endangered species was scuppered by the US and Japanese governments at the urging of the tuna lobby - who happen to give large campaign donations to all parties. A similar corruption has eaten into European politics. Add to this the fact that fishermen are a determined and demanding constituency with an equally short-term agenda. They demand the maximum quotas today - even if that means no quotas tomorrow. Our societies are structured to put these short-term cries for money for a few ahead of the long-term needs of us all. A small determined group with hard cash almost always beats a diffuse group with good intentions - until they get angry and fight back. Yet today, ordinary people in rich countries are being insulated from the fish crisis. As we exhaust our own fish stocks, our corporations are sailing out across the world to steal them from the poor. Today, there are armadas of industrial European and American fishing boats across the coast of West Africa, leaving the small fishermen who live on its coasts to starve. Professor Daniel Pauly says: "It is like a hole burning through paper. As the hole expands, the edge is where the fisheries concentrate, until there is nowhere left to go." We are not only stealing fish from Africans; we are stealing them from future generations. In the age of limits, we are hitting up against the capacity of the planet to provide for us - yet we are reacting with blank denial. This story is unfolding, in one form or another, in the rainforests, the air, and in the planet's climate itself. It has left us at a strange crossroads. We will either be a despised generation who left behind a depleted husk-planet - or a heroic generation who, at five minutes to ecological midnight, turned back to the light. With fish, the solution is even simpler and more straightforward than with the other ecological crises ensnaring us. The scientific experts say we need to follow two steps. First, expand the 0.6 per cent of the area of the world's oceans in which fishing is banned to 30 per cent. In these protected areas, fish can slowly recover. Second, in the remaining 70 per cent, impose strict quotas on fishermen and police it properly, as they do in Alaska, New Zealand and Iceland. The cost of this program? $14 billlion a year - precisely the sum we currently spend on subsidizing fishermen. At no extra cost, we could turn them from the rapists of the oceans into their guardians. Yet The End of the Line has one flaw - and it is one that riddles current environmental thought. It presents us with a great earth-altering crisis, and then says our primary response should be to change our own personal consumption habits. It urges people not to buy from Nobu, which shamefully still sells bluefin tuna, and to ask if the fish we buy is sustainably produced. It's like the end of An Inconvenient Truth, where the primary response Al Gore presses on us is to shop green and change our lightblubs. Of course this is valuable - but it is only an anemic and minor first step. It is rather like, in 1937, reacting to the rise of Nazism by urging people to make sure that they personally weren't killing any Jews or gays or Jehovah's Witnesses, or buying from any Nazi-owned companies. We needed collective action that would stop other people from killing these minorities - just as today we need collective action that prevents anyone from irreparably trashing the means of life. At the moment, many good people get anxious about environmental issues, and hear the message that The Response is to scrub their own lifestyle clean. Yet individual voluntary action by a minority of nice people will not save the bluefin tuna, never mind the ecosystem. But if all these honourable people act together - by volunteering for, and donating to, organizations like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Plane Stupid - they can change the law, so everybody will be required to change their behaviour, not just a benevolent 10 per cent. It was just such determined minorities armed with the facts that spurred the fights against slavery, colonialism and fascism. When you respond as a consumer, you are weak; when you respond as a citizen, you are strong. The voice of millions of people can drown out the concentrated power of the fishing industry - and all the other industries with a vested interest in trashing our planet - but not with the swipe of a credit card. The alternative to collective action today is catastrophe tomorrow. As Charles Clover explains: "When the human population comes under pressure on land because of global warming, when we are running out of ways to feed ourselves, we [will] have just squandered one of the greatest resources on the planet - wild fish." The epitaph for the human species would turn out to have been scripted by Douglas Adams: so long, and thanks for all the fish.

