A boat is a hole in the water where you dump your money.  The word “boat” stands for “Break out another thousand.” There are many jokes about the cost of owning a boat, and are all too true.

    I have owned nine bass boats over the past 45 years, and all had their good and bad qualities, but all had one thing in common. They cost a lot, from purchasing them to keeping them working and running.

    Boats have improved a lot over those years.  My first boat, a brand new 16-foot Arrowglass with a 70 horsepower two stroke Evinrude motor, cost only $3500 in 1974.  That seems cheap now, many depthfinders and trolling motors cost more than that individually and just the sale tax on a new bass boat can be much higher. 

    That boat was top of the line back then, with one of the biggest outboard available that would push it about 35 mph on a good day, a 12-volt trolling motor, flasher depthfinder, two batteries and a single axle trailer with two narrow 14 inch tires.  It served me well for seven years although I had to have the motor rebuilt twice and made some improvements, adding a paper graph depthfinder to the dash and moving the flasher to the front.

    My current boat is a 20-foot Skeeter with a 250 horsepower Yamaha four stroke motor. I bought it used from Chad Pipkins, an Elite series pro, and it cost just over $50,000.  The list price for it new was in the upper $70,000 range. It came with a 36-volt trolling motor, four batteries, two power poles, four Hummingbird depthfinder, LED lighting around the inside of the gunnel and a dual axle trailer with four 14-inch car size tires.

    This boat will run in the upper 70 mph range if I ever get in a hurry, but I seldom do. It cruises great at 45 to 50 mph.   

    Four stroke motors crank instantly even in cold weather, something always a problem with two stoke motors, and there is no need to add oil to the gas.  I thought that would save me money over time, not having to buy oil, until I had the oil changed in its annual service.

    Last week I towed my Skeeter to Perry’s High-Performance Marine near Gainesville, fighting horrendous traffic both ways.  Perry is the only mechanic I trust to work on my motor, or even service it. He is definitely the best Yamaha mechanic in Georgia, if not the entire Southeast.

    During service them motor is tested on a computer, giving all kinds of information about it.  A couple of things surprised me.  The boat had about 250 hours on the motor, put on it in one year by Chad. I put about 100 hours a year on it and it now has 500 hours on it. I calculate I spend about 7 hours on the trolling motor for every hour on the gas motor.

    In those 500 hours, the computer shows it was run 5,000 to 6,000 rpm only 28 hours, and many of those running 60 plus mph, were put on it by Chad.  Most of the time, 336 hours total, were at less than 1000 rpm, idle speed.  Chad spent most of his time idling around, watching depthfinders, as do it.  At the speed I run, about 40 to 50 mph at 3000 to 4000 rpm, totaled 64 hours.

    In three years, the only problem with the Skeeter is one of the live well pumps burned out.  Perry and the Yamaha folks say if the motor is serviced as scheduled, it should last for several thousand hours, more than I will be able to put on it the rest of my life!

    If you buy a bass boat, expect sticker shock. But be aware that is just the beginning of your expenses!

Coast Guard Recommends Five Communications Devices for Boaters
from The Fishing Wire

Going out on the water can be dangerous, especially if you don’t have the right equipment. If you do find yourself in trouble, being able to communicate that you need help can be a lifesaver—literally!

Here are the top five items the Coast Guard recommends you take with you on your boat so you can call for help if you need it.

1. VHF-FM marine radio: It’s the most versatile piece of comms equipment you can have! If you find yourself in distress, calling for help on the radio not only alerts the Coast Guard, but it also alerts all other vessels in your surrounding area who may be able to assist you. If you find yourself in distress, calling for help on the radio not only alerts the Coast Guard, but it also alerts all other vessels in your surrounding area who may be able to assist you. In addition to being able to call for help, it also allows you to receive important weather information, safety updates, and call bridges to request openings.

2. Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon: They let us know where you are via satellite! Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons can also tell the Coast Guard who the beacon is registered to and how to contact you! Register your beacon and verify your information here.

