Wisconsin Tacomas and bad financial advice

I've only had to use one a couple times. What was that part about patience?.!
I still keep it close by. Ya never know.

 

After work today I needed to chill out so I went down to the local park pond to see if I could get a couple trout. Fished for an hour and the only bite I had I landed. Unfortunately it was a large painted turtle. He was hooked in the side of the upper lip and was having nothing of me trying to get my hook remover pliers anywhere near his mouth. I snipped the line and just have to hope he works it out.

I felt bad since the tattoo my daughter and I got last week together for her 18th birthday is a sea turtle.

Moved down the shore a bit and first cast I see a little turtle nose on the surface of the water motoring towards my line. Come on guys!

 

I've had occasions where I went catfishing and had a turtle find my setup. I swear they'll just go from one line to the next stealing your bait on one while you replace the bait they just stole from the other. I concluded years ago, when I used to chase Flatheads, that once a turtle finds your setup, you might as well pack up and go home.

Here's a hissy Softshell Turtle that kept stealing my catfish bait on the Chippewa River one day in 2018.



Any chance the sea turtle tattoos are of a Loggerhead? They've been known to mess with my bait as well.

 

Did the turtle come over and say take out you hook?

 

Haha! The Softshell Turtle was definitely angry.

The Loggerhead was an incredible wrestling match. It took 20-30 minutes on my heavy shark setup to get it boatside. Unfortunately I was unable to get the hook out of it. It was probably 250-300#.

 

Never hooked a turtle. Have caught a seagull... thats an adventure. A friend and I were swimming up at Long Lake with our girls and he spotted a small painted turtle. Chased it around and actually caught the thing. Not my kind of fun. Fun to watch though.

 

I fish around them but like I said, around them.
I haven't hooked onto one since I was a kid but I don't use bait that sits in one spot.... Not that they won't chase jigheads because trust me they will chase.

As far as the stuck hooks go, those mofo's are resilient buggers. That hook will find its way out or that turtle will be rocking some sweet bling!

 

I caught a seagull once. We were fishing off the breakwall piers in Sheboygan. Seagull got caught in my line while casting. I reeled it in to untangle it. What a mistake. Soon every gull in Sheboygan was circling overhead.

 

Sounds like a fiasco!

I had a pelican get hung up in my line in Florida, fishing Bookelia pier. I didn't know what to do. Some guy said "reel it in" so I did. The guy just wrapped his arm around the bird and un-tangled it, and released it like it was nothing. I was pretty impressed!

 

Sounds like a fiasco in our skies, right now, with the Navy Blue Angels preparing for tomorrow's show.

(different species of bird)

There's also CountryFest and BlueOx going on this weekend.

 

Back in black. Took a while but the shocks are all new (inside-shafts and seals etc). Riley at Locked was good to work with. Said it was road damage from not having boots and therefore not a warranty issue. Covered it anyway. How ever gave out the thin rubber mats I used one to make half boots- I don’t want water staying in there and I like to see when they start leaking

 

Funny,I’ve used the factory jack a couple times and was thinking about making a purpose built attachment for the drill so I can spool it out quicker. But then I thought that I most certainly have German machinist DNA hidden somewhere in my genome, and I know it aggressively asserts itself whenever I try to make something.

Knowing that I’ve seen that movie before, I firmly told my inner Karl, “Nein!”. It just wasn’t worth the time or trouble. As it stands, I’d have to fully unscrew the jack 158 times to recoup the time I spent thinking about whether or not I should make an attachment.

 

So for various usage reasons I’ve decided to carry my traction boards width-wise on my roof rack. In fact, I made the width of the rack exactly the width needed to capture the boards side-to-side. For a while now I’ve just used velcro straps to tie them down.

The velcro holds them down just fine, but the last time I used them was on a sub-zero day to get a Kia unstuck from an unplowed parking lot. It took me a few gloveless minutes to get them off because fingers don’t work in the cold, and the velcro was frozen. By the time they were off I’d my hands were wrecked.

I’ve been listening to Karls ideas for a while on how to mount them in a way that they can easily be removed from one side of the vehicle using the least amount of steps. So I created a crossmember “gate” that is hinged on one side to a tab on the roof rack, and holds down the boards with tabs that slide over strategic areas over the boards to pin them down. The gate is held down by a pin/hinge on one side, and a bolt that goes onto a tab with a welded on nut on the other side.

I’m not quite done yet with the tabs needed for the the back of the boards, but the idea is to undo one bolt, rotate the gate forward, and slide the boards out at an angle. One bolt using one hand is all that needs to be undone to remove them.



So in all, it’s fabricated using 12 parts, and 14 bolt/nuts. It probably costs more to make than the overpriced commercially available traction board bolt down kits. All so I can take them off using one hand-turned bolt. Wise use of financial resources and time? You be the judge lol.

If you look closely, I used an ajustable foot for table legs as my tie down bolt. I did that to mess with Karl!

 

How hard would it be to replace the bolt with a quick release gadget?

 

Can confirm. My 80 has one that still works after 30 years, no leaks.

 

Zip it Karl!!!

 

WTF is Karl????

 

Drat! You caught on to my evil plot!