workinprogress
10-11-2007, 04:16 PM
I am a vegetable farmer living in southwest Florida about 30 miles from some of the best backwater fishing around. I can leave my house and have the boat in the water in the 10,000 islands area in less than 45 minutes. Neither my occupation or my location have been the cause of my sudden interest in fishing. The most important thing I am is a father to 2 boys. Noah is only 4 months old, and Austin will be 4yrs old later this month. I am 32 years old and have never had much of an interest in fishing until a few months ago. Austin was listening to some of my buddies talking about fishing when he looked at me and said, "Dad, I think it is about time you teach me how to fish." If that's not motivation, I don't know what is. Within a week I had purchased a CS j14 and over the course of a few more weeks my son and I outfitted it to our liking. It has a large front deck with swivel pedastal seat, rear bench, storage seat turned lengthwise in the middle, (this provides good seating for Austin with low center of gravity in the boat facing the side for easy fishing) and a Yamaha 25hp tiller steer motor. I'm a cautious, common sense kind of guy, and I have been around boating a little, but I took a boater's safety course to familiarize myself with all of the rules regarding channel markings, right of ways, etc... I really like a lot of the features of the j14, but didn't realize until I used it quite a bit I wanted to do several things differently in setting up a boat. When I fish with my son, we typically fish local lakes with minimal traffic. The one that always seems to yield fish is a 200 or so acre lake on a farm I rent. I dug a ramp into the lake (actually an abandoned rock pit) with a track hoe, but there is no place to tie a boat off. I'm sure you can imagine the challenge of launching and reloading a boat by yourself without the benefit of somewhere to tie off the boat. To reload, I have to tie a rope (40 ft) from the boat to the trailer, shove the boat in the water, jump in the truck and back the trailer into the water, and finally drag the boat to the trailer with the rope. This eliminates the possibility of a boat any bigger than a j16, which is about the size I want for the other places I would like to fish anyway. I don't particularly like the tiller steer setup, and I need more floor space. My floorspace is always taken up with coolers and portable livewells, leaving little space to move around. Here is my list of things I want to incorporate in the setup:
1) Center console steering with seat on front of console
2) Same front deck setup as on j14
3) Incorporate cooler/s and livewell/s into the layout to minimize need to fill up leftover floorspace
I am looking forward to gaining a lot of insight into exactly what works and what doesn't in regards to rigging a j16 from people who have "been there and done that".
1) Center console steering with seat on front of console
2) Same front deck setup as on j14
3) Incorporate cooler/s and livewell/s into the layout to minimize need to fill up leftover floorspace
I am looking forward to gaining a lot of insight into exactly what works and what doesn't in regards to rigging a j16 from people who have "been there and done that".