the icast vid is locking up and can`t be accessed, something about not being attached to the address. it`s not easy to get out of the lock up. just wait for your system to reject it and get out of it then. it took my system about 5 minutes to do this, totaly frozen until then.
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i went out for my first trip into the Bay of Fundy this year today, looking for some striper bait or food fish, preferably mackerel or polluck.i hooked up rigt off he bat, but it was a surprise - squid! i thankfully remembered the fishing bwestern Australia show where they showed you had to play them for a bit to get them to release all there ink in the water, instead of in the yak or all over me. they didn`t get me with the ink but i did get squirted with water a few times
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so how far have you taken your kayak for a walk? in either distance or time spent. most of the time it`s just a few feet or yards from your transport to the launch or landing, but sometimes you have to haul the yaks a little further. sometimes it`s a lot further...!

99% of the time i`m walking it less than 20yrds, often just the lenght of my car. i have over the years stretched it a lot further, doing a 250 yrd beeline through heavy bush - so heavy we could float our yaks along on top of the thick 5-7" trees, which would have made a good video. more recently for the last few years i`ve been taking it between two resevoirs, with a 400yrds up hill climb. today i went by far and away the farthest i have ever portaged. a crazy thing to do, since it was also onto a 660` higher plateau but i had lost the use of the hybrid the guys from the other camp lent me due to some yokels messing with it. besides fishing that spot, i also hope/plan to follow it up next week with a major run and group of portages, down and through from upstream those same resevoirs. that trip will be about 32kms. today i got it all started by doing a 4.5km portage. ....i had to carry the gear and the yak seperate - couldn`t quite carry it all, even though i took in a light yak. so i ended up leapfrogging the kayak and gear all the way there. this ment the kayak went 4.5kms but i walked 3 times that getting it all in. thankfully i landed a nice trout in the first 5 minutes, then nothing for a couple hours when they turned on just before dark. i finished the trek off by walking back out, leaving the kayak and most of the gear there. i`ll be back a few times this week, too take it for a fish and a paddle, and leave out the taking it for a walk. for a little while anyway.

i must be crazy!
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over the years i have noticed that one of the best places for the fish to hide, is right under my kayak. it helps i`m sure that mine is a wooden yak, with a clear natural finish, but i`m sure it`s more important to present the yak as natural structure. queitly. slowly. take your time.

when fishing chain pickerel, between follow in`s and releasing caught fish, i often have a school of these toothy preditors hanging around under my kayak. today i saw the posibility of doing the same with brook trout. the stream mouth was flooded, with water well up into the alders and covering the marsh grass. but i`ve been there before - lots, including a couple times in the last week, and i studied where the main channel is, where the structures are, and where the bank is undercut. so today, after landing a couple and the bite turned off, i went trout hunting where the channel and the alders meet.
i snuck in slowly, just a flip cast or two, then move 20 feet, and repeat. i slid across the grass of an oxbow and let the yak drift up to the edge, letting it peek out just a little into the channel. i worked a spinner and worm right at the yak first then a short cast away. landing a nice one, i then let it quiet down. put on more worm. watched the flying raptors working the area around me. then i flipped the spinner the other direction. let it sit. then pulled in another. flipped the spinner up stream, really close to the yak. light flicks of the line let me just pop it off the bottom and drift with the current. flick. flick. pause. land another one - time to start c&r, i`m just one short of my limit. another flip cast, worked the same way. another trout c&r. and another. all from underneath my yak! i started pulling it away if i thought they were to small, i didn`t want to hook damage them. finnaly i moved on...and did the same thing again, finnaly hooking one badly enough to keep, then went after yellow perch to end the evening.

it just goes to show, one of the best places to fish is in...and under a kayak!
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because i go for my bigger fish at night, and it`s in nasty structure with rocks and posts and steel, i`m fairly carefull how heavy a line i will run. a few close calls has also pointed out a need to watch this for me. untill last year i had settled on 20-25lb mono or copolamar as my maximum. this was arrived at by finding what test line i could break off in the kayak. even at that strength, plan to cut it, it`s quite hard to break off more than 17lb from in a yak safely. i did find a way to break off 20-25lb by rocking the kayak with the line held tight to the side of the yak, but this is the upper limit. also, this is under the worst conditions - wind, waves, current & rocks at night...in the fog, with debris coming down stream.... you get the idea.

so last year, i started using up to 30lb sometimes. it made me nervous! lol! the reason for it was i broke a reel and replaced it with my smallest surf reel, which was spooled up with 30lb copolomar. it has a good drag, or i would not have used it, but the much larger line capacity came to play that first night, with a striper taking me for a long sleigh ride, pausing to sound as it came to deeper water each time. he would have spooled me if i had not been using that reel, with an extra 150yrds of line. landing that striper was awesome, a 36" fatty, but i still think i`ll switch out that line for 20 or 25lb test, just to be safe, and save the 30lb for other fishing methods.

soooo, how big is your line...?
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as kayak anglers we often look for a challenge, some can be harder on gear than others . so for fun, tell us some stories of how a rod, reel net, or even kayak was broken while kayak fishing or just fishing.

i have broken rods and reels etc. on a number of species, including salmon, but i do it by far most often striped bass fishing. they hit so hard or go zooming off so fast and strongly they snap the anti-reverse pin or burn out the drag . salt water doesn`t help of course lol

i don`t completely break the rod that often kayak fishing stripers, mostly because i use ugly sticks only for this now . stripers have their ways though... this summer i got mugged by a striper, i might have the story here some where. he caught me by surprise while i was trying to untangle two rods whose reels had decided to eat each others line. and i wasn`t thinking about that trout pattern magnum bomber i still had floating out there on one of those tangled lines, looking all wounded and innocent.... this monster striper nailed it, smacking me in the head with the two rods i was working on, i grabbed the middle of the rods as they exited the kayak blind since i had the other lure on my nose...and it trashed the rod against the kayak so hard it smashed the rings from two of the eyelets . getting that lure off my face and attempting to land that fish were my first two priorities. the lure turned out to be no problem, just a couple little marks, it`s handy sometimes to have a big nose . as for landing the fish, he was the probabaley the biggest striper i hooked into this past year and he got off while i was trying to hand line him from the kayak. i didn`t notice the damage until i used that rod again and it was peeling shavings off of the striper line like spagettie.

that one taught me to strongly secure the rods even while working on the lines, lol!

and then there was the time i donated my folding kayak net reaching for a sea run brook trout...

so, what did the fish do to your gear?
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does any body know of any web/net based kayak tournies out there? any that are set up yet for 2012?
i was in one last year but never found out about it until june, so i would like to get in at the beginnings this year.

i expect the cka (canadian kayak anglers) will have one again this year but that`s only for canada, it would be nice to be in an international one again.
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