Stressers changing fish June 4th, 2009 Michael Woods / The Kingston Whig-Standard Lake Ontario getting warmer Lake Ontario is accumulating what one expert calls “stressers,” factors that may affect fish perhaps more than some species can handle. “It’s changing the fish communities from colder fish communities to warmer ones,” warns John Casselman. “Different species now are becoming more abundant. “I’ve seen this dramatic change.” Casselman, a professor emeritus of biology at Queen’s University, was honoured by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission Tuesday at the beginning of its two-day conference in Kingston. The organization, which co-ordinates fishery research and ecosystem management in the Great Lakes, awarded Casselman the Jack Christie- Ken Loftus award for distinguished scientific contributions toward understanding Great Lakes ecosystems. Casselman said climate change is already having a dramatic effect. In the summer months, Lake Ontario’s temperature is two to five degrees warmer than the air. “It isn’t just the ambient heat, but it’s the solar energy,” he said. “That energy that’s coming in is being trapped in the water more than it is on land.” As a result, warm-water fish such as sunfish and bass are in abundance, while cold-water fish such as lake trout and whitefish are suffering. Casselman said fishers should adjust their harvest accordingly. “The warm-water fish are increasing in massive numbers, so we should be exploiting them and using them.” In recent work with Natural Resources Canada, Casselman said Lake Ontario’s temperature is set to increase four degrees over the next 100 years if climate change isn’t addressed. “We’ve seen a one and a half degree change in the past 20 years, and we know there’s two degrees programmed in, even if we solve climate change right now.” Casselman said one way to fight climate change is to make local fish more readily available. “Whenever I get a piece of fish it’s been flown from Honduras,” he said. “It’s flown 1,500 miles to get on my plate when I’ve got excellent fish out my front door that don’t cost me carbon units.” When Casselman began his research career 40 years ago, the Lake Ontario fishery was much different than it is today. “It used to be essentially a big commercial fishery,” he said. “At one time in the 1950s, they were still harvesting probably a thousand tonnes of fish from Lake Ontario in commercial fisheries.” With the growth of recreational fisheries, though, he’s seen quite a shift. “You had to give up one because of the other because the lake only produces so much fish,” he said. “We’ve been able to communicate to recreational fishers that they can’t harvest like they used to. As a result, catch and release has become a very important aspect of fishery management.” Casselman, who worked for the Ministry of Natural Resources before retiring and joining Queen’s, chairs a working group on the American eel, an Atlantic seaboard fish that has all but disappeared from Lake Ontario, in part because it is being killed in canals, dams and turbines. “When we Europeans arrived on these shores 400 years ago, half the inshore fish biomass — the weight of fish in shore down to 30 feet deep — was the American eel. “Now they’re gone. This one fish, if you look at it carefully, is showing all of the stressers that we’re placing on these very important waters.” “We have to do something about this.”

Spotted musky cross the Canada border with a broodstock passport June 1, 2009 / www.great-lakes.org MADISON – The 1,100 fingerlings that made the road trip from Ontario, Canada, to their new homes in three northeastern Wisconsin lakes are among new efforts this spring in the decades-long quest to restore a self-sustaining population of the Great Lakes strain spotted musky to Green Bay. These young fish will eventually serve as broodstock for Green Bay. Taken as eggs from Georgian Bay and later certified disease free, they were raised in the small, Sir Sanford Fleming College hatchery in Ontario, Canada and stocked into Elkhart Lake, Sheboygan County, and Anderson and Archibald lakes in Oconto County. The $59,000 project, funded by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, money from the Fox River environmental restoration settlement, Musky Clubs Alliance of Wisconsin, Muskies Canada and Titletown Chapter of Muskies Inc., is aimed at increasing the genetic diversity in Green Bay’s spotted musky population, which in turn will yield healthier fish, according to fisheries biologist David Rowe. “Greater genetic diversity helps to protect a population from changes in their environment,” Rowe says. “If all the fish have the same genotype, they are all likely to succumb to the same illness or an environmental change like a warmer climate. If there is a great amount of diversity, the changes that impact some fish will not affect all fish in the population. This means the population can better adapt to changing conditions, and then they pass those stronger traits on to their offspring.” The three receiving the Canadian fish have a 50" size limit to protect them, giving DNR multiple years to collect eggs before the musky would be vulnerable to harvest, according to Rowe. A $200,000 grant from the Natural Resources Damage Assessment that resulted from the Fox River environmental settlement will allow the DNR to stock the Ontario-raised strain of musky into the recently established brood lakes for the next four years, which will continue to increase the genetic variation and abundance of the re-established Green Bay population. Spotted musky are native to Green Bay, but the population collapsed in the early 1900s due to over-fishing, pollution and habitat destruction. Thanks to stocking efforts that began in 1989, the population in the bay is older and larger than ever, according to Rowe. “The musky have grown fast in Green Bay’s waters,” Rowe says. “We estimate the population in the lower bay somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 musky and just this spring we handled about a dozen fish larger than 50 inches in our nets.” Even though the musky population has been revived and anglers are finding opportunities for trophy fish, biologists, who have been looking for signs of natural reproduction for 20 years, are just now starting to see hopeful results. “Last fall, for the first time, we collected two, unmarked fingerling musky in the lower Menomonie River,” Rowe says. “We know from genetic analysis that these two had the same genetic markers as the adult fish from Green Bay, meaning they are Great Lakes Spotted muskies, and the first evidence of natural reproduction.” To help determine why the DNR hasn’t seen more spotted musky reproduction, fisheries crews have begun a two-year study funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Great Lakes Fish and Wildlife Restoration Act Program and several musky angling clubs including; Dave’s Musky Club, C&R Musky Club, Winnebagoland Musky Club, M&M Musky Club, Titletown Chapter of Muskies Inc., and the Between the Lakes Chapter of Muskies Inc. This spring 20 female musky were inserted with miniature radio transmitters when they were captured during DNR fyke-netting. When those females spawn and expel their eggs, the transmitter will also drop, pinpointing their spawning location. This information will allow biologists to identify the area and see if there are any problems that might be hindering natural reproduction such as habitat degradation, poor water quality, or invasive species.

