Then the Minn Kota started getting loopy again. We had to keep restarting it, waiting for it to home in to GPS, waiting for it to figure out it needed more throttle to get to 2.0 mph. By then the 6 lines would be tangled and we had to pull everything in, untangle, cut line, re-tie swivels, re-deploy. And then the Minn Kota would malfunction again. I thought the LiFePO4’s would fix that problem, but no.
We gave up on the Minn Kota after an hour of tangle after tangle. Switched to manual steering the Yamaha 50 – which means tangles – and lines wrapped around the prop. One line broke, losing a bandit and a planer board which disappeared.
Yet it was pretty cool that many times, we were pulling in a tangled line by hand and there would be a fish on it.
Once, my daughter was reeling in a tangled line and it surprised us with a fish – but it also had snagged another line. But it wasn’t one of our six lines. It had snagged the line we previously broke an hour ago. And it still had the bandit on it. And a fish was on that bandit. So she reeled in two fish on two lures at one time with one pole. We netted them together.
Another time, we were all tangled around the prop. We stopped and unwrapped our line only to find another line around the prop too. Pulled it in by hand and sure enough there is another of our lost lines, and it also had a fish on it. Another lure recovered.
I could do without the constant tangles but they did keep us busy. We called it a day with two limits of walleye – half over 20″ – and 9 tasty drum, 1 cat and 1 striped bass. No shorts.