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Morning clouds will give way to afternoon sunshine. High 51F. Winds WSW at 10 to 20 mph..

A clear sky. Low near 35F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph.

Side-imaging can show you things you’d never suspect, like this railcar on its side in Pere Marquette Lake.

Brian Mulherin | Daily News photos

Rodholders commonly called “rocket-launchers” or “trees” can get your rods out of the way and make your planer boards behave.

Side-imaging can show you things you’d never suspect, like this railcar on its side in Pere Marquette Lake.

Brian Mulherin | Daily News photos

Rodholders commonly called “rocket-launchers” or “trees” can get your rods out of the way and make your planer boards behave.

It’s said that a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into.

I can’t argue with that.

Although my 17-foot Lund isn’t as up-to-date as many, I do tend to try to keep up with the times when it comes to electronics.

Being a mid-sized boat, it can run into two feet of water for casting or — on a flat day — can run out to 500 feet of water for steelhead (when there are steelhead). That has meant drilling some holes to make some changes over the years. What follows are some ideas for making your boat more suitable to your needs.

It’s easy to see the usefulness of this upgrade. Spot-Lock, the Minn Kota trade name for holding in place with your electric motor, makes life much, much easier, especially for panfishing and perch fishing in light winds. Even in heavier winds, it can be preferable to dealing with anchor ropes.

The technology just uses GPS to keep you in roughly the same spot by turning and thrusting your bow-mount motor.

If a bow-mount motor isn’t for your boat, maybe you are tired of handling anchor ropes? An electric winch can be a real time-and-labor-saver. My boat came rigged for one and I have enjoyed using it over the years. However, there was that one time when we hooked some kind of trash in Pentwater’s harbor and lost an anchor. So use some caution with these – or stick to mushroom anchors that are less likely to snag than heavy fluke anchors.

Some people try side-imaging and don’t care for it. I didn’t think the first generation of it was that special. It was cool to find that railcar on the bottom of Pere Marquette Lake over near Starport Marina, but it didn’t really help my fishing. However, the subsequent generations of side-imaging are great for finding weeds, baitfish and even predator fish.

My legal muskie in 2020 was located with SI while trolling. I went back to the area casting in the evening and hooked up.

As we head into the spring walleye trolling season, SI is a great way to follow contours and emerging weedlines.

Map cards were a revelation, but autochart is revolutionary. To be able to show up at a lake and take a quick lap and have your own charts generated on your graph is so, so game-changing. We’ve all seen map cards that were off or not up-to-date. With Autochart, you simply plug in the card and drive and your sonar unit does the rest.

There are some kinks to be worked out of the system, though. It would be nice if the card detected you’re making a move and stopped recording when you take the boat up to 30 mph. Or, as the operator, you could try harder to remember to shut it off before you make a run.

I think this technology, paired with side imaging, really gives you a chance to go out and find “the spot on the spot” for panfish, perch and walleyes on any given body of water.

I do not own a Panoptix unit. I just don’t have that kind of a fishing budget right now. But if you have $1,500 burning a hole in your pocket, you can learn a lot about fish behavior in a hurry. The shortfall of traditional down-facing sonar is that it has a cone and things outside of that cone or on the edges of that cone get distorted. This leads us to believe things that aren’t really true – like the fish swimming away under you on the ice is swimming to bottom and then leaving. In reality, fish maintain the same depth much more often, it’s just that our sonars draw them rising as they come in and descending as they leave – that’s just what that cone does.

At the Mark Martin Ice Fishing Vacation Schools, we were able to verify with cameras and a couple of Panoptix units that the walleyes who swim off are really not leaving at all, they’re circling around your bait and preparing to come at it from another angle.

You can have theories and hunches about what fish are doing, but with this technology, you can actually watch them in real time. It feels like cheating and maybe it is? But it’s definitely expanding our knowledge base about fish behavior.

One of the great things about YouTube is that you can see how other people have their boats set up and something you notice really quick if you watch any kind of professionals who are casting all day — they all have anti-fatigue floormats in their boats. Most of these are just Harbor Freight or Tractor Supply mats, but some have taken the opportunity to add a permanent anti-fatigue product to their boats.

One problem with the mats that have all the half-dollar-size holes in them is that they are tough to clean – salmon fishing messes come to mind. That’s why a product like ProTech or SeaDek might be a good addition to the back deck of your trolling boat. You can spray it clean.

Track systems are not new, but they have gained wide acceptance over the last decade. They give you the ability to move rodholders and other accessories around as your needs change or as your mood suits you. Got a big fish you can’t land off the stern? Get that rodholder out of the way. Although aluminum track systems aren’t cheap, they mean that you’re only drilling holes in your boat once, instead of every few years. With the track systems have come many innovations in rodholders. You can buy them to adjust in just about any direction these days. Accessories like net holders, cupholders, trays and even racks for your in-line planer boards are available.

Although downrigger fishing saw a resurgence with the lake trout boom, having room to put out all your lines is still key to success, whether you’re on Lake Michigan or trying for walleyes on an inland lake. The vertically aligned triple rod-holders known as “trees” or “rocket launchers” are a fantastic addition to any boat that is going to be dedicated to trolling. With the newer models, you can adjust each rod individually on the mast.

When I think of trolling for brown trout or trolling for walleyes, I think of these rodholders. They keep all of those lines organized and make the boards less likely to get out of line in choppy water.

Salmon trolling in a small boat can be a mess if you don’t have a place to put all the rods when you’re running out. These aren’t a big expense, but simple ABS rod racks mounted in the right spot in your boat will make your life so much easier. When I think about the months it took me to finally pull the trigger on these, I wonder what the holdup was. Well, I know what it was, it was that I didn’t want to put holes in my boat – but these are drill holes I have never regretted.

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