An 87-pound catfish on 4-pound line June 5, 2009 Ed Zieralski / www3.signonsandiego.com When anglers are using 4-pound test, they're usually either trying to finesse a bass, fool a trout or catch a panfish. They're certainly not expecting to hook into an 87-pound blue catfish. But that's what happened to Adam Hinkle, a La Mesa angler who caught, weighed and released the big blue Wednesday at Lower Otay Lake. Hinkle, an avid bass angler, told Lower Otay reservoir keeper Bryan Norris that he, indeed, was fishing for bass when a big blue catfish struck. Hinkle told Norris he was working a Scrounger jig in Bushlow Cove when his line gave him a sudden jolt. He had 4-pound test line on his spinning reel, so the battle was on. More than an hour later, Hinkle brought the big catfish up and then took it back to the Lower Otay dock to be weighed. At 87 pounds and caught on 4-pound test line, the catch shatters the current International Game Fish Association line-class world record for that line-class. The present line-class world record for blue catfish on 4-pound test line is 47 pounds, 9 ounces, a fish caught by Bob Shepherd in January of 2002 on the James River in Virginia. Shepherd also has the 2-pound line-class world record for a 36-pound, 9-ounce blue catfish. Had he chosen to do it, Hinkle could have applied to the International Game Fish Association for a freshwater line-class, world record. But Hinkle chose not to do that. “Adam didn't want to pursue the line-class record due to the fact the fish was caught accidentally,” Norris said. Accidental catch or not, it is one giant fish on some very light line. Hinkle's catch ranks up there with some of the top blue catfish ever caught in the county. Steve Odomsouk's 113.4-pounder tops the list, caught last year at San Vicente before it closed. Others include Roger Rohrbouck's 101-pounder, also from San Vicente, still a IGFA line-class world record for 12-pound test; and Justin Fools' 99-pound blue catfish, also at San Vicente.

Fish coughs up golden watch Thursday, June 4, 2009 Sheadon Ringor / www.kauaiworld.com Using a dull bamboo stick, Curt Carish clubbed this 10-inch nenue that was swimming awkwardly Wednesday afternoon at Port Allen Beach. Moments later, the nenue coughed up a golden watch in Carish’s cooler. Photos by Sheadon Ringor/The Garden Island ‘ELE‘ELE — With tennis shoes on, wallet in pocket and a bamboo stick in hand, Kaua‘i resident Curt Carish on Wednesday may have written himself into the most eccentric fisherman’s history book. To catch a fish with such simple gear would be an interesting tale in itself. But after Carish hauled in a nenue, the 10-inch fish coughed up a gold watch. “I was just sitting on a picnic table looking out into the ocean of Port Allen beach when I saw a nice-size fish awkwardly swimming close to shore,” Carish said. “So my friend Allen Hall gave me a bamboo stick and said, ‘Go get ‘em.’” Carish jumped into the waist-high water and struck the nenue a few times with the dull stick until the fish went limp. He said its stomach was abnormally large but he just threw the fish in the cooler along with his frozen chicken that he was going to barbecue that night. Tanley, a good friend of Carish, opened the cooler minutes later to discover a gold watch laying inches from the nenue’s mouth. “And the funniest thing is that the watch was on time and still ticking,” Carish said. Carish, who often hangs out at the private Port Allen Club with many other members, said in all of his 30 years on Kaua‘i he has never encountered anything this bizarre.

Well I'm glad to hear it all worked out Harry. I've been through a few of these hospital incompetencies myself lately, certainly leaves you wondering! Now you get on down to that pier and hassle them wee perchies.

Congratulations Dave, it'll definitely be a first for the world of angling.

Damn I'd say anything just bout anything to get here.

Is this in reference to your height?

I hadn't considered that, certainly possible.

I'm sure you'll be up and at 'em in no time Harry. I'm thinking river bank and lawn chair to start with.