So as a Christmas gift to my fellow IDOer’s and to hopefully get some tips from anyone else I wanted to start a general tips and tricks post. The point of this is if someone would like to post a little tip/trick/etc that they have picked up and would like to pass along to help others, if you want to include GPS points that is great but I think everyone may skip this part :). Below are my two tips that I wanted to pass along, I am sure some people may already do these things or it may not be useful for everyone but hopefully someone will get some use out of them.
1. For those of you who are like me and have a lot of crank baits this maybe useful for you. I saw this on an in-fisherman episode years ago and it has really worked for me. Purchase a couple of bags of small rubber bands (cost is around $1 at a Wal Mart or similar store), take and lightly wrap the hooks together (no real science, two or three hook cranks will work just as well). This will give you the ability to put cranks into a single box without them hanging together when you try and pull one out, I have one deep pocket 4 compartment box that has all of my shallow diving crank baits in it, somewhere close to 125 cranks in one box and you can reach to the very bottom of a compartment and pull out a crank without hooking any of the others. I downsized my boat 4 years ago and now have a lot less space but am still able to bring everything I might need in 2-5 boxes.***NOTE*** You do not want to wrap the hooks overly tightly as some hooks will bend over time. Just snug will do fine.
2. For those of you with larger boats but no kicker and you would like to slow your boat down and still maintain control this may be the ticket for you. Take a smaller drift sock (you may have to experiment depending on the size of boat and motor), measure the distance from your side cleat to the middle of the boat on the underside (on my older Crestliner the two cleats I used were located right in front of the counsole, you will need to be somewhere in this area so if you do not have cleats somewhere close to this area on both sides of the boat you will need to add them in or tie off to a rod holder). What you want to be able to do is have the bag sit right under the middle of the boat with a rope ran under the boat from cleat to cleat on both sides (and the rope pulled tight). The advantage is that your boat will handle just like the drift sock is not attached because the wind/trolling direction/etc does not affect the bag as it would if you tied it off of the front or back, or side (tried them all). I saw this on a little video for a guy fishing Lake Erie and it worked well for me. Also you do not have to worry about running into the bag. With this I slowed my 2004 Crestliner Fishhawk from 2.8 to about 1.7 MPH and could run just like the bag was not there. Not as great as a kicker but it worked for 3 years for me.
That is all I can think of, I hope someone out there can get a little something from these tips (they may have been listed before but I don’t remember seeing them).
Happy Holidays to everyone.
Brandon
