Bow Fishing Equipment Explained

Description

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Tags: Dave Canterbury,Survival,Bushcraft,Archery,Pathfinder,Bow Fishing

Video Transcription

morning guys I'm Dave gay right the path of our school I thought we'd do today is talk a little about both fishing equipment and accoutrements I had a lot of questions on the boat fishing video about that and I want to explain how cheap easy and fun it can be to both fish remember that the Asian grass carp and the Buffalo carp are non-native species to the u.s. they are invasive they have ruined a lot of the waterways along the Mississippi Valley in the Mississippi River tributaries and things like that so shooting them even if it's for fun or not eating them there's not something that should be considered as cruelty to animals they are an invasive species that needs to be eliminated so go fishing them is a way for your practice your injure as well okay so let's start our bow fishing conversation by talking about those boat fishing is unique to archery in the fact that you don't have to have a really strong bow to bow this 30 pounds is plenty so the bows that you can find at flea markets and yard sales and things like that may have fiberglass those bows are going to work fine for both fishing which makes it a very common man type sport you don't have to have a 45 pound or 40 pound Plus bug to meet legality issues for both fishing and most of your shots are going to be within 12 to 15 feet because you're going to be fishing in shallow water so that you can see the fish and then you're only going to be just a few feet away from the fish if you're in a boat or if you are walking the bank line or something like that to shoot that fish so you're going to get close shots so it doesn't require that heavy poundage above a 30 pound bow is plumbing and a good example of that would be a bow like this one this is a Ben Pearson fiberglass bow that was purchased at a flea market by me not even three weeks ago for 30 dollars it's in perfect almost mint condition I put a new string on it did not have a string with it its marked on it 35 pounds that's more than enough for bow fishing it's all made out of rubber in fiberglass so you're never going to destroy it makes a great survival bow 35 pounds to be honest with you is plenty to kill small game or a deer especially with close shots inside of you know 1215 yards but legality says at least in Ohio that the bow has to be 40 pounds to be a huntable bow but for bow fishing there's no such regulation so this is a perfect bow fishing boat for 30 dollars now what are you going to have to add to this boat to make it a bow fishing type device you're going to have to add a reel and an adapter it does not have a hole screw down a lot of bows are threaded in the front with a hole for a stabilizer is what most of those were drilled for or for a fishing attachment as in some of the over fredbear recurves and things like that but what we're going to do is we're going to add an attachment to this they cost about fifteen dollars that will allow us to add that fishing reel to the front the way that works I'll show you another bow real quick this again is a solid fibreglass Ben Pearson bow this one is 45 pounds and it's a recurve bow again bought very cheaply I think I paid $25 maybe for this at the most and this is a 45 pound bow so it's a legal bow for any hunting I've done a video on this bow it draws very smooth it's going to shoot any arrow you want to shoot out of it you really want to shoot feathers and not veins which means you want to shoot the feathers I'm not the Fleck the plastic fletchings but if you have to shoot fletchings out of it made of plastic that's okay too for a boat fishing area you don't need any of that stuff the adapter that you're going to put on the front looks just like this and basically all it is I'm going to pull this one off it's a piece of ABS plastic that's got that hole drilled on the front of it and it just wraps around your bow with a couple rubber straps so you can put this on any bow that you have it doesn't matter attachment cost about $15 you just place that on the front of your bow right below the grip and then you wrap around with these rubber devices and there's a locking pin on there or a stable state pin I guess what you want to call it that you just snap that piece of rubber on top of right there and that holds it in place and then clamp it down on the other side do exactly the same thing get it evened up clamp it on there and do the same thing again just stretch it till you get to the hole it's got multiple holes in it so you can adjust it to whatever bow you have and then you have that mounting system on there for your bow reel now again simple stuff common man for the bows we have now got the primal gears survival bow the takedown bow is pre-drilled for this reel and this reel is one that I've been doing R&D work with that should be on our website along without adapter within the next couple of weeks and basically it just has its crew mouth it in a plastic reel that screws right into the front if you have a pre-drilled bow like this your bows pre-drilled like this one with a drilled hole in it or your recurve has a pre-drilled hole in it because you've got an older-model fredbear or something like that you can screw that right in there without the adapter basically the reel is just a very simple plastic reel you can see this one has a pathfinder logo sticker on it solid black and what I use for boat fishing line you know they sell specific line for boat fishing but you don't need that stuff bank line works perfect for this this is a number 12 bank line which means it's right out a hundred pound test that's more than enough even for big carp it has a little knocking point or notching point right there

on the bottom of it to hold your string in place just like a fishing reel house and then it just ripped that plastic reel and you would just screw it into that mount just like this until you get it bottom down in there or as deep as you want to go it doesn't matter if that thing is it's like perfectly straight in fact can is a little bit better because it allows that line to come off there easier when you're doing it downward shot toward a fish I kind of like the fact it does canted down just a little bit from the bow and now straight in front of it and that's all you really need is that clip around the bottom just like that and that's all you really need to start both fishing other than your arrow so you've got about a $15.00 adapter if you got fiberglass bow about a 12 to $15 reel so you got 30 bucks there 30 bucks maybe in a fiberglass boat so now I got sixty dollars in my whole setup excluding the arrow you'll be able to do all of this for less than $100 plus if you've got a heavy enough bow you can use it for hunting as well so now it becomes your hunting bow and your fishing bow

