Costa, Oakley, Maui Jim and most other brands are owned by Luxottica. So are most of the distributors. Luxottica is able to control prices by controlling distribution and cutting off distribution was what they did to drive Oakley almost into bankruptcy before buying them. Not that there’s anything you’re going to do about it, just be aware that no matter how good a deal you get you’re still paying 5-10 times what you would if Luxottica didn’t exist.

Imagine what the price of vehicles would be if one company owned GM, Ford, Chrysler/Dodge, Toyota, Honda, Nissan and so many dealerships that any other maker would have to play ball on pricing or be driven from the market. Well, that’s what you have in the sunglasses industry.

I’m in the market for prescription sunglasses and I’m not happy about it.

Most of us wear shoes while fishing. Keen

It works well imo. Not much mapping around me and I’d love to see it catch on. I fish an unmapped Canadian lake and have shared mapping with a couple guys but we have a long way to go to really get details on 12,000 acres. I know guys don’t want to give up secret spots and I get that. The thing is, we all know that two humps that look similar to us on a map can look totally different to the fish or be productive in one weather pattern and not another. And the only way to find the *spot on a spot* is to be there and fish it yourself.

Caught many walleye on tube jigs in Canada when we found them puking up crayfish in the livewell. Also work good if they are feeding on gobies or bullhead.

Rippin Raps, jigging minnows, blade baits etc. also lose a lot of their action at depth and distance because they’re designed to be lifted and you can’t do that when the angle flattens out. Great baits in shallow water, fished vertically or down a drop. They’re also kind of pricey in the rocks, swim baits and a heavy jig are 1/3 or less the cost. When you run a swim bait horizontally it has exactly the action it’s designed for.

I’m sure Evinrude will be the preferred motors and others will be an up charge. One option is to buy the boat only and have the motor of your choice installed locally. Would that make any difference in total cost? No idea. No question in my mind that BRP did this to grow market share for Evinrude among other things. Won’t surprise me if they start out offering some deals in 2019 and 2020 just to get more motors out there and create some buzz. With BPS/Cabelas merger Alumacraft and Evinrude lost some high profile dealers, places where lots of people see boats even if they aren’t shopping for one. This acquisition is going to put both brands in front of a lot more eyeballs by instantly adding hundreds of dealerships.

I use permethrin quite a bit, buy it in concentrate at Tractor Supply and get a couple years worth for the price of one of the tiny premixed bottles at a sporting goods store. I mix according to the directions, wear gloves and spray my garage and basement which takes care of spiders and other pests. For fly fishing I spray a long sleeve shirt and my vest so anything that climbs up my waders gets blocked. I’ve found dead ticks on the sprayed items several time and haven’t had one get up to my neck in years. That used to be a regular occurrence. The last straw for me was when my kid and I got to our spot and I had 4 on me and he had 13(!) on him. None of them were embedded but that doesn’t keep you from feeling phantom ticks the rest of the day. No fun. In the fall my hunting pants and coat get a dose.

I’ll respray the vest/coat if I’m out in the rain and do the shirt/pants after a few washings.

Dutchboy wrote:

I use old film canisters (what film came in) for my terminal stuff. You guys of a certain age can google film canisters to find out what they are.

I’m old enough to remember when the only people who carried film canisters were photographers and pot smokers. Anytime you saw a guy pull a film canister out of his pocket you knew he was going to fire up. I never used them ’cause I didn’t want the hassle of a CO or cop thinking I had weed. In the ’70s around here, driving down the road with Robin Trower blasting was considered probable cause.

It’s a must have!

Fished mid river at Wyandotte, huge number of boats around Grassy Island, Fighting Island, the Candlestick and in front of the steel mill. Fish still in deep water, 34’-40’ but they were everywhere we tried. Got tired of the pack even though we were catching fish and headed up by the Ambassador Bridge and drifted from there to under the power lines catching more than we were getting in the pack. 51 keeper fish* and many more throwbacks fish in 2 1/2 hours, chartreuse jigs and 3”-4” plastics in a reddish brown called orange craw. The worms come in 5” and we pinch them down, full size got fewer bites and most of those were short strikes.
Wind is supposed to be very bad the next few days. Water still cold, upper 30s. All fish caught were males and none very large. Good luck.

