Iron Skillet: Welchs' Bet's

Well, today found me home again with Isa. Thankfully she is on the mend and should be headed off to "school" in the A.M.. I'm amazed how fast a little medicine can work it's magic. She made a drastic improvement between yesterday and today! She felt well enough to help me work on the boat. She wants to go fishing, you know! As does Dad, but it's hard to justify with the work situation and all. The reality is, the boat has almost 2 year old gas in it (it does have a double dose of fuel stabilzer in it) and needs to be run. So, the last few weeks i've been chipping away at adding things in preperation of a fishing trip. I think after today, with the help of Isa, "Welch's Bet" or is that "Welched Bet" or "High Five" or "Big Red" ..........is ready to go on it's first fishing trip with me at the helm.
I know this may bore most of you, but this has been my bright spot as of lately, and i'm going to give you a little recap of the things that have been done over the last few weeks......so, bear with me........here goes

So the first addition to the new boat was installing my 9.9 yami. from the old boat. A great trolling motor, and i hope it will be a good fit on the back of this old gal.

In order to mount the kicker motor i had to install a new fuel water seperator system, that had two ports, and can directly draw from the 100 gallon fuel tank (yes, you read correctly, 100 GALLONS!). The nice thing about this new system is any water can be drained from the bottom of this filter system, and hopefully will ensure clean fuel.
My next big task was mounting my other fish finder/gps to the one dad left in there. At first i was just going to run one unit, but the more i thought about it, the more i liked running two. Why run two you might ask? Well, now i can run one unit in full screen gps mode, and the other unit i can run in full screen fish finder mode. Overkill you might think? Naaaaa....we're talking man talk here......more is always better! The nice discovery was the placement of the new gps antena. Notice the "hockey puck" with the cord near the window in the picture below. A little Marine 5200 and she was glued in place recieveing a perfect signal, even with my hand placed over the top! (A good thing, to say the least)!

A view from the helm postion, the cool part of these two units is the fish finder mode unit i put on a swivel base and will be able to turn it, so i can see it while running the trolling motor from the aft of the boat (Told ya i was gonna get a little detailed here!)A little more "messing about" and i discovered this old lowerance bottom reader in the dash. Dad had told me it didn't work, but to my surprise with a little bit of "elbow grease" i got this one up and running again too! Here's the proof, sitting in the driveway, she's reading 2' deep........and right she is! 2' from the bottom of the hull to the ground!Isa had a lot of fun today, She got to watch the movie Aladin up in the cuddy cabin, while i worked on the other stuff. I'd ask her quite often if she was done....and each time she'd say "nooooo dadda, i want to stay in the boat, we go fishing o'kay?". I told her this weekend, and i hope to keep my promise as long as the weather holds.And last but not least, we had to mount "woody" up somewhere. He still likes his postion on the bow. So i Think with a few zip ties we can accomodate his request!

So, from the North....