Finally broke 80 in my classic yesterday. Son talked me into going down to Lay for the afternoon. Quick check of the SmartLakes app showed 6 generators running, 32,000 CFS. Off we went. Left Beeswax and headed 15+ miles up-river. Stopped and immediately noticed we were drifting at 2.1mph. Out of the wind which was also going down-river. Before we left, I made a test run by myself and hit 80.9 mph, first time I have broken 80. But as the late Paul Harvey would say, now for the rest of the story. 🙂 That was a downstream run. Drift speed was 2.5mph due to the wind. So the real boat-only speed was right at my usual best in this kind of cold air (40 degrees air temp at the time). 80.9 – 2.5 = 78.4… But it was at least interesting to see my Lowrance depth finders record a max speed of 80.9. Might keep that for a while to impress the natives. 🙂
Wind chill was fierce. Had reasonable luck by finding breaks in the current (islands, bends, mouths of creeks, etc. Discovered how much better Lakemaster maps are as well. As we got somewhere around the railroad trestle / highway 280 bridge, the Navionics map went “blue”. Apparently the contour mapping stopped there, where Lakemaster went all the way to the dam. Not a huge loss but still pretty cheaply done. Boo. Wish Lowrance would work with my lake master chips…
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