Fishin'

One of many approaches to Hobo ReelsIs that a KIRKLAND Whiskey Bottle cork capping the bottom???

Rigged with hook, line and keeper

Alive without breath, as cold as death;

Never thirsty, always drinking;

Clad in mail, never clinking.

-- One of Gollum's riddles from The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein

I'm a-goin' fishin',

Yes I'm goin' fishin',

Baby goin' fishin' too!

-- From Fishin' Blues by Taj Mahal

Fishin'

I've got to say right off that I'm not a fool fer fishin'. In fact, if fish weren't an important part of our diet and livelihood, I'd never set a hook. Anke, on the other hand, you might say is 'avid'.

For me, I'm looking to maximize the efficiency and minimize the sport. To do as little harm as possible, both to those too small to keep and those whose life is taken for ours. To cultivate a spirit of humble gratitude for a fish's life. To console myself with the knowledge that they are fellow predators dancing in the web of life.

For many years, Anke and I have subsisted on smaller fish- rock cod, pink salmon, dolly varden (between a trout and salmon). Lacking refrigeration and unable to carry the weight of jarred fish, these are all we can eat while fresh. Now, however, we have the displacement and tools for jarring, and have our sights set on larger salmon, halibut and dogfish (a small shark).

But these still swim mostly in our future.

Our fishing rods and reels are accordingly very light. Usually the cheap-0 kid's reels. They live on deck, ready to hand, and last a few years. But they're seldom made for salt water and get cranky. And they tend to hang up on this and that at inopportune moments.

Recently, I stumbled across hobo reels! DIY, compact and effective.

Plastic container types offer near instant gratification and are very practical, since they take little or no modification and securely hold a lot of gear for any given size. Check out hobo reels made from PVC.

Wooden hobo reels - whether carved or turned on a lathe - are just plain beautiful. But first, a digression...

At a Renaissance Faire I was once enthralled by a fellow turning chair legs on a pole lathe. He used a living sapling bent over as a spring, sprung by depressing a foot plank. A line connecting the two turned around a pulley on the lathe, and as he worked the plank, spun the leg stock for shaping. 

Unfortunately, it was otherwise a more or less standard metal lathe and, they being generally large and heavy, I hung on to the pole idea but roundfiled the lathe.

Back to hobo reels... one of the vids shows a feller turning one on a home-made pole lathe! OOH... now we're talkin'. It was clear to see that I could dumb his full-feature lathe down to a mini lathe sized for the hobo reel. An hour of cobbling from materials on hand and this is the result:

Ever the Muse brings chaos in her wake!
A bungee has replaced the spring pole.

Stock is skewered between a fixed point (left) and an adjustable point (right).
Two turns around the stock and it rotates around the points.

Never having turned anything, I grabbed a rather funky piece of firewood to try it out. To my surprise, the result would have been a keeper if I'd used better material! On to HR2.0...

Go small, go simple, go fishin'!

My Spice Jar HR left
and Lathe-Turned HR right

*****

A few preliminary tips and tricks...

• I've found that a single hook (vs. a treble) at the end of a line is easy to stow. Lure and / or bobber can be loop tied (pass a bight of line through a hole and around the item to form a cow hitch) as desired. Hook can be set into holes drilled around the spool base, or stowed in storage cavities with its line pinned by the cap.
• Braided line (vs. monofilament) seems to work well, is much easier to handle and has enough friction for loop ties.
• Instead of carrying one or more bobbers, an eye-screw can attach any found bit of flotsam with enough buoyancy.
• For a bobber, consider a stick which can be thrown much farther than a typical bobber, hook and lure can be cast from a (rodless) hand reel.
• If using a container, consider one with a pronounced flare (like one end of a spool) toward the casting end. This helps lift clear of the wound line while casting, reducing friction.
• A throat gorge (spine of wood, bone or metal sharpened at both ends and attached from the middle) is far easier to improvise than a hook. A fish swallows the baited stick which then toggles sideways to set. Size for target fish.

