Princecraft Starfish DLX SC Review #1: Why I gave up my old boat

June 17, 2012

For many years I have fished with considerable success from the bow of a 1982 Springbok 16’ equipped with a 35 Mercury two cycle outboard and a 30 lb. thrust MotorGuide trolling motor.

Built by Alcan in the early eighties as a response to the boom in fiberglass bass boats, this hull is still in perfect condition, though I had to rebuild the decks when I bought it twelve years ago. The carpet had rotted the originals, and the second deck wasn’t well done. I spent evenings over a winter building new fir plywood panels, rounding the edges, then glassing each piece to the standard I applied to the same job years earlier on my antique cabin cruiser. This was a surprisingly expensive and time-consuming job – especially eliminating the voids in the plywood around the hatch openings — but it provided a weatherproof deck for a boat which would spend half of the year tied to a dock and exposed to sun and weather.

Time took a toll on a series of swivel seats, but they were easily replaced through trips to Walmart or Princess Auto for new ones. The front live well holds only ten gallons, but it has kept many, many bass in good health, and because it is mounted to the port side I used it to trim the hull when I was in the boat alone. The rear live well is huge, but because it is located at the aft starboard corner of the vessel, it isn’t usable because it ruins the boat’s weight distribution. I stored life jackets in it.

At 60” at the widest point, the Springbok was too narrow for me at this time of life. While the boat was remarkably efficient on fuel, and even though it routinely outran the other boats in the fleet, the Springbok demanded of its operator and passengers the balance and co-ordination of a canoeist.

So my friends and family put increasing pressure on me to upgrade. Apparently the sight of a heavy, arthritic geezer perched on that narrow bow platform disturbed the serenity of others, (especially when this boat beat all comers in last year’s bass tournament).

A month of obsessive Internet searches and wild-goose chases occurred in pursuit of a wider boat. Every potential candidate I viewed was in much worse condition than the Springbok. Any idea how ratty that old blue carpet looks after twenty or thirty years, and how those rotten floorboards smell?

My search for a restorable hulk took me to Dave Brown’s establishment in Chaffey’s Locks, where I found no promising wreck, but spotted a bright red Princecraft, still without a motor, on his lot. Tentatively I asked Dave for a price. He vanished upstairs and returned in a few minutes with a printed page containing a graphic of the boat and a price not much greater than what I had been thinking of paying for a used glass centre-console on Kijiji.

“How much is the motor?”

“The 40 hp Mercury 4 stroke with EFI and tilt is included in the package.”

I don’t recall saying anything at that point. Numbers were racing around in my head, but I spent a good deal of time looking over the hull.

The thing that grabbed my attention first was the floorboards. Covered with a textured vinyl, they fasten down with exposed, stainless steel screws. The biggest problem I had with the Springbok’s glass deck was my unsuccessful attempt to build a coping which would join the deck to the aluminum sides. The walnut moulding on which I lavished hours wouldn’t stay on when the hull flexed in a chop. That loose coping remained my biggest disappointment with the rebuild of the boat.

Princecraft designers solved the same problem by creating a bead of the vinyl flooring material and sliding it between the floorboards and the hull sides, a simple and elegant solution which had eluded me over many hours of trying. (After a look at the new boat I thought I could fix the trim on the old one, and I did. I hope the new owner enjoys the old girl as much as I did.)

The new hatches are aluminum, also covered with vinyl. The latches look primitive, but seem to work well, won’t break from a misstep, and won’t trip anyone.

The swivel seats are comfortable and quite elegant in comparison to the Spartan ones which tormented my back for the last couple of years in the Springbok until I replaced them a month ago. On a first look the large seats seem to be placed too close together. The port seat looks as though it should be set to the left about three inches to balance the boat. Turns out that’s an illusion. As I discovered on the shakedown runs, the seats make optimal use of the hull’s width just the way they are.

There’s not much storage space in the new boat. Gas tank, battery box and pumps are exposed. The stern side bulkheads enclose foam only. The 7’ rod locker is just about it, if like me you plan to use the live well for fish and the forward locker for a battery. But I soon discovered that the side console (under the steering wheel) is much deeper than on the old one (I had to crawl in there after my wallet) and it’s the logical repository for a stack of life jackets.

The transom’s 71” wide and 20” high, so the light boat can take a 40 hp motor. With a butt that wide it will need it, too.

I asked Dave to order a matching “bicycle seat” to mount on a tall post at the bow. This should provide a more comfortable fishing position because I can either perch on it or use it as a brace while standing.

