ENHANCE YOUR FISHING PLEASURE
ENHANCING YOUR FISHING ADVENTURES
Several tackle tips have been swimming around my head that can help make your fishing day on the more enjoyable. Some my own ideas and some offered to others. One of the benefits of owning a fishing tackle/marine supple shop is that I receive plenty of suggestions from various people on how to do “such and such”.
Let’s start with a money saver. I am always saving plastic jugs, filling them with water and freezing them for ice. As a bachelor I can get away with a freezer filled up with plastic jugs of ice. This probably does not go over well in a more domesticated household situation. So why not stop on your way to the boat ramp or fishing pier by a McDonald’s restaurant, they sell ten pound bags of ice for $1.00 each. We can thank Captain Hank Williams for this cube of information.
Lately we have been doing a lot of drift fishing over hard bottom for red grouper. A drift anchor to slow the boat’s drift for this style of fishing. A drift anchor makes it a lot easier to drag bottom with less weight. These speciality anchors are a funnel shaped piece of vinyl or canvas that is tethered to the stern, bow or amidships of your boat. The apex of the drift anchor has a hole cut into it to help keep a flow of water through it so it does not flatten out in the water and become inefficient. They look like a miniature parachute. The hole also facilitates retrieval of the drift anchor. Fifteen to twenty feet of tether line should be enough to get the rig working for you. Be sure to have a large swivel attached at the end to avoid line twist.
Various sizes of drift anchors are used depending upon the length of the boat involved.
We hate to use our gunnel or cabin top rod holders for gaff and landing nets storage. Gaffs in rod holders are a safety hazard. We have installed rod holder clamps on the stern of our boat and hung our landing equipment accessible yet out of the way while fishing.
When it came to cabin top rod holders I directed the fabricater to make the rod holders vertical, eliminating the aft slant. The vertical design is a bit harder to grab a rod from, however when casting The area above the aft deck of the boat is wide open and we do not find ourselves smacking the rods stored in the cabin top rod holders since the rods stand straight up in the air.
Several years ago a customer came in with a Penn 7500 ss completely frozen with internal corrosion. I spray in a product called “Strike Hold” which is designed to clean lubricate and protect equipment from corrosion. After a few minutes the reel began to turn, not smoothly, however we got it working . I have used the Strike Hold product since then, it cuts the grease and grime, displaces water and sets up a protective barrier on your equipment that actually beads water. Strike-Hold is a multi-function product that cleans, lubricates, protects, demoisturizes and conditions. (http://www.strike-hold.com)
The other day I was venting my concerns regarding the large amount of fishing spots I have accumulated on my Gps to Captain Larry Mc Guire and how I was afraid of having the gps short out erasing all of my fishing spots. Mc Guire told me that the Garmin gps I owned could download all of my fishing spots onto a chip that is inserted into the Mapsource port. I aquired one of these chips and proceeded to back up my gps. It seems that the hundreds of hours spent accumulating hot spots over the past seven years took all of five seconds to back up. Oh, well pop my bubble.
Capn John Guy