tipsandtricks

Send us your tips and tricks that make
fishing safer, easier and more fun.

Your fellow fisherpersons will be grateful to you.

Need a cutting board to prepare that fish for shore lunch?
You have one in the boat!
A paddle makes a great cutting board and it saves dulling your knife on the rocks.

Check your line often. Pull the last few feet between your thumb and index finger. If you feel any rough spots, re-tie. At the very least you should re-tie several times a day and more often if catching fish with teeth, fishing heavy cover or over rocks.

If you're fishing with a drop weight from a 3-way swivel, make sure the line to the drop weight is lighter than you main line. That way, if you snag your drop weight, the light line will break and that's all you'll lose, saving your main line, leader, hook, bait and whatever else is attached.

Although your line may be new, it may have curled from sitting on your reel or from being stored in the box too long. Try running it between two pieces of leather. This will often remove the curliness.

To get your hooks down deeper, add three or four colours of lead-core line as a leader.

If your boat is a side console - bass style, tie your fish stringer to a loop of rope hooked over your throttle lever. This way you'll never throttle up while your fish are still in the water. A 10 lb. fish will not stay on the stringer at 30 MPH.

Instead of sticking your self-adhesive fish measurer to the inside edge of your boat, stick it to a piece of lexan, plexi-glass or similar material. This way it can be passed around the boat instead of having to bring the fish to where the measurer is.

Every month, or even every outing, view your important GPS locations and write them down, with coordinates, in a notebook, that is specially kept for this purpose. Then, if you lose your "saved" settings, lose the GPS, get a new GPS or using a friend's GPS, you'll always have those important "fixes" to go to.