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The second annual Possum Lodge bass tournament

September 11, 2011

As Sir Paul McCartney once famously said, “Merely to succeed is not enough.  Others must fail.”  Hosts Tony Izatt and Anne DesLauriers must have had this in mind when holding the event during a full moon.  They couldn’t have foreseen the stiff northerly wind, though.

Tony had scheduled the thing to begin at 7:00 a.m.  What fish is awake at such a ghastly hour?

So there we were around the gas dock at Indian Lake Marina at the crack of dawn, waiting for the only sane members of the crew, Jeff and Greg, who had apparently slept in.  Eventually they came slumping down the dock.  We were a motley crew, but the fishing tackle was good.

As the designated “ringer” for this event I realized that my duty was to bring my particular skill to the tournament: the ability to make the fish stop biting whenever there is any pressure of any kind for the anglers to perform on cue.

So I dialed up CONSERVATION mode as Les Parrott, unsuspecting, joined me in the boat.  The others apparently decided their best bet was to get as far from me and my jinx as possible, for at the start they all blasted off to various points of the compass.  I moved over to A-dock on the trolling motor and began to cast.  Fishing in the morning is best off A-dock.

Surely enough, a chunky largemouth waited for my worm, immune to my jinx.  I stored him in the live well for his own protection.

Then we fished our way around Indian Lake.  Lovely body of water.  Perfectly fishless this morning, as well, until Les found another largemouth just off the Pagoda which had apparently missed the memo.

Hiding from the wind, we worked our way up Indian, across Mosquito (fish very well protected there by the jinx) and into Pollywog Lake.  Pollywog bass are notoriously independent and a bit suicidal, if provoked.  Most of the belligerent ones tore our bait off the hook and tangled us in weeds, but a couple of the unlucky ones ended up in the well.

Then we moved through Bedore’s Creek onto Newboro Lake and the jinx cut in with full force.  We cruised around more exquisitely clear water, cast a variety of choice weed patches, and had a few strikes best characterized by their inaccuracy.  Some occurred as much as 3′ from the actual bait.  According to Les these strikes say: “Get out of here and leave me alone!”

But no Newboro Lake bass were unfortunate enough to land in the live well.  My jinx seemed to work well enough on the north side of Scott Island.

To put it to the test we moved over to the bay known as “The Boathouse”.  Tony and Jeff were already there, straining the weeds frantically with long, looping casts.  Tony tried to wave me out of there, but  I lobbed a cast under a tree on the outskirts of the bay.  A solid largemouth took the worm, fought valiantly for a while, then tossed the hook back past my ear.

“I’ll bet that just cost us some money,” I muttered to Les.  The jinx continued.  An inaccurate cast under another tree led to a missed strike and a lost worm, then I took into a run of tangles in trees which led to the exploration of a lot of overhanging limbs while I removed a series of hooks from branches.

Back at the dock Tony conducted weigh-ins with a large plastic pail and digital scale.  Things proceeded normally until a protest from the group forced the host to drain the water out of the pail in which he was weighing his team’s catch, reducing the weight from 22 pounds to seven.

Turns out my jinx had been pretty effective after all.  The five bass we had put into the well for safekeeping weighed a total of 9.9 pounds and turned out to be the catch of the day, beating the entry of Morgan Pickering and Brad Wilson by a half-pound.  The fat laggard from under A-dock at 2.8 pounds won the largest fish by a couple of ounces, as well.

So Les and I faced some baleful glares, but we got to hold the Bob Steele Memorial Trophy for photos and have the right to display it in our homes for the winter.

Maybe I’d better ease up on the jinx next year because a passing cottager complained that the mouth of every bass on Newboro Lake seemed to be sealed up Saturday morning.

Host Tony Izatt presents Bob Steele Memorial Trophy

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Fishing the shear tide with Brian Clive

June 24, 2011

At Naden Harbour the water’s about 48 degrees at this time of year.  Salmon migrate away if it rises above 55 degrees.

Thursday dawned clear and calm, the start of an extraordinary day at the Queen Charlotte Lodge fishing ground.

Guides and guests pay close attention to a running total of the fish brought in for processing, as this fish is flash frozen, packed up and shipped on the plane with us back to Vancouver.  Everybody wants to load as much salmon and halibut as possible into his package.  Four Chinook, four coho, two halibut are the mainstays.  The various less desirable groundfish include rock cod and lingcod.

