January isn’t the greatest month to be fishing or hunting in the Carolinas. It’s a little early for good bass and crappie fishing, and deer season has either ended or it’s been going on so long, you’re almost tired of hunting.The real season that opens in January and lasts about a month is boat- or fishing-show season, where thousands of fishermen flock to big coliseums and exhibition halls that are, at least for a weekend, filled with every kind of fishing tackle you can imagine — plus boats.
What you take away from the show season depends on what your interests are, but your needs can be served if you’re a weekend recreational fisherman — or a person who might be ready to try and become a professional angler. And it’s a good time for guys to look for good deals on boats and tackle.
If you’re boat shopping, boat shows can be a great service. You’ll never have a better chance to look at all the options available. If you were to do it another time of year, you’d be driving from site A to site B and then to site C and back to A. At a boat show, if you give yourself plenty of time, you can see all the options in a day.
I think you have to go to a boat show with an idea of what you want, but with an open mind. It’s a great opportunity, a great opportunity to do a lot of research in a single weekend and find the boat that will best serve your wants, your needs, your budget — and what your wife says you can have.
I convinced my wife a long time ago that I needed two boats, but some people aren’t that fortunate. The choice you may have to make might be between a fishing boat and a fish-and-ski. The average bass fisherman wants a boat that rides good in rough water and runs 100 miles an hour. His wife wants something where she can be in the shade or the sun.
So a guy who goes to a show looking for an 80-mph bass boat may wind up with a pontoon. But you it comes down to what you can afford and what’s practical for you. And of course, after you give yourself plenty of time and weigh all the factors, I know you’re going to wind up buying a Triton like mine. Aha-ha.
If you’re not in the market for a new boat, January is a great time to do some maintenance on the boat you already have. One of the first things I think about are batteries. You may not have used them, but you can remember you were losing some power on your trolling motor, or maybe your depth-finder when you fished back earlier in the fall.
January is a great time to check whether or not your batteries just need some water, or whether you need some new batteries to get the best performance out of your boat.
I check the oil in my lower unit. I don’t want to see any water. Most people won’t check it more than every four or five years, but it needs to be checked every year, and the winter is a great time.
And here’s one really good tip: clean out your boat — all the storage boxes, rod boxes … everything.
It’s amazing how much tackle one can accumulate. You may have so many bags of soft-plastic baits in your boat; you’re slowing it down, hurting its performance. You carry a couple hundred pound of plastic baits in your storage boxes — especially if you don’t realize they’re there — and your boat’s performance suffers.
Take the time to take all the tackle out of your boat and consolidate it. It’s January; you know what kinds of baits you’re going to fish in the spring, and keep them in the boat.
But you know those 11-inch worms you’re going to use during night tournaments at Lake Murray in July? You don’t need to have those in your boat for several months.
I realized when I cleaned my boat out this year to trade it in, that I had two duffle bags of plastics in there I didn’t realize I had. That’s a couple of hundred pounds of extra weight that can keep the boat from peak performance.
The other reason a good cleaning and organizing of your tackle can do is give you an idea of what you might be in the market for when you hit the floor at the fishing show. You might think you need three or four bags of a certain kind of lizard, but when you clean your boat out, you might find 20 bags of them you didn’t know you had. Or, you might find you’re really missing a couple of colors you thought you had.
It’s sure better to find that out in January than it is in April when you need that crawfish-colored spider jig you thought you had.
So get ready for boat-show season by getting your boat ready for fishing season, then spend some quality time at the shows, listening to the seminars given by guides or professional fishermen.
And walk those aisles, looking for the best deal you can get on those lizards you need — or on that Triton I told you about.
Davy Hite is a 40-year-old native of Saluda, S.C., who now resides in Ninety Six, S.C. He has fished professionally since 1993, when he qualified for his first Bassmasters Classic. He was the BASS Angler of the Year in 1997 and 2002, and he has won the 1999 Bassmasters Classic and the 1998 FLW Tour Championship. He is sponsored by Triton boats, Evinrude outboards, All-Star rods, Pfleuger reels, Pure Fishing (Berkeley), Owner hooks and Solar-Bat sunglasses.
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