Lets see your Bowfishing Boats

Lund Alaskan 1600 with a plywood platform.  Did a little bit of changing from this picture from last year.  We put a bow mount trolling motor with copilot, went from six 500 watt flood lights to 4 and soon up to 5 just trying to figure out how to mount one to trolling motor so i can point it where i want.  We currently have one light on each side permantely attached and two lights on a telescoping pole that is on a sport trac bracket so it can be moved to either side and is up alittle higher.  Running a 3500watt champion generator and a 35 gallon drum for the dead ones and the pickup box is the offload sight when the barrel gets full.

Awesome topic! Please include your "home waters" with your pics.

Theres tons of awesome home made rigs in pensacola where instead of carp & other roughies, they go for flounder & sheepshead.  heres a link to one of the flounder gigging forums down there www.pensacolafishingforum.com/f32/ check it out lots of awesome boats set up just for this on there. went out in the intercoastal flats at night last year east of pensacola and it was a blast

16' Monarch with a 20 horse johnson. 55 LB bowmount troller. 4000w of Halagon Lt. powering the Absolute Carp slaughter fest! Love this ol girl. Home waters are now Bis area. Lets see more Rigs guys! I could talk bowfishing for hours and hours!

fowlattitude21 Said:


16' Monarch with a 20 horse johnson. 55 LB bowmount troller. 4000w of Halagon Lt. powering the Absolute Carp slaughter fest! Love this ol girl. Home waters are now Bis area. Lets see more Rigs guys! I could talk bowfishing for hours and hours!

Are you that guy from Wisconsin whom I saw down at the McClean bottoms a few weeks ago?   I was trying to bowfish from my kayak.  You have the ultimate bowfishing machine there.

how well do the halogen lights work, and where did you get them/price  havent decided what i want to use for lights and can you have too many? will get pics of mine on once done puting my turf on

The halogens work pretty well. They are no means Hps but they get the job done. I bought all mine at menards. You can have as many as your generator will allow you too. Did you finish your boat?

jmidjet- Yes im "the guy from WI" lol  and thanks a lot it really gets the job done! P.s. sorry about all the exremely late replys. Must have forgot to follow this topic.

Anymore Rigs out there? Wanting to put on a few tournements this year. Any interest around the Central part of the state?

a 500w halogen light will put out 10500 lumens (candle power), a 150 watt hps (high pressure sodium will put out 15000 lumens.  It makes sense to me to mount hps lights.  150 w hps flood lights on ebay for around $70 each.  My logic is that with say 6 150 w hps i would require 900 watts of power where as with 6- 500 watt halogen i would require 3000 watts of power,  keep in  mind that 6-500 watt lights would also require 25 amps at 120v service. most of the outlets on the generators are rated for 30 amps, you will be runniing your generator at full throttle (if it has voltage regulator).  With hps you can get a smaller quieter generator and have more light - smaller generator = cheaper and less gas.

This is a bit off the boat topic, but I recently saw something that a lot of us might use.  Lots of time I've been out walleye fishing and the wind died or walleyes quit or something, and there are tons of carp near the surface by the boat, and wished I had my bowfishing outfit.
It would be impractical to always carry a bowfishing outfit, too big and clunky, but my brother in law built a bowfishing rig out of a Wal Mart slingshot.  He installed stronger elastic, used a "whisperbiscuit" for an arrowholder mounted in the 'V', and shoots fish arrows with it.  It'll drive right through a carp like a bowshot arrow. Also mounted an old reel on the bottome of the handle.
The best thing about this is that its small and stows in any side pocket of the boat, and is always there if the opportunity comes up to use it.  He showed me a bunch of U-Tube clips about these gadgets.  Look like fun. 

How do the residents of the marinas like it when you are lighting up their houses in the middle of the night? See many gamefish? I would think the noise of the generator would scare the fish deeper? Do you mainly get carp, or do you get the buffalo fish also using lights at night?

Murrdogg Said:
 We put a bow mount trolling motor with copilot, went from six 500 watt flood lights to 4 and soon up to 5 just trying to figure out how to mount one to trolling motor so i can point it where i want. 

Perhaps an older Lowrance gimble mount off of one of their smaller units would hook up to one of your lights, or be close enough to make it work at which point you could use a ram ball on your trolling motor and another hooked to the bottom of the gimble bracket.  Might even be able to skip the Lowrance piece altogether and just attach a ram ball right to the mount the light comes with.  It'd be a fairly easy-on, easy-off deal that you could keep pointed in the correct direction as the motor mounted ram ball goes on with a large hose clamp and is easy enough to spin where you want it so you could always have the light pointing the same direction as the motor.

Horsager,

Never thought of putting a ram mount on there.  I'm going to have to see if I could rig that up, would be nice to take on and off easy.

 I am having a hard time uploading a picture because i am not tech savvy. I use a 1976 starcraft ss160. i put a deck up front and i have a 65lb autopilot up front. 70 hp johnson to get me there. it cleans up well and doesn't take too much water to float unless i got 2 barrels full of carp and buffalo. its not ideal but not bad for a college student. 

Ever considered running LED lights underwater, you know a large percentage of the light created is just reflected when the lights are out of the water. Also with LED, you wouldnt need a generator, you could run directly from a couple deep cycle batteries...

In all logic it is better to run Hps lights! They are the cats meow when it comes to shooting at night. They have a lot more output and also all but make the fish glow with there type of light. They are just more of an initial expense and when you first get into the sport it can be spendy... lights, deck, bow, reel, arrows, genny... on and on and on... and when buying them used you have to be careful because if a ballist goes out on a hps it can cost half the light.... I suck have to suck it up and upgrade :)


As far as seeing fish... You see all kinds out fish and none really seem to be very scared they are all just so relaxed and you can get right up on them most of the time. ITS A BLAST!