Many of the lakes that I fish have little to no structure. I was curious about artificial structure and just how much it could help my favorite big panfish lakes. However when I had finally decided to shell out the money to buy some reel weeds, I walked into Thorne bros and saw the much cheaper Weed’EZ. being on a “budget”(AKA needing to hide fishing purchases from my wife) I bought 2 packs of the weed EZ(8 weeds) instead of the reel weeds.
I set them up by cutting foam board down to 12×4 inch boards and tying on 30 feet of 30# berkely big game. the first problem I had was the 1 oz weight I tied on wasnt enough to get it below the surface. now I have on 4 oz weights and they do the trick. Also the foam board, not exactly waterproof. I would suggest some corragated plastic or thin wood paneling.
Last weekend I was able to use them and really I had mixed results. I was on a 250 acre featureless weedless lake, nice gills, small crappies both on the move plus the odd pike. The first day was sunny cold and quite windy, we didnt move much. we placed the weeds around our shelters and they seemed to get small crappies to stick around, not much else. The second day we found a nice school of gills so we placed the weeds in a line behind our shelter. we stopped catching fish at that point, because 4 pike cruised that weed line for nearly 40 minutes when we decided to move. we ended up catching more fish by being mobile than setting up a weed bed.
In my opinion the Weed EZ do hold and keep fish around longer, but they are a detriment to mobility. so they wont be as big a part of my equiptment as I had hoped. But they should help on those miserable days where you dont move much. If you want a product you dont have to monkey with go with the reel weeds. If you want to save a few bucks be ready for a few trial and errors, but the weed’ez can work.
