Archive for the ‘Fishing’ Category

If you’re thinking about doing some winter fishing this year, here are a few ideas for how to make the experience easier and more enjoyable.

Target Rocky Areas

This is especially useful if you are fishing in freshwater lakes that aren’t very deep. If you go fishing on a sunny day in the winter, the sun can heat up rocks at the bottom of a lake, and this will often make the water around these rocks warmer.

The warm water will attract fish in shallow areas. Rocks that are deeper down will also attract other types of fish such as crawfish.

Check Dams

If you’re in an area with dams both natural and artificial, it’s a good idea to check along them since many fish like bass will move around the area looking for smaller fish to hunt.

Use the Right Technique in Sloping Banks

Some fish will suspend themselves in banks that slope down in the winter. Any fish doing this is likely to be full of lethargy and not especially responsive to anything moving by it really fast. This is because the cold waters will tend to sap the fish of energy.

But if you dangle a lure right in front of their mouth, many fish will go for them anyway, even if the water is especially cold at 35 degrees or under. The important thing is to keep the lure still and right in front of fish like this in order to get them to go after the bait.

For more information on supplies you might need for winter fishing, please contact us today.

So it’s winter – you know what that means – time to go crab fishing! According to Recent News, “seafood fraud [is] a continuing problem in Maryland and across the nation….” Some examples of this include the mislabeling of seafood. One specific widespread mislabeled product is Atlantic blue crab meat. “Businesses are importing foreign crabmeat, repackaging it and selling it as [blue crab meat.]” What does this mean for you? It’s probably best to fish for your own blue crab meat – it’s both cheap and authentic!

Where should you fish for crab? According to a recent article (Read More), “Dungeness crab season, which starts November 1 in California, and December 1 in Washington and Oregon,” boasts the most of these crabs being fished from Half Moon Bay in California. In January, you should head to Oregon – where the truffles are going to be the most prevalent. “You’ll [also] find events [there] like truffle hunting lessons, cooking classes, and truffle dinners in Portland and Eugene.” There are other trending catches in Oregon – salmon is hot this month of December, with people reporting catching king salmon. If you’d like to read the full list of trending sealife visit this link.

So if you’re thinking about going fishing this winter and need to buy the right equipment for your boat – check out our huge selection! Performance Product Technologies offers innovative marine equipment to specifically suit your needs. We are experts when it comes to skiing, motorboats, and fishing. We have everything you need for all the year’s seasons. Contact us today to learn more.

At the point when the temperature plunges and the days are at their most bleak, you can still take advantage of your love of fishing, even on the coldest of winter days.

Here are a couple of things to consider and attempt next time you choose to overcome the elements:

• Fish have a tendency to get lazy in cold weather, moving around significantly less to save energy than they would in a hotter climate The result is that they require less nourishment and are liable to eat less frequently. The fish will frequently hide in a spot they know is useful to them, warmer, with plenty of nourishment. If you look hard enough, you will find them even in harsh elements.
• Because fish require less nourishment in lower temperatures, fish will feed harder if conditions are ideal for them. To provide for yourself the most obvious opportunity with regards to getting fish at this time of year, you may consider prebaiting your swim ahead of time of your session, by bringing a couple of loose offerings into your fishing spot throughout the span of a week. You will successfully make an atrificial larder for the fish to feast upon.
• Keeping your tackle light will help get additional bite’.As fish movement drops, so does the water color. As the water clarity enhances, fish depend less on their sense of smell and all the more on vision to find sustenance and keep away from potential dangers, so keeping rigs straightforward and simple will keep the fish from recognizing your trap.

By considering some of these ideas, you can heighten your chances of success in a frigid climate. If you’d like more information on wintertime fishing, please feel free to contact us.