Our go-to fishing sources:

Indian Fishing Methods by Hillary Stewart
Living Off the Sea by Charlie White


A Coupla good, how-to vids:

And check out this guy's Rodless Reel!

Bilgin' the Barge? Reflecting on the Pond

Princess Tuvstarr gazing down into the dark waters of the forest tarn
By John Bauer

Swim out of your little pond.
-- Rumi


Bilgin' the Barge?  Reflecting on the Pond

After the first day's sail aboard our first boat - a shoal, flattish bottomed life-boat conversion - we happily went about preparing a special meal for our first night at anchor.

To our consternation, some of our stores, stowed low and outboard, were mysteriously soaked! We checked the bilge under the floorboards and were relieved to see our customary few inches of water between lead ballast bricks (as low as we could pump it)... so we weren't sinking. Some fluke?

No further problems until the next time we went sailing. With the same, soggy result.

Turns out that, as we heeled, that little bit of water all ran to and piled up the low corner, climbing above the far end of our lowest shelves. Some water-tight storage boxes did the trick, but it left a bad taste.

*****

So this is a general problem for flat bottomed boats, especially those with no rocker amidships. Not only does all that flat skim of water add up when concentrated, but when upright there is no sump (a low point which concentrates water for efficient pumping).

But do we really need or want a (wet) bilge at all?

The purpose of the bilge is to collect and contain water that makes it inboard from outboard (seeping planks, say, or leaky through-hull fittings). Or oil spills from the engine.

But there are considerable downsides:

Basically, a sailor with a wet bilge is living above a pond of... well... bilgewater. A pond is always moisturizing its environs and contributes to that dank, musty smell that many think of as boaty. Mildew and 'dry' rot fungi love the humidity. Wooden boat frames tend to rot near the standing waterline of the bilge. Most bugs die of dehydration, but not if there's a pond handy.

Bilges themselves smell better, nowadays, than in the days when raw sewage was among the fluids, but a 'sweet smelling' bilge remains rare enough to be noteworthy.

In flat-bottomed boats, a bilge must be created by raising the sole (floor you walk on) by at least several inches. Another way of putting it is that you must lower any given headroom the same amount.

Traditional construction approaches are sufficient to achieve a dry bilge. As Larry Pardey put it, would you rather pump or sweep your bilge? It requires careful building and installations, with consistent, proactive maintenance. But doable.

With modern gap-filling adhesives and milled materials, we can achieve that high bar with much greater ease. With no more skill than is required to pull the trigger of a caulk gun and spread with a paddle, we too can achieve a truly watertight hull. And preserve precious headroom!

*****

In our boats, we go without a bilge. Generally, the inside of the hull is either the surface we walk upon, or against which we stow gear and goods.

This means, of course, that if salt-water gets in, you know it right away, and it's something to be dealt with pronto! As I've written, girder furnishings help contain any leak and localize any soaking.

In all these years, we've only had salt water intrusion twice. A new mooring ring sliced through two sets of line and chafe gear in a squall, and ZOON was blown onto a rock which ground a two foot hole through her side and bottom.

A wet bilge wouldn't have helped in this case.

SLACKTIDE drug two anchors while lying unattended in a squall and spent a happy few hours fracturing a couple spots in her bottom planking, which then seeped.

A wet bilge would have made life a bit easier, but then, we may never have fixed it by patching the inboard face? We're lazy that way.

*****

Once again, each of us finds the path that suits us. Some may prefer to pump, some to sweep. Some might hedge their bets with a dry bilge on standby. Others remember the adage, a leaky boat never sinks (yer always pumpin' her!).

Keeps it interesting!





P.S.... One nifty, fail-safer solution is to build a 'step' sharpie or barge - essentially a wide, hollow, keel that can serve as a bilge in an otherwise flat bottomed hull. It only need be deep enough to do the job.

The drawing below gives the general idea... I couldn't find a pic of one applied to a flat bottomed vessel.

Phil Bolger's BLONDIE HASLER