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Hi gang, Rick Ostler here from used Pontoon Boats with news and views from the boating industry. Looney Tunes drew a lot of disbelieving looks this spring when Joe Raymer first started using it as a charter boat for walleye and bass. You don't see many pontoon boats on Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River, where they are looked on as suited only for little inland lakes.
It's Not a Pontoon - It's a Tri-Toon
"Don't call it a pontoon. It's a TriToon," Raymer said on a sunny Friday morning as he headed the 24-foot boat down the Detroit River at about 25 miles an hour. "It has a third hull forward, and that lets me lift the bow out of the water. You can't do that with a pontoon boat. It's just a barge."
He shut the engine down just upstream from the Canadian side of the Ambassador Bridge and started a slow drift down the river with the big saltwater trolling motor on the bow neutralizing most of the current's flow.
Fishing the Canadian side of Lake St. Clair
"If you'll notice, 90% of the boats out here are fishing the Canadian side. That's because that's where all the fish are. Some people don't like to buy a Canadian license, but that's what you have to do if you want to fish where the fish are."
Walleye fishing on Lake St. Clair
The sun was still low on the horizon when Raymer got the first walleye a couple of minutes after starting the drift. A few minutes later, Dan Ouellette of Macomb Township boated one at the back of the boat, where he and longtime fishing buddy Steve Morse of Warren were contentedly heckling each other. "Sometimes, I'd like to forget how I met him," Morse said as Ouellette rubbed it in.
At the bow of the boat, another of their longtime fishing friends, Joe Mudel of Warren, said, "I'm amazed those guys haven't been divorced by now." Added Raymer, "You listen to them and you know why I don't have kids."
Fishing the Detroit River
For fishing the Detroit River, Raymer uses conventional ball jigheads in various colors and a rubber tail called a Finesse Minnow (he buys the Ontario-made lure at Lakeside Fishing Shop in St. Clair Shores). The most successful color usually is a combination of root beer and gold, and in the water it looks a lot like the Wyandotte worm that has a huge following among Detroit River anglers.
"The Finesse Minnow has been great," he said. "We used to have to order them from Canada, but now we can get them here. They last a lot longer than most of the other (rubber) baits."
He also rigs each jig with a free-swinging stinger hook off the main hook, and on this day all nine of the walleyes we caught in four hours were on the stingers. Most of the dozen smallmouth bass we caught and released took the main jig hook.
Great Fishing on Canadian side of Lake St. Clair
We did several drifts along the Canadian side from the bridge down past some big piles of sand and gravel, picking up one to three walleyes each time along with smallmouths, white bass and white perch. A couple of the latter were so big they must have been white bass-white perch hybrids, which are increasing in number.
Raymer, who lives in Standish, bought Looney Tunes five years ago to fish on Saginaw Bay. He rigged the boat with a 115 horsepower Evinrude outboard engine and three electric motors -- two in nacelles fastened on either side of the outboard's lower unit, the third a bow mounted Minn-Kota saltwater trolling motor with a 62-inch shaft to accommodate the TriToon's high freeboard.
"I wasn't sure the single trolling motor forward would handle the current in the Detroit River, but it's been perfect," he said. "I've had this thing doing 4 m.p.h. into the current with just the bow motor. I'll use the two rear motors to move around when I started fishing Saginaw Bay in June. That should save a lot on gas."
Pontoon Boats are great for Charter Fishing
The big bow and stern decks are excellent fishing platforms, and the closed-in cockpit area offers protection from cold weather and summer sunshine. While this day was nearly windless -- too nice for walleye fishing -- the boat easily handled two-foot wakes thrown by freighters and passing pleasure craft.
Next week Raymer plans to move his boat to Saginaw Bay, where the walleye fishing has been fantastic for the past couple of years and where it stays strong in the summer when the Detroit-area bite starts to cool down.
Thanks to ERIC SHARP at 313-222-2511 or esharp@freepress.com for this. Raymer can be reached at 989-846-4865.
Used Pontoon Boats, By Rick Ostler
Pontoon Enclosures-North American Waterway
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USA Fisherman, for your convenience.....scroll down to bottom of article where you can obtain your Canadian Boat Operators card to fishing in Canadian waters.
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