BrianF wrote:

“We had numerous FFS systems and could find and see fish… they just wouldn’t bite.”

^^^This could be a clue to your problem.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of FFS – just not on the ice. My experience is the same as yours when using FFS. The fish sense the signal and when doing so it suppresses the bite. Not totally, but a lot. Do as B-Man suggests and your results should improve quite a bit.

I probably had my Livescope in the water less than 2% of the time. I used it to find weed edges and drop offs but then went to the Vex for jigging.

TheFamousGrouse wrote:

I built my dream garage a few years ago and it was well over $100k, which shocks a lot of people for a 3 car garage with office loft but that’s what things cost these days. My wife’s friend is a real estate agent and she said that the new garage added about 40-50k to our market value and that you never really recover the full value of these add-on structures.

^ That’s exactly the kind of data I’m looking for. The problem that I’m going to have is that the vast majority of the demographic where I live can’t afford the more expensive houses in the area. The pool of potential buyers for a $500K+ house in this area is extremely slim. We’re talking small town Wisconsin.

I think we have a rough idea of what the new home structure would cost… but the big variable is finding the right piece of land and how many acres it ends up being is the big driving factor.

Less than 50% return seems like a horrible investment.

I used Captain Tim Jones of Matlacha Fishing Charters back in August. He is a local and has lived out on Matlacha/Pine Island for many years. We fished that sound between Pine Island and Cape Coral. We pounded the reds and caught plenty of other species as well. Saw manatees and dolphins. He goes out and catches his own bait before picking you up.
He does NOT have the fanciest of equipment. If you’re looking for a guide with a brand new $150K boat, this is not your guy. But, if you look at his website, Google reviews, and Instagram; you’ll see how successful he is.

https://matlachafishingcharters.com/

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It was 20% off everything… which equated to getting some studded soles for “free”.

I just ordered the filler and 4 of the Fuel Kegs from Ace… using their Cyber Monday code and $10 in rewards.

I am tired of dealing with refilling the disposables. I’ve had numerous that won’t seal quite right afterwards. Once had my garage fill up with propane fumes… not cool.

350. I can go hotter.
I’m wondering if doing it in a pan wouldn’t be better to retain some moisture.

I mean… probably? The thing is I don’t know what is correct. Will it ever get crispy and not tough or do you basically just have to heat the stuff up and it’ll have that SPAM-like texture?
I like my pork bacon really crispy and maybe that’s just not a possibility with venison bacon.

I’m eyeballing a Vexilar but I’m not in a huge hurry… wondering if they’ll have one more price drop before ice season is done.

I’d vote for the Daiwa Exceler. Excellent bang for your buck.

Ironic timing for me. I fished a tournament Saturday. I have the 93SV with GT10 set up for my hole-hopping (Livescope in the shack). My brother-in-law has a Helix Ice setup. My 93SV was extremely disappointing. I fished 9-16 FOW and could not see my bait the majority of the time. I’m talking a sizeable 1/8 oz spoon with a minnow head. I had more interference than anything. I could see fish but not my bait.
The Helix seemed to be working significantly better.
I will be in the market for a mechanical flasher at some point.

I’m getting pretty frequent server timeouts as reported by Cloudflare today.

Sorry… CloudFlare problems this morning.

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There’s been a bunch of Echomap updates since this issue and I have not installed. No GLS updates have been released… so I think the latest is the problematic one. I never got any sort of acknowledgement of the issue from Garmin, so I decided to poke and prod them a little bit. They gave me nothing other than saying not to update if it’s working… but the crappy thing is that there have been new features released that I could utilize and I get nagged at every turn to update. At some point this winter I may bite the bullet and update my whole LiveScope shuttle system and see if it’s still laggy… and then just roll back again if need-be.
I also have some quickdraw community mapping that I contributed 4 months ago that has not been committed to their system. I asked them about it and they said “this can take a few weeks or a few months.” So I said “well…. it’s been four months. How much longer should I wait until I bug you guys again?” He said “middle of January after the holidays.” I’m 99.9% sure he just wanted to get me off chat so he wouldn’t have to dig into it.
Lastly, they removed the ability to view quickdraw community on the web. This is now only available on the ActiveCaptain app. I used to like eScouting on my big PC screen.
I used to sing Garmin’s praises to my fishing buddies but man… I really feel like I’ve been left out to dry lately.

If you do buy a new one take a peek at the California Air Ultra Quiet line.
You would not believe the difference in decibels…

So I’ve actually heard of the exact opposite. Smoke how you normally would, then into sous vide for what you could call an “extended rest”. If you pull at 206 you might start the temp at 160, then 150, 140, then eat. I have heard as long as 24 hours. A coworker did a spendy Snake River brisket this way and it looked pretty amazing.
The long & short of it is that the meat should suck all the juices back in.