3. Air horn, whistle, or other approved sound-producing device: Sound producing devices work for day and night emergencies. The good thing about sound distress signals is that they’re good during any time of the day. Just like on a car or bicycle, boaters should always carry a sound signal to get the attention of other people on the area. For more information, click here.

4. Visual distress signals: To pyro or not to pyro? Nine of the sixteen internationally recognized distress signals are visual distress signals. Three are three pyrotechnic distress signals, and the other six are non-pyrotechnics. While visual distress signals can be extremely helpful when operating in a well-populated area, they should not be relied on as your only method of communicating distress. If you need to use a pyrotechnic distress signal, be sure to point the pyrotechnics in a safe direction, away from yourself and other people.

5. Cell phone: Not a primary, but a good back-up. While not reliable enough to be used on its own as an on-water communication device, it’s a good back-up in case your radio isn’t functional, you don’t have a radio, or you don’t know how to use one. The Coast Guard recommends mariners download the official Coast Guard Boating Safety App. One of the many features of the app allows mariners to place an emergency call to the U.S. Coast Guard or 911, and provides you with your current location to provide to emergency personnel over the phone.

Boat Control Tools Keep Anglers in the Bite
By John Geiger
from The Fishing Wire

If you have a boat with multiple modern outboards, you have a lot of options when it comes to joystick control of your vessel for docking or tight maneuvering. Joysticks are particularly great for sidling up to the dock. But what about solving the challenges anglers have setting the right drift to keep lures in the zone, or trolling ultra slowly to keep live baits alive and active? Some marine companies are ramping up boat-control tools that will simply help catch more fish.

Yamaha joystick system

For more than a decade we’ve had joystick helm controls like Mercury’s BowHook, SeaStar’s Heading Hold and more recently Yamaha’s SetPoint. To see these systems in action is a front-row seat to the future of boating. In fact, it’s astounding to see each motor working independently, changing direction and throttle as if they had minds of their own. Yet the outboards work in unison with each other, tapping GPS technology and advanced system integration to keep the boat in a position or in a certain heading despite wind, waves and currents.

Like the other companies, Yamaha has offered similar tools with its Helm Master and SetPoint trio of boat-control modes — StayPoint, FishPoint and DriftPoint. But recently, Yamaha upped the game and brought another boat-control tool, a function called Pattern Shift, to the SetPoint array. It lets the boater troll below standard in-gear speeds. When set, it automatically bumps the throttle in and out of gear, as a captain would do to create a snail’s-pace drift over productive structure or waters. Under some conditions, the system can troll at 1/2 mph or less. You can actually set it to be in gear 90 percent of the time and out of gear 10 percent, or in gear 10 percent and out of gear 90 percent or any 10 percent increment in between.

It’s frustrating to try to quickly fish a hot spot—say a small reef outcropping– before the boat floats over the top of it and past it. It’s obvious that companies like Yamaha are getting into the minds of captains to find out what they need to position their boats perfectly despite groundswell, tides, winds and current. And the systems are basically intuitive. They’re very simple to operate.

How much does a system like this cost? That’s not easy to answer on a new boat because it’s often standard equipment on more fully equipped models. As an option, however, you might expect to pay nearly as much as you would for an additional outboard.

ON THE WATER

On a recent fishing trip in the Chesapeake Bay with Captain Shannon Pickens, a longtime guide on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, I saw one of the Yamaha systems in action.

Captain Pickens used his Garmin fish finder to locate a school of resident striped bass on an oyster bar in about 30 feet of water.

“I marked them and then moved off to deeper water to drift up to it,” said Pickens, who is based on Tilghman Island.

But the wind was coming from the south against the outgoing tide. If he simply drifted over the structure, the bow probably would have swung to port with the current, and anglers would have been creeping up the port side gunnels toward the bow. Pickens likes to keep his anglers around the stern of the boat, where there is more room to maneuver in the cockpit.

Summer stripers on Chesapeake Bay are not usually huge, but there are plenty of them and they put up a spirited fight on light gear.

