Fishing Forum

Tried fishing from the shore for about 20 mintes. Fly and bubble with a bit white/black/red wet fly. No hits.

Never thought I'd be saying this, but I also fished from a boat. My Bro-in-law inherited a boat from his brother. We took it out more to see how it ran than to fish, but we dropped our lines in for about 45 minutes. I had no idea what I was doing, but I tried a gulp minnow on a 1/4 ounce (I think) jig head. That didn't seem to drop very far, so I then tried a gulp minnow on a drop shot rig with a rather heavy weight. Not sure I presented the minnow properly, because it was hanging more vertical than horizontal.

So now that a boat will be part of my fishing outings from time to time, I need to learn all about that. Over time perhaps we'll invest in downriggers and trolling gear. The boat does have a fishfinder so we need to learn how to use that.

Kind of an interesting, funny thought process as we pull up to unload at the dock and collapse our lawn chairs (boat has no chairs right now) and hang on to the dock (boat has no ropes yet) while we see all these huge, powerful boats, with all their bells and whistles around us. Ha! Oh well, can't afford another house payment right now. I'll stick with a humble, little, dingy anyway. It's more my style, I think--and once I learn the ropes, the same fish can be caught from either vessel.

I'm excited to have this project. But it means I'll have to read more threads on this site. I usually skip over the ones from boaters. And I'll need to learn how to vertical jig. All this, and I can barely catch fish from the shore as it is! I'll never run out of things to learn, that's for sure.

Oh yeah, didn't catch anything; but I talked to another boater at the ramp who had 4 nice bows.

Good times!
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Time to start rigging it up. What type of boat?

Walmart has clearances out a lot of their boat stuff as they bring in the new. They have mooring lines and everything. I have some old boat seats you can have. Pic attached. I just changed mine out.

FishIn gear won't be much different than shore. Egg sinkers, #7 swivels, strong leader and you can start washing lures with ease.when standing still vertical jigging works great.
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As they say, the best two days of a boat owner's life are the day he buys his boat... and the day he sells it... [cool]

My current boat is a 1976 16' aluminum Starcraft I picked up for $1000 with boat, motor, and trailer. We (my father and I) like fishing out of the boat so much we just upgrade it when something needs upgrading.

It's a fun project and it makes the boat more "ours" so to speak.

As for learning to fish from it, well, lots of people do lots of different things. I grew up in a trolling family but over the past couple years we've picked up bottom jigging, shore popping for Bass, and drift fishing.

I personally think trolling is the easiest way to catch fish particularly without a finder. Once you troll around and find where fish are gathering, you can get an idea where to target fish by jig or drifting.

There are certainly better boat drivers than me though.
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