I just upgraded my Garmin stuff to Navionics Vision+ and it has been impressive so far. Even though I have Navionics and OneBoat subscriptions I will use ActiveCaptain 95% of the time so that I can see, create, and sync waypoints & tracks.
I’m doing an ice-fishing snowmobile build right now and will just use my phone mounted to the handlebar. As soon as I turn my Garmin unit on it syncs both ways.

I snagged the firmware files off the BassBoatCentral forums… because I haven’t been keeping them on file… but I probably will going forward.

All I did was drop the files on the microSD and do the power+4 button method to get into boatloader. It’s interesting because all three of my units indicated that the “update” failed but it actually did not. I did, however, lose my internal memory. It’s as if some portion of the “update” failed so it did a factory reset or something. I guess my big point of advice would be to make sure you have everything synced-up to ActiveCaptain prior to trying. Once I got the unit fired back up and re-synced my ActiveCaptain stuff I was happy.

Well my LiveScope was pretty crappy in Canada (not that we really needed it to catch fish)… and since getting back home I’ve done a bunch of troubleshooting and I believe I’ve narrowed it down to GLS version 2.74. I have updated Garmin support with my findings.

Things I’ve attempted:
*Eliminated the GMS10 switch (Still laggy/choppy)
*Different battery (Still laggy/choppy)
*Different network cable (Still laggy/choppy)
*Force re-installed latest software (power + 4 bootloader method) with only the LVS-dedicated Echomap + GLS10 connected. Update was successful. (Still laggy/choppy)
*Rolled back to Echomap 22.10 successfully… but the GLS failed the first time. (Still laggy/choppy)
*Re-did the rollback process and this time the GLS successfully went back to 2.61.
*Lag gone / LVS smooth!

Will update if I hear any more…

I found a guy on YouTube who said that when you first set noise reject to high you can experience lag for the first ~20 minutes while it calibrates itself.
Maybe that’s all it was…
Will report back after my Canada trip.

Hmm interesting.

My battery is a group 31 AGM, only a couple months old. It was showing 12.4 on the unit but I did not test with an actual tester.

I upgraded about a month back. I had to load it through ActiveCaptain. There is no longer an option to “replace” the built-in maps.
I spoke to Garmin about it and this is expected behavior.

This is timely for me as dropshot has become a staple in my arsenal and I have a big trip coming up.

I recently saw Bro from Northland explain his setup and it sure makes a lot of sense… although I cannot remember losing many fish at all dropshotting. Seems a little over-complicated.

Just throwing this out there…. Firman sells their refurbs on eBay for a hell of a good price. I picked up one about 3 months back and it starts on the first pull every time. Two year warranty. American based company and American engineering.

https://www.ebay.com/str/firmanpowerequipment

As far as the mainstream ones I like Bombay but really have not experimented around much.
Highly recommend gin + squirt (as in the soda) + a slice of lime.

Sounds like an awesome trip! Thank you for sharing.

Jacked it up and popped the tires off and oh my goodness did those brakes sound terrible. So far out of adjustment. Could not have been helping my mileage either. Turns out my bag full of literature that came with the boat had a whole booklet specifically for the drums. It seems I missed a paragraph…
Tore everything down, got them adjusted, re-packed the bearings (which seemed in great shape), new cotter pin and outer seal. Good to go!

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All helpful responses… thank you.
While I am mechanically inclined I don’t know diddly about drums. I will give it a go and if I have any issues I’ll just drag it to a mechanic.

According to the numbers this year is unprecedented.
If you take that plus the goofy jet stream stuff going on… I think that explains it.

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I purchased a brand new boat in 2021. I went to pick it up and it was sitting there with the incorrect motor on it. My heart sank, the sales rep hung his head, and we went into the office and determined that the order WAS sent to the factory correctly and the factory installed the wrong motor and then the dealership missed it and accepted delivery.
In my opinion, it has something to do with corporations/enterprises pushing the whole “do more with less”, “let’s run as lean as possible” thing. Teams are asked to maintain output with less people and less budget… and more often than not it’s just a management/executive order but they don’t truly invest in the training and tools that are needed to run that lean. People become stressed and eventually burn out. They’re angry at the company for being understaffed. By that point quality and attention to detail are long gone.
Did you know that Microsoft fired their entire quality assurance team that tested their Windows operating system patches? So now they are only tested by other code, not people putting them in real world situations. Numerous times in any given year they will roll out a garbage update to North of 1 billion users that breaks 57 things and THEY.DO.NOT.CARE. That’s a conscious decision that they made, believe it or not.
So if you want to point fingers at declining quality, they should be pointed at the leaders of the company. It’s a decision. Pure and simple.

Just to be crystal clear on the alcohol stuff… the official page is written in the context of “you”… so I assume that means the limits are on a per-person basis?