For hardcore anglers, just about any fishing is better than none at all. It’s not even necessarily a matter of traveling to a warmer climate. It’s the fishing, so they bundle up and cast along the edges of icy slush. Sometimes they catch something, but mostly it’s just a way to scratch the deep itch of winter. Here are the Top 5 winter fishing holes we think you’ll enjoy:

1 OCEAN RUNNERS [WASHINGTON] Steelhead in the Pacific Northwest are perhaps the most intensely politicized fish on earth. They are big, beautiful, and hard to catch. Their runs have been decimated by decades of habitat loss and overfishing. Freshwater trout are a sport, but oceangoing steelhead are a passion. It is a tilting-at-windmills sort of fishing, hard labor in lousy weather, all for the rare thrill of a violent yank at the other end of the line.
There are still fishable winter runs of both wild and hatchery steelhead on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, perhaps the prettiest of all the regions they call home. Hatchery steelhead, identified by a clipped adipose fin, start returning to coastal rivers by mid-November in most years. These runs usually peak in December, with fish averaging 5 to 9 pounds and occasionally reaching 15 pounds or more. By mid-January, wild fish, commonly 10- to 12-pounders with a few at 20 pounds or more, have often started their winter run. Even 30-pounders are possible, though exceedingly rare.

2 SKI-SLOPE TROUT [COLORADO] There are some truly crazy trout fishermen in Colorado, where tire chains and four-wheel-drive vehicles are basic equipment for winter fishing. If those can’t get you to your favorite December water—and yes, that happens—you may need a snowmobile, too. Flyfishing for snowbound trout isn’t about to replace alpine skiing as a growth industry here, but in recent years it’s been getting increasingly serious attention.

Aspen, Vail, Breckenridge, Steamboat—scratch deeply enough around any major Colorado ski resort and you’ll find at least a few winter flyfishers. They’ve figured out that as long as there’s some open, flowing water nearby, the trout will eat something no matter how cold it is outside. They’ve also learned that the same sort of high-tech clothing that makes skiing pleasurable makes winter trout fishing bearable, too. Just trade your breathable ski bibs for breathable waders and wear fleece underneath. The water you’re standing in will likely be warmer than the air anyway.

3 HOG WALLOW [CALIFORNIA] Let’s cut to the chase: 22 of the 25 largest largemouth bass ever taken (according to Bassmaster magazine) have come from small reservoirs in southern California. The daytime highs for December and January in much of the area average around 70. If you fish this region during the winter, you’ll probably be over some monsters. And you most likely won’t be shivering either, at least not from the cold.

So here’s a sleeper for you, a big one. Diamond Valley Reservoir in Riverside County near Hemet, southeast of Los Angeles, is the newest and largest water-supply project in the area, having been completed in 2003. The lake is big for this region—4½ miles long by 2 miles wide—and has been generously stocked with both Florida-strain largemouths and rainbow trout, the combination that has made Southern California bass fishing so famous. Diamond Valley is open year-round from sunrise to sunset. There’s a boat ramp, but the types of outboard motors allowed are severely restricted. Rental boats are available at a marina on the lake.

4 STEEL MAGNET [NEW YORK] It’s only 10 miles long, within easy reach of the urban Northeast, and it just may be one of the world’s best steelhead rivers. The lower Niagara, which carries the out-flow of Lake Erie from Niagara Falls to its mouth on Lake Ontario in extreme western New York, is big, fast, deep, and at times dangerous water. It’s also a magnet for Lake Ontario’s steelhead, plus brown and lake trout, especially in winter.

Before you grab your waders and head for the car, know that the best fishing here is by boat. Drift fishing provides the mobility needed to find active fish in the big river. And there’s considerable finesse required to catch them. As the area around the falls ices up toward midwinter, the flows downriver tend to stabilize and clear. Winter steelhead in clear water are among the world’s fussiest fish, and getting the right drift with a small spawn sack on a light leader is no easy matter

5 BASS ON THE BORDER [TEXAS] By what’s been written in recent years, you’d think Lake Fork near Dallas was the only bass lake in Texas. It isn’t, of course, but the attention given to its ability to pump out big bass has overshadowed dozens of other worthwhile waters. So here’s some advice for winter bass hunters shivering through yet another Dallas December: Go south.

It’s about a 480-mile drive from Dallas down to the 84,000-acre Falcon Reservoir on the Rio Grande at Zapata, Texas. When it comes to bass fishing, this is about as far south—and as warm in winter—as you can get and still be in the Lower 48. The international boundary with Mexico passes through the middle of the lake.

Fishing at Falcon is on a roll. After years of drought, rains starting in the fall of 2003 brought lake levels back to near normal, flooding newly grown shoreline brush in the process. All that cover has helped recently spawned juvenile largemouths to survive. That, combined with recent stocking programs, is starting to produce some outstanding fishing. Nor are all the bass little ones. It took a stringer of five of them averaging more than 5 pounds each to win a tournament here in March 2005, and a 14-pounder was caught the following month.

