First day on open water - Lake Newell

[nicemustang]

Well we made it out yesterday to Lake Newell. No ice on the lake at all, launch is clear and in perfect condition (no dock yet). Not many people on the water. It was gorgeous out yesterday, nice temps and hardly any wind.

Fishing wsa slow. We had trouble finding anything that looked like fish on the finder. But the goal was to get the boat in the water and test out the newly installed trolling motor and HDS 5. Everything is good so that's all that matters :)

Caught a very nice sun tan and 2 medium pike. Couple others that were out there were having about the lake luck as us, not a lot of fish. Lake seemed to be in turnover, so it will take a week or so to get back to normal. Nice weather though and this shouldn't take long. Water temp was 40 in the am, 43 in the afternoon.

[gramps73]

sounds like a good day had by all, with the up and coming warm weather the fishing should turn on sooner the late...

[WalleyeDeitz]

Hey Stang, good to hear you got out already. I am just in the process of buying a new Lund in Red Deer. It comes with the cheapest Humminbird 160 sonar....cant believe they would put that unit on a new boat. Anyways I was at Bass Pro yesterday eyeing up the Lowrance HDS5x ($780). Perhaps there was an HDS 5 without the x but Im not sure. Wondering what you think of it, where you pikced it up and what it cost? Did you also purchase the mapping program? I looked up the list of lakes and Crawling Valley was not on it, but never checked for Newell. Also can you comment on how difficult the installation would be on that unit? The dealership is telling me I would not be able to do it myself and I cannot figure out why they would make that comment. Looking at the unit I think you can hook it into fuel gauges etc as well, perhaps thats what they meant. What you think of the HDS 5? Is the GPS feature handy?

Thanks a bunch in advance for your response.

Regards,

[npauls]

hey walleye the hds units are pretty easy to install. I am not a handy man at all and wired my hds8 in to my new to me rig just fine. the hardest part will be mounting the transducer in the proper position. If you follow the mounting directions that come in the box or on the lowrance website I can't see why you couldn't hard wire it in to the new rig in a couple hours at most.

Newel is not on the map chip and same with st.mary down here in the south. I also found sherburn (grassy) to not be on there either. The gps is very handy for mapping. All the lakes are shown on the internal lowrance map so it wont show the depth charts on the lakes but at newel and places that don't show up on the map chip you can still see the lake and punch in way points which can still be usefull later on down the road.


Congrats on the new boat. I picked mine up at the end of october and am now on the hunt for a used or new 75hp motor to finish it off.


Nate

[nicemustang]

Yes, very easy to install. I'm using the US2 sonar from my trolling motor so I didn't have to worry about that. You can hook it up to your guages but you will need some extra gear to have that installed to get it to work.

On the flip side, I have it connected to my battery through my fuse box. When I start my boat, the HDS 5 has to restart (too much power draw??). My other finder doesn't do that, so that's a little annoying. Have to try to figure that one out.