Tuning your boat to catch more fish.

[iwannagofishin]

Hi again fellow anglers. A HAPPY NEW YEAR to you all. I've been away from the forum for awhile. Some of you may remember my posts and conversations about voltage tuned boats and voltage tuned lures. I recently sold my voltage tuned lure business, Lurecharge, to one of my customers. I was asked to stay on with the business as a technical advisor. Unfortunately, I lost my old email in the transition because of a website change, but was suppied with a new one, so responses to my posts should work again. This is an absolutely free service that I offer in order to help out anglers with their non-fishy boats. When I was marketing my voltage tuned lures, I came to the conclusion that my lures didn't work for everyone. For the ones that it did work for, they could generally catch 80% of the fish on one side of the boat if they only used one of my lures. This discovery led me to work on finding out why one boat would catch fish while a seemingly identical boat would not. This started years ago when I was commercial trolling for salmon on Canada's west coast. If your boat wasn't right, you didn't catch as much as the other guys. So, a few years ago, I placed adds on Kijiji 'Free Help for Anglers with Non-Fishy Boats'. Over a 2 year period, I was approached by many anglers and the results were such that I had a good cross section of varying scenarios. It was simply a matter of compiling the data and connecting the dots. Then it was up to me to personally test and prove the findings. This culminated with a 5 lake study over several months. Instead of using voltage tuned lures, I used identical plain ones and modified the signature of my 14' aluminum boat to be positive or negative. I was basically surface trolling for trout with one lure 30' behind the boat and a second, identical lure trolled 100' plus  behind the boat. The results were such that I could make the 30' lure catch 3/4 of the fish, or the 100' lure catch 3/4 of the fish depending on how the signature of the boat was configured. When my boat had a positive voltage signature, it would attract fish to the 30' lure. When my boat had a more negative voltage signature, the fish were somewhat repelled by the boat.

 A good positive voltage signature requires a boat with bare underwater hull metals (cathode) that has an area that is at least 5 times the surface area of the anodes (hull ratio). There is a big range of ratios that seem to work well, from 5:1 up to 300:1. I found that about 100:1 worked best. Originally, my aluminum lake boat only had the small 8hp outboard zinc and my ratio was about 1000:1. The boat always fished ok, but I never had fish jump as close to the outboard as with 100:1 ratio. A bare aluminum boat without a connected outboard zinc will not catch fish very well either. I proved this one time while product testing my tuned lures one fall. There was a guy with a 12' cartopper and an electric trolling motor (no zinc). He fished all day with a lake troll with spinner and worm. At the end of the day, he had zero strikes while I recorded 17. This convinced that a bare aluminum boat will repel fish just like a boat that has a poor ratio, or simply too much zinc ratio (overzinced). 

 These principles apply to all types of boats and most of them can either be fixed, or the negative impacts reduced to where voltage tuned lures will work very well. I have helped guys that their boat had such a strong negative signature that my voltage tuned lures did not help. These effects influence fish at greater depths that even surprised me. Not once in all my years has a customer ever said to me that they can only catch fish past a certain depth. It seems that a boat that can't catch fish, also can't catch fish at over 200'. This applies to both fresh and salt water.

Here is a link to an article that I wrote in 2020. https://islandfishermanmagazine.com/is-your-boat-voltage-tuned-for-fishing/