A fishfinder is an invaluable tool that every serious angler should have at his or her disposal. As the name suggests, it allows anglers to locate fish (individual and schools) beneath the water. Modern-day fishfinders also have the ability to pinpoint underwater debris, calculate water depth, and utilize global positioning satellite (GPS) technology.

While there are dozens if not hundreds of different types of fishfinders on the market, nearly all of them use the same technology to locate fish and debris: sonar. Originally developed by the British Royal Navy for the purpose of detecting Nazi submarines during World War II, sonar (acronym for Sound Navigation And Ranging) is a technique in which sound waves are used to “map” and identify objects in an underwater environment. When the sound is propagated, it will travel through the water, bouncing off the ocean’s bottom and any fish or debris it hits.

Fishfinders work using the same principle as sonar. The device sends an audible wave from the surface that travels through the water, bouncing off any objects (or fish) in its path. The audible wave is initially narrow when it’s first emitted, but it gradually widens and spreads outwards as it travels deeper into the water. If the audible wave hits a fish, part of the beam will bounce back towards the fishfinder.

The size of the fish is determined by the shape of the returning sonar beam. If the returning beam contains a large “gap” in the center, the fish is probably large, whereas a small gap in the center of the returning beam indicates a small fish.

It’s important to note that certain elements can affect the accuracy and effectiveness of a fishfinder. Using a fishfinder in waters with a soft, muddy bottom, for instance, may yield incorrect depths at times. This is due to the fact that soft bottoms absorb sonar beams more so than hard, rocky bottoms. Fishfinders are more accurate when used in bodies of water with hard bottoms for this reason.

When shopping for a fishfinder, it’s recommended that you choose a model that sends out multiple sonar beams. Generally speaking, the more sonar beams it emits, the greater the accuracy. Some of the older models only used a single beam, but newer fishfinders like the Hummingbird are capable of emitting up to half a dozen beams. This allows for a more accurate reading while covering a greater amount of underwater space at the same time.

Owning a bass fishing boat opens up a whole new world of possibilities for recreational anglers. Rather than being restricted to the shores and docks, you can venture out onto the water for the ultimate freedom to fish where YOU want. This freedom means you’ll have more options when choosing a fishing location, which subsequently translates into a higher level of success.

Livewell

A livewell is a “must-have” accessory for any bass fishing boat, as it keeps your fish alive while you enjoy the remainder of your day on the water. These otherwise simple storage containers work by pumping fresh water from the surrounding lake or pond into the tank while using an aerator to fill it with oxygen. This mimics the natural habitat of the fish, keeping them alive while you continue to fish.

When shopping for a new bass boat make sure it contains a medium-to-large-sized livewell. There’s nothing more frustrating than throwing fish back because your livewell is full. A good rule of thumb when using a livewell is to provide every one inch of fish with one gallon of water.

Swivel Seats

360-degree swivel seats are ideal for bass fishing. Sitting atop a swivel seat will allow you to cast in all directions with greater power and accuracy – elements that are essential to a successful fishing excursion.

Most swivel seats are interchangeable between bass boats, so replacing them is a quick and easy process. Assuming the seat mount is already installed on the bass boat, you can easily add or replace the current seats with new ones.

Trolling Motor

Bass frequently bed and feed in shallow waters of just a few feet deep. Traversing waters such as this with an outboard gas motor is just asking for trouble since the propeller may strike the bottom. Having the option to switch over to a trolling motor, however, will allow you to safely traverse shallow waters to access those “hot” fishing holes.

Note: some municipals reservoirs and lakes prohibit the use of gas-powered motors. Depending on the area’s rules, you may still be able to traverse it using an electric trolling motor. Just remember to keep your battery charged so it’s ready to go.

Rod Holders

We really can’t talk about bass fishing boat features and accessories without mentioning rod holders. Tossing your rods on the boat deck is a bad habit that will leaves your rods susceptible to damage, which is where rod holders prove useful: you can stand your rods upright in a secure holder (usually mounted on the side of the boat), protecting from being stepped on or rolling off the boat.