*obviously we only kept our 4 man limit but we count all keeper size fish.

I’ll be on the river tomorrow and post a report either late in the day or early Saturday.

I never stay the night there (2hr drive) so I can’t be any help with that. I can recommend fishing mid-river. The lower river is much more snaggy, especially Trenton Channel. There’s a good launch in Wyandotte with a golf cart if you have to park far away. I used to try to get there at dawn but the lines have been horrible and it wasn’t worth the wait. If the fish are biting they usually bite all day so I just plan on having breakfast and launching around 10 when the early guys are starting to pull out. That gives me 10 hours if I fish ’til dark which is long enough for me. If you have a Canadian license take it with you and a passport or enhanced drivers license. No need to call in anymore so long as you don’t anchor. And don’t anchor! They keep a sharp eye on it. Otherwise stay on the American side, you’ll miss out on some spots and maybe get too muddy of water if there is a strong east wind. The run is definitely on. Mother Nature isn’t making it easy for fishermen.

Here’s a link to pictures of some of the better known spots. At least you’ll know what they look like when someone says Two Rocks or Belanger Park. http://walleye101.com/detroit_river_tour

Make sure your transducer is level for the speed you’re going to do most of your searching if you haven’t already. Makes a huge difference in the quality of the images.

I would start at 80′-100′ and just leave it there unless you fish really deep water. Mess with sensitivity and contrast until you learn to interpret things a bit, then you can add in range. Just pick a known piece of structure and look at it with different settings until you get a feel for what you are seeing. It doesn’t take too long and you’ll start to notice things that you’ll want other opinions on. That’s when looking at internet forums really helped me. When I went online and had no idea about anything I just got more confused.

I’m planning on getting out as soon as the ice is gone and doing some fooling around before the water warms. Seems like I can’t concentrate on learning the sonar if I think the fish are biting. Maybe that’s just me. There’s always more to learn.

In Rochester your average murder rate per 1,000 people is 0 so if you had a murder yeah, the rate has skyrocketed.

As for your axe analogy, you had to go back 17 years to find that? In 2016 432 people died from gunshots in Minnesota. Maybe if there were more axes and fewer guns that number would be lower.

big_g wrote:

I didn’t call anyone names and am still waiting for a honest answer to my questions about 30+ years ago, when full auto weapons were available, the lack of school shootings. What changed, now that semi-auto’s are the issue ?

Numbers. 30+ years ago hardly anyone had these kinds of guns, now there are thousands of them. The tiny percentage of kooks have much easier access than they used to.

Another factor is the fetishizing of guns and the glorification of violence as an answer to your problems. Seriously, there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time training for how to protect themselves with a gun and very little time thinking about how to avoid situations where they think a gun might be necessary. If you don’t live in a very very very high crime area you are incredibly unlikely to need a gun to defend yourself from anyone but your own family.

Kids are scared. Fear is a great motivator. The fear will get worse with every shooting and near shooting. If gun owners refuse to compromise and justify it with the 2A this generation will decide that the 2A is the root of the problem. There are a lot of them, enough to repeal an Amendment.

Politicians, countries and corporations have no morals, they have interests. If repealing the 2A is in their interest it will get done. A little compromise might be a good idea. Some short term pain for a long term gain.

What about getting the Navionics app for your phone, or a tablet if you have one, it’s cheap, then get the zero line card and make maps every time you fish? You can upgrade to a better map chip later though none of them will be as accurate as the maps you make for yourself.

Not for quite a while. Planned obsolescence in a field as competitive as recreational sonar is a recipe for disaster. And with the way Garmin is coming on in the freshwater market HB is going to have their hands full growing their share, the last thing they will do is leave customers in the lurch with two year old units. Sure, there will be advances* that new generations will support and the older units won’t but they’ll keep supporting those older units. The way Garmin is including so many capabilities in mid-price units HB will have no choice but to keep the Helix up to date and affordable.

