greenhornet73

Same here! Thanks for all the responses and troubleshooting help.

You got that right!

Nice job getting to them early. I did the opposite and put in at 10:30 and couldn’t maintain enough boat control to give myself even a decent chance to connect with a fish. It was just enough of a NE blow to spin me around if I took my hand off the wheel. Glad to hear you’re still on them.

Just got home from a 3 hour troll and the oil level is still perfect. Easy fix with a replaced thermostat.

I can’t stress enough to occasionally jerk the rod or give it a steady pull then drop back motion during mid-troll. You’ll grab those followers that otherwise may not strike a steadily moving lure. I learned this trolling spinnerbaits and bucktails for pike and muskies in Ottawa.

I ran a third quart of oil through the crankcase today to make sure all of the gas/oil mixture was out and filled it with good oil. Fired it up and ran it for 10 minutes on almost half throttle with muffs on. Checked the oil after and was perfectly clean and level didn’t change. I’ll run it on the lake this weekend but for now it seems replacing the thermostat did the trick. Thanks everyone for all the input. If anything changes over the weekend I will post it to help anyone in the future with the same problem.

I replaced the thermostat and changed the oil twice. Will fill again tonight and run it and post what I find.

Seriously, makes my transom look like a car top boat!

I’ve been experimenting with different setups each time out and have caught fish each time. So far it is one rod that takes the most hits on each trip. One day it was a planer board flat line with crank bait, next time was a 1 color with a spoon, and last time out was the downrigger but over deeper water which makes sense. The one constant is that I have been running every line on one side of the boat instead of spreading them over a larger area.

I really hope not