“I put the bow into the wind, set Pattern Shift and let them vertical jig over the zone from the stern,” he said. “They might not know it’s the system doing a lot of the work, but they’ll notice more fish on their line.”

Pickens could have chosen to manually bump his binnacle throttle to keep the port Yamaha F300 coming in and out of gear while also keeping clients safe, watching for other vessels and all the things a captain does when there are six people aboard dropping lines. But Pickens chose to use Pattern Shift. It kept the boat in the zone longer by controlling the heading (bow quartered away from the wind) and the speed (about 2 knots north to south) with a 50-50 ratio of forward-thrust-to-neutral bumps to let anglers work the bar slowly and naturally. And that’s one of the best features of Pattern Shift — the bumping and very low rpm, especially when coupled with Yamaha’s innovative Shift Dampening System, created little noise under the hull.

Pickens said these fish are highly pressured and shut down with prop wash or noise from above. The crew was able to keep rods tight on the resident summer stripers when other boats in the area were watching and waiting.

Non-migrating striped bass, also called rockfish in this part of the world, will take live baits, trolled umbrella rigs or plastics. Pickens had his crew throwing artificials on light tackle: Z-Man scented jerk shad and paddle-tail swimbaits in the 6- to 8-inch range on 1-ounce lead jigs. The 12-pound fluorocarbon leader was tied to 10-pound braid with a Uni-knot. Hot bait colors were purple, white and electric chicken, a combo of chartreuse on top and green on the bottom.

Thanks in part to the impressive SetPoint position-control system from Yamaha, we had brisk action on summer rockfish. We caught none of the giants for which the area is famed—Bloody Point, where we were fishing, produced the 67-pound, 8-ounce state record, and occasionally turns out fish approaching 50 pounds—but we kept busy with stripers around the lower end of the 19-inch slot, and gained new respect for the ways technology can affect our fishing.

The last bullet point at the bottom is most important, in my mind, and the one fewest people follow.

Coast Guard Reminds Mariners of Boating Etiquette
from The Fishing Wire

As the summer heats up and boaters take to the water, the Coast Guard is responding to an increased number of preventable incidents and Good Samaritans are lending a hand.

“Most drowning and near-drowning incidents are preventable, if people used proper precautions,” said Capt. Olav Saboe, commander of Coast Guard Sector North Bend. “To reduce the risk of drowning, it is important for boaters to wear a life-jacket at all times. You may not have a chance to put it on, if and when a sudden emergency strikes.”

This comes in response to a recent incident in which a halibut angler fell overboard without a lifejacket while fishing alone, 14 miles west of Newport, Ore., May 29.

He was forced to tread water, fully clothed, in frigid conditions, until help arrived and without a life jacket, his chances of survival were extremely low.

Luckily, the man had a handheld VHF radio attached to his person. He used it to contact the Coast Guard as well as a nearby vessels.

The Coast Guard launched all available assets just minutes after the MAYDAY call came in. However, it was a Good Samaritan that reached the angler first and pulled him from the water before he succumbed to the disastrous situation.

“That case highlights the importance of the Maritime Rescue Doctrine,” said Chief Warrant Officer Thomas Molloy, commanding officer of Station Yaquina Bay. “Good Samaritans are very often the first to arrive on-scene and the Coast Guard encourages responsible action.”

A Good Samaritan is the operator of a private vessel who renders voluntary aid, without compensation, to a person who is injured or to a vessel in danger.

Good Samaritans are expected to exercise reasonable care, to avoid negligent conduct which might worsen the position of the victims, and to avoid reckless and wanton conduct in performing the rescue.

“It is extremely important, that if you hear a MAYDAY call over the radio, that you remain silent, listen, and write down or record any information you hear,” said Molloy. “The most important information is going to be location, location, location. Coordinates, latitude, longitude, geographical reference points. If the initial call is too weak to reach Coast Guard watchstanders, you may have to relay everything you just heard.”