*drone submarines with wifi cameras that display to your unit or a tablet in real time, at a distance of up to 200′ and a depth of 150′. “Now you don’t just mark fish, you mark ’em down”. (Voice over by Sam Elliott)

Great innovator: flies, rods, lines, techniques, you nailed it. He’ll be missed

Matt Moen wrote:

Read this thread:

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Walleye Presentations: How Big Can We Go??

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I just started use the 360 baits and really like them for multi species. I also use the bfishn plastics for <strong class=”ido-tag-strong”>bass and pike when they are finicky. I think it’s more important to match size and color than species specific brands.

This. I catch a lot of smallmouth bass and walleye on BfishN and Keitech plastics, often off the same piece of structure. My *home* lake has the same water clarity problems a lot of Michigan lakes have, it’s too darn clear especially early and late in the season. Natural colors work best then and you can’t beat *bass* baits for that. My best BfishN by far are the oyster shell and peanut butter & jelly. I wish they did more *bass* colors like green pumpkin and golden shiner. Keitech does a good job with those and so does Gambler in the EZ shiner line. The primary forage in my lake is perch, bullhead and the heavily stocked young walleye. EZ 49er, fat swing sexy shad are great colors for me. Mid season when the algae is up a bit and clarity drops to 10′ or so I can go with brighter colors like pink/white and traditional walleye colors when I’m trying to draw them out of weeds.

Start where the river comes in and if you don’t find them there look for rip rap and gravel that will have some current from wind and waves. Fish should be staging near those areas getting ready for the spawn. If the river is already in the mid-40s they’ll be up river. After the spawn they’ll be on the first break in the lake, especially if it has weeds.

Not sure it was legal so much as unenforced. Enforcement has been increasing for a while, I remember in the late 80s or early 90s losing access to a stretch of the Pere Marquette because we could no longer walk the tracks. Now the railroads can write trespassing tickets themselves. Having their own law enforcement is one of the special privileges they’ve had since the 19th century.

I can see the RR side. If they let people cross the tracks they create an attractive nuisance. Someone gets hurt and the RR gets sued. What’s needed is a law that indemnifies them so long as they don’t charge for the crossing and only if the ROW is across public land.

Railroad right-of-ways are unique and allow them to have de facto control over huge tracts of land adjacent to their rights-of-way. If you are looking for politicians to blame start with Presidents Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Cleveland and McKinley. The rail roads have gotten special treatment for a very long time. Heck, they even have their own government run retirement plan. Kind of like Social Security but well funded and pays enough to retire on comfortably. Full retirement at 60 if you have 30 years in. Not a bad gig if you’ve got some flexibility in your life.

Fish plastics a lot in the spring. In rivers the plastic is moving at or close to the speed of the current, usually pretty fast. That generates reaction bites and triggers fish laying in ambush around cover like a wing dam or rock pile.

In lakes the fish may want it either fast or slow. I’m partial to flukes in lakes that have spring spawning runs of bigger bait. With a light jig they can be popped off the bottom or a drop and allowed to fall back slowly, very much like a dying smelt or young cisco. Put a heavier jig on and you can rip them through emerging weeds around points and down drops. Ripping a fluke is a more subtle version of fishing a blade or lipless crank.

For really slowing down or lakes that have heavy perch and shiner numbers I love the pulse-r and moxies. They move a ton of water and can be fished at a crawl on flats, down slow breaks or over the top of emerging weeds. I’ll usually start fast to pick out aggressive fish and cover water then slow down if needed.

New here, nice discussion. Couple things I’ll add.

A good rule of thumb with predator fish is that they prefer prey that is 25%-50% of their length; best bang for their buck. When that size is readily available to them they’ll go for it. The biggest exception is when there is a huge amount of small food easily taken like during a bug hatch or when young of the year are everywhere. That was mentioned earlier in the thread. A 20″+ fish likes to eat the prey fish that is feeding on even smaller fish.

Colors. Some of my local lakes have mostly small forage except for perch. In those lakes, especially the ones stocked with walleye, gold/gold flake etc. swimbaits really shine. I think the bigger fish are cannibalistic and devour 4″-6″ young walleye as well as perch. My .02. anyway.