Fishing improves as spring shoves winter out of the way, and many of us spend more time on the water enjoying it. Newspaper and Internet fishing reports let us know when the fishing gets hot, but they are sometimes a bit light on telling us where. […]
If there is anything worse than a complicated sounder or chart plotter, it’s an owner’s manual that doesn’t give you the traction to climb the unit’s learning curve. […]
If you look at the top of a plain old flooded-cell, 12-volt marine battery, you see two widely separated metal posts and plastic caps lined up to cover six holes. […]
If you have an emergency position indicating radio beacon (EPIRB) for your boat and it’s old, you need to take a quick look at it. EPIRB’s that operate on 121.5 mHz or 243 mHz will become paperweights after February 1, 2009. The search and rescue satellite aided tracking (SARSAT) satellites will not process those frequencies after that date. […]
A friend showed me his new pontoon boat, and I was impressed until I saw how a sonar transducer was mounted on the back of a pontoon. I remarked that it probably wouldn’t work above idle speed, and he confirmed that as soon as he throttled up above fast idle the fish finder lost its reading. […]
About 20 years ago, a company called PulseTech Products Corporation developed a way to cancel a process that prematurely “ages” lead-acid batteries, rendering most of them useless long before their components actually wear out. That process is called sulfation, and you have read about it in this column before. […]
Many fishermen and boaters call any sealed, maintenance-free marine battery a gel battery, and that is not correct. […]
GPS units navigate by satellites that circle the earth twice a day at an altitude of almost 11,000 miles, yet the system can take you back to within a boat length of a location you saved in memory. Thinking about that makes my head hurt, so like most other fishermen, I prefer to just take the system for granted. […]
Emergency position indicating radio beacons (EPIRBs) have long been required equipment on commercial vessels and a smart addition for all larger boats. The introduction of the personal locator beacon (PLB), a smaller and manually operated version of the EPIRB, has spread the use of maritime distress beacons to smaller boats and to inland users on both land and water. […]
Every now and then I’ll hear someone at a tackle shop or out at a launch ramp give advice on caring for electronics that stands my hair on end. The most frequent category of advice is how to clean LCD screens or, more accurately, the protective lenses that cover them. […]
Early GPS units were pretty clunky by today’s standards — and approximately 30 times more expensive. Today’s units are faster, more accurate, and most importantly, have a lot more memory. Now, we can look at a detailed on-screen map of the area around us and see ourselves on it. We can also see the locations of places we visited and saved as waypoints, and getting between them is as simple as selecting one with a cursor and hitting a Go-To button. […]
The lights on your trailer are your boat’s first line of defense against collisions. Running lights show other drivers that you have a boat behind you when towing in the dark. Brake lights and turn signals can help keep tail-gating drivers from turning your stainless steel prop into a hood ornament, night or day. That is, of course, if your trailer lights work. […]
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