okay so now that we've talked about the bows and the reels let's talk real quick about arrows because it requires a special type of arrow to both fish with as well

you can modify any arrow that you have to work for bow fishing very common man what you do and I'll show you how to do that but I also want to walk you through specific fishing arrows from the take down arrow that we sell at the Pathfinder website and we'll talk a little bit about the mozzie fishing arrows as well the impaler scale type fishing arrows we'll talk about two different ones of those and then we'll talk about making our own bow fishing arrow out of an existing arrow that we have in our kit so that we can do it in common band fashion if we so choose so stay with me and we'll walk through these arrows one at a time okay so the first area we'll talk about is the Pathfinder take down fishing arrow it employs the same AMS bow fishing slider system that mozzie uses on their fishing arrows basically has a locking device here and slider here so basically you would attach this to your fishing reel this would be the line that you wrap around that reel just like you saw earlier in this video on the bow fishing reel and then when you put this arrow into the rest basically that slide goes forward so the line and nothing else is in your way when it's sitting in the bow and then when the arrows shot the slider comes down into this lock point at the the arrow and then pulls line off of the reel and then you can just retrieve the fish by hand or wind it around the reel it's easier to just retrieve it by hand and then wind it back up depending on the size of the fish depending how well you've got him shot and this arrow takes down into three pieces so it becomes very convenient for you to pack this inside your backpack along with maybe a couple of other arrows all of our take down arrows at the Pathfinder small come in a plastic too so you can store two or three take down normal arrows in one fishing arrow in this tube and have everything you need in your backpack now as far as the tip goes for this Pathfinder arrow this is a Pathfinder fishing tip and it is made to screw into any carbon or aluminum arrow that has the threaded fixture on the front to screw in as far as I know this is the only one on the market like that that's a fishing tip most of them are gluons or pin ons that go on a solid fiberglass or solid carbon arrow these are made to go in aluminum or hollow carbon arrows that you already have in your kit basically it has a sharp point on the front two barbs on it so that when it goes into the fish it can't come back out once you get the fish on that arrow what you're going to need to do with this basically is make sure that this pushes all the way through the fish may not happen till you get them on shore or in the boat whatever the case may be and then just unscrew the arrow tip just like this and the fish will slide off of your arrow and then you just replace the tip and you're ready to fish again this is a very very good system it's a very good system for holding fish it works really really well this is something that we developed at the Pathfinder school it goes with our take down arrows but we also sell this fishing tip supper so you can use it with any arrow that you have okay let's talk about a couple different Muzzy hunting arrows this is a solid piece of carbon fiber or fiberglass with the exact same slide lock system on it that I showed you on the path on your arrow and this has the Muzzy and Paila scale tip on it now the difference with this tip is this is a newer model tip and the way they've set this up is you can turn this arrow a half a turn like this and it loses that barb so that you can pull that out the fish and then just slide it back and turn it back that half turn it locks it in place again the only thing is you have to be very cognizant of that thing screwed and unscrewing while you're fishing when you're burying this thing in the mud pulling it out and things like that it tends to vibrate loose a little bit so you've got to check it a lot but this was really made more for people who are tournament fishing from boat fishing and things like that so they can get the fish off the arrow very quickly get them in the boat in the live one of the cooler whatever the case may be and move on to the next shot not necessary for self-reliance although this is a very good quality arrow and I don't think you're ever going to destroy the thing okay this is another mozzie type hunting head and this one does not have the locking device on it so the barbs are a little bit floppy on this one works just fine no problem this one does not have a knocked on it was set up with a ball on the end to be shot out of a sling shot it's got a couple of duct-tape feathers on it feathers are very unnecessary for boat fishing this is made early on they might give you a little bit of stability over you know a shot that's maybe over 2030 feet but you're not going to take shots like that 99% of the time your shots are going to be inside of 15 feet straight down into the water you're not going to need any kind of stabilization on there at all the reason these are made out of duct tape pessoa they're waterproof now this one has a system setup on it instead of a slide lock it has a homemade system on it and you can do this with your normal arrows and basically all I've done is I've tied a self tightening knot on this end

