On Tuesday, April 24th, Dad, Jay and I went to Sodus Bay to pick up the new boat.  After taking care of the paperwork and fueling up ($$$...ouch!!), we ran it the hour or so back to Fair Haven.  The lake was rolling at 2-3', but this new boat hardly even takes notice of waves that size.  It was a very comfortable ride, and the trip went off without a hitch.



We spent the next several hours getting the boat settled into its new home.  It got new dock lines, snubbers, fenders, etc.  It takes a lot of time to put the eye splices and back splices into the dock lines.  I sure am glad we had Dad along, as he's the best at splicing dock lines!  Thanks Dad.  I spent quite a bit of time bringing all the rods & reels and tackle down from the camper to the boat.  It's amazing to to me just how much stuff was on the original Billy V.  It was equally amazing to me just how much room there is on this new boat for all of that stuff.  I put it all away with plenty of room to spare.  Guess we'll just have to get more tackle!  I snapped a couple of pictures of the boat at rest in its new slip:





Here's a couple of pics of the interior:





After all that work, we felt it was our obligation to take the new ride out for a brief shakedown fishing trip.  How could we not go fishing with this beauty??  We didn't have the lines set up for more than 5 minutes when we took our first fish.  With our first fish in the boat, we could relax and enjoy the rest of the trip.  We spent probably 90 minutes out trolling around trying to learn the new electronics, and so on.  We managed to boat four really great browns, and lost another at the back of the boat.  The fish were taking Dave's KA-BOOM shiners in black/silver and firetiger patterns fished off of planer boards.  We were running 175' leads off the boards.  Water depths ranged from 8-15 FOW.  We also took fish on an orange bleeding belly R&R spoon that we were fishing 75' back and 7'  down on our downriggers.  Water color was less stained than it's been, but was still brown & green and very fishy looking.  We found water temps ranging from 47-53 degrees.  Best trolling speed was 2.3-2.5mph on the Fish Hawk.



Dad with a gorgeous 7Lb brownie.



Jay with a nice 5lb chunk that took a KA-BOOM shiner.  All fish were released.

I'd say that today was a total success.  We came home happy but very tired.  We're all looking forward to our next opportunity to fish on the Billy V II! 

I owe a big THANK YOU to Dad and Jay for all their hard work and help today.  None of this would've been possible without them.  Thanks guys.  I couldn't ask for better crew members.