Gearing my river boat for the lake.

[haus]

I live between two trout rivers and decided to buy a boat to fish the river. I have a 20ft supreme. Its really fun to drive upstream and throw out my chain and float down stream. I like catching trout, but would prefer to eat crappie, so I started to look at ways to make this a lake boat. Heres what I came up with.

Hard to be on the lake without a trolling motor. Had one I bought for another boat years ago. Took it apart and reversed the handle since it was setup for transom mount before. Also had a fish finder laying around. Made a bracket for both.





I found you guys while looking for homemade rod holders. This is what I came up with for my setup. I will be adding one more in between these two. Need one more part from lowes.

[Blackhawk19]

Nice lookin set up!

[river slabs are better]

be careful it is really easy to swamp a trot boat on that lake.. but you have a great set up

[speck tackler]

Looks like you'll have the best of both worlds! Great set up!!!

[haus]

I plan to stay in the coves with my setup. I could not handle the waves in the main part of the lake on windy days. Plenty of coves with boat ramps at Bull shoals and Norfork though.

My father-in-law will be running the trolling motor in the front most of the time. I will likely drill some holes in the front to attach my holder to for when I'm alone.

The folks on here fixing up old boats to look like new is awesome and makes me think about buying another one in the future just to have a project.

[Crestliner08]

Very nice set-up! I especially like the rod holders. What did you make them out of? Is that a section of large PVC soil pipe? What did you make the bracket out of to support those? Thanks!

[prchjerker]

My only concern is with your trolling motor bracket.Looking at the way you cut the 2x6 Im afraid you could break the grain under much of a load.Might want to opt for a piece of good oak or plate metal to avoid losing a trolling motor. Otherwise nice set up.PJ

[haus]

Prch, thanks for the advice. That is a peice of treated 2X12 I cut down to size. The angle on the tubing staggered the lag bolts to keep them from all being in-line. I think I'll attach a piece of safety rope just in case now that you mention it. These boats have very little draft so it shouln't take much to move it around.

crestliner, I found a setup I liked on the internet. Here is the link to this guys setup. Homemade Rod Holders for Boat I wanted something that could be removed without leaving a bunch of holes in my fiberglass. I found another setup where they used 3/8" rod and pipe hangers that you can buy at Lowes. So what you see is 4" schedule 40 coupling, a section of 3/8" rod, 1/2" pipe hanger(bracket), and 1" square tubing. The bottom 1/2" pipe and tubing are all fully welded. One thing I do not like is on the pipe hanger it has phillips head screws to tighten it to the pipe. I took my bracket with me into the local farm store and replaced the original screws with ones that use an allen wrench instead. This should prevent stripping of the screw when adjusting and actually allow for a tighter fit. The rod holes are 1 1/4" but I'm probably going to enlarge the bottom hole to a larger size to allow me to grab it out of the holder faster. I used my grinder to round off the edges on the PVC and shape it the way I wanted.