How Do You Treat Your Bass Rig?

One would suspect the answer to that question lies somewhere between "with kid gloves" and "like a piece of crap."

Read an item by veteran outdoor writer Pete Robbins the other day, in which he opined that while avid anglers are willing to pay increasingly large sums of money to own top-of-the-line bass boats, many tend to treat them like crap.

As he noted, "We fly through big, fiberglass-cracking waves, we navigate through log jams to get to out-of-the-way spots, and we fail to do routine maintenance that will save us future headaches. If you have a bass boat, along with a warranty, an insurance policy, and a wallet, there's a pretty good chance you will use all of  them at some point during your ownership," he said.

Of course, not all bass-boat breakdowns and other problems are due to aggressive driving. Some are pure and clean operator errors that easily could have been avoided.

Said Robbins, "During my 25 years of boat ownership and tournament angling, I've been guilty of a few. I've tried to launch the boat with rear tie-downs still attached. I've also made it five miles up the road from the house before a passing driver helped me understand that I'd been trailing 50 feet of orange extension cord the whole way."

Robbins also described a friend who once had a bout of consistent motor troubles. As soon as he got his boat back from the mechanic, he headed straight to a tournament, where things just got worse. While trying to idle to his next spot, the boat wouldn't steer correctly or trim down. The friend ended up fishing near the ramp for most of the morning. Intermittently, he would start up the motor to see if he could figure out what was wrong. Eventually, he remembered that, in his haste to launch, he'd forgotten to remove the motor toter.

At the same tournament, another friend had an up-close-and-personal issue with the trolling motor on his boat. Wasn't anything mechanical...it worked well all day. But as he was waiting for his partner to back the trailer down the ramp to recover the boat, a quick-moving thunderstorm, with some nasty lightning, hit. As he accidentally kneeled on the trolling-motor pedal to hook up the winch strap, the propeller spun and cut his hand, forcing a trip to the emergency room.

As Robbins noted, "Not all accidents are avoidable, but what I've found is that by slowing down, we tend to minimize those that are. In each of the examples above, the person was in a hurry. A few extra seconds of care could have eliminated a trip to the ER, a destroyed motor toter, or a ruined extension cord.

"Whether we want to admit it or not, speed is one of the things that we like about our boats," continued Robbins. "Heading down the lake at 60 mph is exhilarating, but passing someone at 70 mph is near-orgasmic. However, before hitting the water, or once you're off the water, it pays to slow down and control the variables that are most controllable. It may even save your bacon in the long run, or at least a lot of aggravation."