mr 580

I think the 1st Spring ESLO I fished was 1979 with my 16’ StarCraft and 3 buddies. We pretty much had no clue what we were doing. Sent two of the guys up to weigh a fish while me and the other guy held the boat off the concrete wall on the Genesee River. The guy who caught the fish comes back PO’d that they kept his fish. I go up to see what was going on and come to find out the guy was in 2nd place. A fair amount of beer had lead to the confusion and by the end of the Derby he finished 1 place out of the money. A lot of good times and stories from those days.

Your diagram is fine- but you would want your set back and weight the same for all three rods per side. That way as you reset you just slide down then put a rod in. That is a typical big board Lake Erie walleye setup with leadcore. We’ll use three 3 color on one side and three 5 color on the other. Now if your target is steelhead you might want to only do two per side- a hot steelhead can wad up a bunch of lines in a hurry.

Not exactly sure what the question is here. Can you use in line boards from a 26’ boat- yes as GF describes above. Can you run three lines per side from a mast and planer board system - yes with distance limited by the height of your tow line. Once tow line hits water that is about how far out you can go. Can you mix an in line board in with a mast and planer board system- that is not a good idea- would be pretty hard to reset lines. So pretty much an either or situation. All in lines or mast and planer boards. Either is effective and depends on preference, boat layout and experience of your crew.

Bought a 4 year old Lund Pro V and ran it for 18 years-guided with it for 5 of those years. Never a leak or loose rivet. Sold it this fall to make room for a new Lund. Yesterday ran into some local guys that were interested in my charters-told them I was getting a new boat. They were surprised as they thought both my boats were “late model”. I believe how you take care of things makes a difference. Start with something good, take care of it and it will treat you right.

I’m agree with SK8 that there are a lot of tools in the toolbox and you use them in different circumstances. I’m a big user of slide divers but I also know there is a learning curve with them and the same goes for wire. For people starting out learn one tool at a time-doing otherwise can result in lost gear(took me a while to learn this). To me slide divers offer the advantage of being able to adjust your leader length to whatever you want to slide the diver to. Really helps with spoons-flasher flies not so much. For Lake Ontario where you don’t have the small fish that won’t release, you don’t need the Light Bite version so if you setup a fixed leader on a Slide Diver it is the same as LJ dipsey. Use the tools for what they were designed for- slide diver works well higher in the water column with a longer lead as it’s dive curve is less than a dipsey. There are many ways to do things and learn what works for you- jumping from one tool to the next can get frustrating. Keep things simple change one thing at a time.