Some recent search and rescue cases that the Coast Guard responded to have involved solo boaters.

Taking to the water in any craft alone is extremely dangerous and the Coast Guard recommends never going out without a partner.

Along with using the buddy system, it’s always safer to tell someone where you are going and when you expect to be back.

The Coast Guard makes this easy by offering a free application which you can download onto your mobile device.

Use the mobile app to file a float plan. It also includes navigation rules, contact information, buoy information, vessel requirements, and lifejacket recommendations.

The Coast Guard recommends keeping a waterproof marine radio on you, in case your mobile device runs out of battery, service range, or if you accidentally drop it into the water while trying to take a selfie.

A VHF radio may also help mariners stay informed of Urgent Marine Information Broadcasts (UMIB).

A UMIB is used to alert potential Good Samaritans, in an area where there is a vessel in distress.

Federal statute, 46 USC 2304, requires a master to render assistance if the master can do so without serious danger to master’s vessel or individuals on board.

“Good Samaritans save lives,” said Saboe. “But responsible boating saves more. Mariners need to remember their safe boating etiquette.”

SAFE BOATING ETIQUETTE

• Make sure your craft and all safety equipment are in good working order before you get on the water. That includes your lifejacket. Make sure it fits well, and wear it at all times.

• Do not consume drugs or alcohol when operating a boat. Not only is it against the law, but it is one of the most common causes of boating accidents.

• Plan ahead so everyone in the boat knows what their roll will be in case of an accident.

• Make sure that everyone in the boat is on the lookout for potential dangers, not just the driver. Let the driver know if you see anything of concern. Do not assume he has spotted the coming danger.

• Anyone operating a boat in Oregon or Washington is required to have a state-issued, valid boaters-operator card.

• Learn the “rules of the road” and when on the water, follow them.

For more information, visit the Oregon Marine Board Safety page at: www.oregon.gov/osmb/boater-info/Pages/Safety-and-Education.aspx
For the Coast Guard Mobile App visit: https://uscgboating.org/mobile/

With Memorial Day Weekend coming up, a lot of folks will be out on area lakes driving boats. Many of them should not be. Way too many folks behind the wheel of a boat have no idea what they are doing and often cause accidents.

“Keep right” is the most important rule for any boat operator. You are supposed to stay to the right side of the channel and you should stay to the right when meeting a boat head-on. This is a simple rule, and it is the same as when driving a car, but many people get confused.

The steering wheel of most boats is on the right side, opposite of car steering wheels. I think this is what confuses people, they try to meet oncoming traffic on the side they are sitting on, not keeping right as required.

Skidoos or Personal Water Craft (PWC) are a whole nother problem. These small, fast boats are often driven by young kids that have no idea they are endangering themselves and others by the way they are driving. Jumping wakes may be fun, but the fun ends when you jump into the path of another boat.

Last year there were 329,569 boats in Georgia and 165 accidents were recorded. Out of that number, there were 37,649 PWCs and they accounted for 47 of the accidents. That means PWCs are 11 percent of the boats but they are involved in 29 percent of the accidents.

Drivers of bass boats are often just as bad. Many bass boats will run faster then 70 mph and the drivers often take short cuts by running the left side of bends and turns. This means they may meet a boat driver doing the right thing, keeping right, head on. If it is another bass boat and both are running 70 mph plus, there is not much time to avoid an accident.
Drinking while driving a boat can get you in trouble in a hurry. Last year there were 339 arrest for Boating Under the Influence (BUI) and many of them paid a hefty fine. Beer and boating seem to go together, but it can get real expensive if you are driving the boat.

As might be expected due to heavy boat traffic, Lanier lead the lakes with 51 accidents, more than twice as many as Allatoona in second place. Jackson had 5 accidents, down the list a good ways. Its small size concentrates boats, though. That can make accidents more likely.

The most important thing to do when driving a boat is to think. Realize what you are doing and plan ahead. Know the rules and obey them. Watch out for other people and be careful, and have a safe holiday weekend.