I've ran the string up the arrow just like this to the other end of the arrow right before the nock and I've tied another self tightening knot there so that when you pull them apart spread them apart they tighten up so you have a slide here now instead of hooking your line to this type slide system you basically can just take your take a swivel like is on the pathfinder line right here hook that swivel right on to that line and that allows that to travel back and forth on the arrow so that when you have your arrow in the bow you basically have that swivel up here and as it shoots the swivel travels to the back of the Arab pulling line off of your

same system just common man setup you can use bank line for this as well I think this is just a colored Mason's line but you could use any type of bank line for this I would prefer to use at least a number 12 - possibly a number 36 but number 12 at a minimum first setup like this and you could do that type of setup on a normal arrow just like this and this is a normal three-piece take down arrow from the pathfinder school but you can use it on any arrow aluminum carbon whatever the case may be you could use that slide system of string on any arrow like this then all you need to do is you're going to have arrows in your quiver that are going to get feathers ripped off of them and things like that when you get to that point that's no longer a hunting arrow then it becomes a fishing arrow so you just strip those feathers off your knife because you don't need them anymore

tie that string on there and leave it and then you either put the fishing tip on there you would either take this tip off and put one of the Pathfinder fishing arrow tips on there like I said this is a major screw in to any error that has that adapter on the front four screw in tip of broad head and now I have a fishing arrow all I have to do is put my slide string on there and I'm ready to rock and roll now if I don't want to go that around and I want to be really really common man about it I can make a fishing Arrowhead it's not going to be as effective or near as robust or something like this but it will work on smaller fish for sure and all I really have to do is take a safety pin and this one happens to be a brass colored one and just spread it out like this okay take my multi-tool trim it back a little bit here and here trim about even if you can now you're left with this then I'm going to take that and put it on I have to open that spring up a little bit to slide it over the collar of this screw in fishing - or the screw in field point but once I spread it out enough that it will go over that go over the top of that sometimes it takes a little doing there we go

once I do that then I can take and screw that

into a normal arrow with just one of my normal field points screw that down tight you might want to get your pliers on that once you do that just to make sure that thing hasn't vibrate loose let's put your multi-tool pliers on your screw it now and then I'll just take those two barbs and bend them backwards just like this and I have effectively made a fishing arrow with barbs on it that the fish shouldn't be able to pull off of now large fish is going to bend these Barb's these are not heavy gauge steel barbs like what we have on the Pathfinder fishing arrow but very similar so if you're with smaller fish or to drop that emergency if you've got some safety pins in your kit you can do this to fish or frog or whatever the case may be this will work fine for frogs no doubt about it but this is what you're going to want for anything you know ten pound fish or bigger you're going to want something like this it's got heavy gauge steel barbs on it they aren't going to bend but this is a good common man solution for a fishing arrow if you need one just for frogging or for smaller fish along the water's edge okay so just a couple of more real quick tidbits before we end this video on you know bow fishing equipment and things like that when your bow fishing is going to take you a little while to get the hang of this and if you notice in the video that I posted a meat bow fishing with Jeff barber from primal gear it took me 4 5 6 8 10 shots to get the hang of where to aim that arrow is very hard to get used to aiming at a certain point or aiming center mass on a target and shooting it because you don't do that when your bow fishing you have to aim a low and how low you aim depends on several things it really depends on the angle that you're shooting at the fish and how deep the water is the fish is in and how deep he is in the water because the refraction of light actually makes you think the fish is in a spot he's really not so you have to shoot low in order to hit that fish and all that depends on several variables what I found is that once I got used to letting my mind understand that I had to shoot low the way I shoot archery is instinctive so I very seldom do anything more than look at the target I want to hit and shoot I don't really aim per se I let my eyes focus what I want to shoot and that's where I let the arrow go and I hope the arrow is going to go where I'm looking at almost the same thing you have to do with bow fishing with bow fishing you're very seldom ever going to come to full draw most of the draws that I took or most of the shots that I took to be honest with you we are both fishing the other night most of the shots I took were from about right here they were really down below me which that helps you to aim lower because you're not bringing that thing up to your eye level where you're normally shooting so by bringing it just up here to the body of chin or half way into your chest you're already aiming low a little bit when you're looking at the target and that seemed to help me out a lot as well but you're not going to get that chance to take full draw and aim at that fish most of the time because they're going by too quick that boats moving or the fish is swimming so you've got to basically snaps you you're just going to half 3/4 draw and snap shooting at that fish you'll get used to it after a while it took me a little bit to do it you know like I said took me 10 10 shots or so before I really got used to where to aim but after that you know I was plugging fish left and right I probably missed 2 3 more times throughout the night but you know I hit 5 fish at the same time so once you get used to that aiming low and how low to aim and that snap shooting at 1/2 or 3/4 draw you'll get it down pretty good there's no doubt in my mind that you could do bow fishing very inexpensively from a canoe that you can stand up in with you know a 70 to 130 lumen headlight you could get in shallow areas of any lake or Creek and you could vote fish like that or you could walk the banks with a pair of nice bucks or hip waders or something like that walk along the bank and you get both fish like that as well and there ain't nothing wrong with shooting for off with a bow either so it's a very good common man family type sport get your kids involved in it they'll enjoy very very much I'm sure I want to take one of my young is down to do it as soon as they're old enough down to Alabama we were at Lake Guntersville as the questions about that as well very good boat fishing lake but there's places right here in Ohio I'm pretty sure I can get some good bow fish net as well so I'm going to be trying that in future episodes of on the water's edge I appreciate you guys joining me for this video I thank you for everything you do for me for my school for my family for all my friends and my sponsors and affiliates and instructors and I'll be back to another video as soon as I can thanks guys

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