Chinook are both the most desirable and the most abundant species available at this time.  Cohos are smaller, more delicate, and much harder to find.  By the last day Tony had two coho on his list, but I had caught only Chinooks.  It had made me feel a little strange over our first three days of fishing to watch Brian release 17 and 18 pound salmon as casually as I would slip a 14” bass back into the water.

Then I hooked a 26 pounder.  There seems to be a tipping point with salmon where the energy of the fish suddenly doubles.  The 22 pounder the day before was a magnificent fish, but the 26 pounder wore me right out.  It ran, sounded, shook the line until my biceps ached, then headed for bottom several more times.  While I haven’t caught one yet, I’m told the sheer power of a fish of tyee size, 30 pounds, reverberates in every muscle and tendon of the angler’s body after the fight is over.

But this day we needed cohos and the sea was calm, so Brian took us out about two miles offshore.  Hauling in large salmon is great sport and excellent tourism, but time spent with a knowledgeable instructor and a square mile of water is to open a world of wonder.

We were running slowly along in the boat when Brian suddenly perked up and pointed down into the water.  It was littered with tiny, iridescent spots.  “Scales.  Birds have been feeding on a baitball here.”

“Plankton is the basis of all of the life in the water.  It’s fragile and the wind  beats up the organisms close to the top of the water column and reduces the food supply.  But when a calm day comes like this, the sun produces an almost instant bloom.  This turns on all of the other life forms to feed on the plankton, so the bait fish, the birds, the salmon, all become active.”

There we were out there with nothing around us but water.  And birds, a lot of birds.  And apparently a river, because on the calm sea a stream came flowing by us like a sharply-defined river in the middle of nowhere.  It carried pieces of kelp broken off from the beds on shore, as well as enough algae on the suface to make it easy to see.

The birds, helldivers and gulls, congregated in great numbers around shoals of needlefish forced to the surface by the helldivers.  Brian called them baitballs.  The gulls could swoop in and grab mouthfuls of the tiny fish, they were that tightly packed at the top of the water.  “Of course a humpback whale will eat the whole ball.”  The feeding frenzy continued for several minutes until the birds gradually filled up, drifted away, and the baitfish were allowed to disperse.

So at 10:00 Thursday morning we set the downriggers for coho after hauling in Chinooks near shore for four hours.  “Coho are hard to find, but we’ll try out here for a while.”  Before long my rod twitched, so I ran through the routine Brian had drilled into me over many lost fish:  “Lift the rod off the holder.  Tip it over so the reel is down.  Reel in to the clip on the downrigger.  Feel the fish?  Jerk it off the clip.  Reel up to the fish until you feel it.  Set the hook! Still there?  Let him run.  Bring back line when you can.  Hold your right hand on the bottom of the reel to control the drag.  When your left hand tells you, let him have line.  When you can get line back, pump with the left, reel with the right.  When the fish comes near the boat, don’t worry about that.  Just play the fish.  The guide will get the lines and the downriggers out of the way and move the boat so that the fish doesn’t foul the motor.”

Brian expertly predicted each fish’s moves.  His coaching and seamanship were vital to our fishing success over the 11-hour days of the trip.  My part?  Once a fish was hooked, I didn’t lose it.  Getting to that stage was hard for me, though.  The unfamiliar mooching rod looks like a fly rod, and that turn-the-reel-over stage kept confusing me at a critical time.  But after enough repetitions muscle memory took over.  By the fourth and final day I found I could whip the rod out of the holder, flip it over, wind-wind-wind, flip the line off the clip, chase the fish down with the reel, then stretch its neck with a strong, smooth hook-set motion.

Brian commented when I set the hook on the first Coho:  “I’m surprised it can still swim.  I thought that hook-set would have fractured its neck.”  The eight-pound coho surged to the surface where it ran and rolled on top.  Brian told Tony and me that Chinooks will use the whole water column it a fight, often diving straight down 100’ or more.  “Cohos take to the surface when hooked, often jumping behind the boat before you can get the line off the downrigger clip.”

But that was our last coho of the day.  We couldn’t keep the blasted Chinooks off the hook.  Today the things were everywhere, and we were treated to the spectacle of fighting 16-26 pound fish in water so clear we could see every iridescent scale when the fish turned thirty feet below the boat.  When we brought them to the boat, Brian would reach down with the gaff and gently slide the unbarbed hook out, and away would go the fish.

But this is the land of the midnight sun.  We brought Brian back in at 4:30 to look after the fish and to give Tony and me a chance to do what we had been itching to try:  catch a salmon on a downrigger on our own.

Stay tuned for the next part of the saga.

 

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Yarns I have heard while fishing

December 14, 2008

Sometimes the best yarns come from quiet guys.  Paul’s a prime example.  A polite, fastidious gentleman, well-liked by everyone on the dock, he nevertheless has a good side, I discovered.  When fishing, Paul likes to get into the muck.  He’s worse than I am, and if it were left to him, we’d have the boat mired in mud every time in our search for largemouth bass in shallow water.

When around civilized society Paul goes out of his way to appear steady and conventional.  I guess it’s the training.  Paul’s a pilot.  Until they bought him a surplus 747, his favourite  was an old Boeing 707 which his employer, Pratt and Whitney, bought in Saudi Arabia.  “They patched the bullet holes and turned it into a test bed.”  The techs placed an improvised mount beneath the cockpit for engines under development so that Paul could give them 3 ½ minutes of negative gravity as part of the test protocol.

“How do you do that?”

“We load twenty laboratory people and their equipment into the plane with the test engine mounted on the front, fly up to thirty thousand feet, point it at the ground and hit the throttle.  They do their tests.  I pull out and repeat the process until we have the 3 ½ minutes elapsed, and then we land and go for a coffee.”

“So, you fly a vomit comet?”

“I guess you could say that.”  He showed me a photo of the 707 with a huge jet engine mounted below the cockpit.  At rest the engine only cleared the runway by 3 ½”.

One weekend Paul was a bit grinny, so  I could tell he had something to say.  He waited until we were well away from the dock and then mentioned that he discovered another 707 in his parking space the other day when he returned from a test flight.  He thought no more of it, and headed on in to the coffee room, where he encountered the owner of the plane, a civilian in a leather flying jacket who clearly wanted to talk 707’s.  Paul chatted willingly away.  The other guy seemed smart and enthusiastic, and was quite taken with Paul’s account of the extra engine on his plane.

After they’d had lunch and parted ways, everybody descended upon Paul at once.  “Did you know who that was?  John Travolta!”

“He’s an actor, right?”  Groans from his colleagues.  Paul sometimes seems a little out of it, but I don’t think he misses much.

Taxes on Canadian air space drove them south for their test flights, so for the last few years before Paul’s retirement Pratt and Whitney flew out of an abandoned nuclear missile base in Plattsburg, New York.  Paul asked someone about the herd of goats grazing in an open-air compound within the maximum security section of the airport.

“Those critters are worth $1.5 million dollars each.  They’re transgenic goats, with a spider gene added, part of a U.S. Defense Department black program.  Spider silk is way stronger than Kevlar, so they’re trying to get the goats to produce the fibre in their milk so that they can harvest it and use it for superior body armour for soldiers.  The Defense Department is worried a terrorist group will get access to the goats, so they’re farmed under maximum security conditions.”

I had a great laugh about this bit of whimsy, but kept quiet about it until two years later I saw an article in The Ottawa Citizen headed by a photo of a guy in a lab coat with a goat perched on his shoulders, chewing his ear.  A Quebec firm had gained possession of the goat technology and were going public with their story to raise interest in their I.P.O.

This article was too good to be true, so I gave copies to my OAC English students and asked them to write a response.  As usual, I didn’t quite know what to expect.  That’s the fun of teaching English.

I won’t soon forget the rewrite of “The Three Billy-goats Gruff” which a clever young woman named Anna wrote, though.  These three transgenic Billy-goats lived in peace in a brick house at the edge of a river until a nasty troll set up shop under the bridge.  The confrontation came early when the troll tried to capture one of the young goats and eat him.  To his surprise, the troll became entwined in a strong, sticky web which at first restricted his movements, but eventually disoriented  him to the point that he fell off the bridge into the river and drowned, all the while subjected to a relentless spray of goat milk from the intended victim and his two brothers.

To this day Anna doesn’t know why I found her story so funny, and she grew up on a farm, too.  I guess sending the city kid to the barn to milk the Billy-goat isn’t quite as current as some jokes anymore.

Ten years later, the group trying to develop the spider/goat technology has become Nexia Biotechnologies, and according to their website, biosteel development is still a key part of their asset list though they’ve acquired some pharmaceutical companies and some oil interests, as well.

And to think I’d accused Paul of making the whole thing up.

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How to cook a splake

November 9, 2008

Martin and Vanya are grad students in the Queen’s Biology Department.  They have taken quite an interest in finding alternative sources of food in an urban environment, but since Dr. Bill Barrett suggested that I warn them to check all pigeon’s lung sacs for T.B. spots, they have confined their foraging to squirrels and porcupines they find in our woodlot.  The most recent porky was quite a success, according to Martin.  From his description it sounds as if it tasted a lot like beaver, a delicacy that I tried with colleagues and 450 Canadian studies students at my school one fall day in 1973. For the record, the large beaver (provided by my grandfather) tasted like finely-grained beef with a hint of liver.  This may be more of a tribute to the skills of the ladies in the Chimo cafeteria than to the innate flavour of the critter, but it wasn’t bad, actually.

Martin and Vanya have taken to following Charlie along to the farm on weekends in hope of an invitation to hunt in the woods, or failing that, the offer of a meal of wild game from the family grill.

The first time they showed up I cooked a pile of largemouth bass fillets and dumped them on a cooling tray while they prepared corn in a propane boiler.  In my experience if there’s a crowd around the fillets will disappear from the tray at a good rate, and the first sign that the crew is filling up is when a fillet actually makes it to a plate before it is eaten.  It took until the third cast iron pan full for this to happen, and it might have been that Martin and Vanya wanted to leave some for the other six people; nevertheless, it does a cook’s heart good to see how a bunch of hungry twenty-somethings can eat.

Their most recent visit came about for the same reason that I had gone fishing the night before:  it was simply too nice a fall day to remain inside.  I had coaxed a very active splake onto the shore and its fillets were cooling in the fridge as they arrived.

I lit the grill and they required no coaxing.  I pontificated away on the tricks of making an inedible fish into a delicacy, but their ears seemed to be blocked by hunger.  All they wanted was the food, which they dispatched with haste and relish, did the dishes, looked briefly around the woods for squirrels, then raced to my secret fishing hole, though they claimed they were overdue for work on campus.

The following day brought my largest splake ever, and so I had to circulate a photo or two.  Vanya responded with a few photos of his own and the following note:

—————————————–

Hi Rod,

Nice fish. Here are pictures of the one I caught.

After eating the splake at your house, I thought it was impossible that these fish could taste bad. So that evening, I grilled the splake that I caught the night before, and my god it was terrible. Tasted fishy and strong, and smelled equally bad. They’re a pleasure to catch but a chore to eat!

Vanya

—————————————–

Ah ha!  He had made the classic rookie mistake:  you must never mistake a splake for something good to eat!  A splake looks somewhat like a salmon (though it’s a lot prettier), but while an Atlantic’s oil is sweet, a splake’s is almost as rank as that of a lingcod.  I still remember the smell in the house that January day when I first tried to fry a ling fillet in an open pan.  We had every window of the house wide open, just to get the smoke out.  It turned out that the ling’s oil has a very low fuming point, and it smells awful when burning.

Memory of the ling debacle is why I only cook splake outdoors and downwind of the dwelling, if possible.  But I’d heard someone — it might have been Lennie Pyne — talking about how ling is quite good if you deep fry it and get rid of the oil.   Actually, I think Lennie gave me that ling, but he denies it, so maybe it was someone else in the group ice fishing off Trout Island that day.

Later on after I discovered downrigger fishing I was catching significant numbers of splake during my run of beginner’s luck, and I was unwilling to admit that they were almost inedible.  I wondered if Lennie’s principle of broiling the grease out might apply equally as well to splake as ling.

I decided to slice the fish into skinless fillets and try to burn the oil out of them with an open flame.  This worked surprisingly well.  The whitish oil would rise out of the fillet when heated, and would then burn off when I turned it.  You just didn’t want to be downwind.

Butter hides a lot of evil flavours simply by coating the tastebuds on the tongue.  It works for August bass, so why shouldn’t it help a splake?  I decided to baste the fillets in melted, unsalted butter each time I turned them throughout the cooking process.  I singed a few hairs off my hands, but the process worked better than I deserved:  it turned out that butter is denser than the splake oil, so as the segments of the fillet open up from cooking, the heavier oil displaces the lighter to the surface, only to be lost to the fire when the fillet is turned.

A splake fillet will sustain a great deal of flame without charring.  It is like a salmon that way.  Basically you can treat it like steak on a barbecue.  Cook it until it breaks in half, then serve it with lots of salt.  The fillet will have a great texture and appearance, and will taste like butter and salt – not bad, under the circumstances.

Just don’t be lulled into thinking that these magnificent fillets actually taste good.

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