Although Lyle Soileau definitely uses a standard anchor, he also has another tool to help hold his pontoon boat in place.
It’s a length of electrical conduit through which a rope is looped. It looks for all the world like one of those contraptions animal-control officers use to capture snarling dogs while keeping them at a distance.
Once he sets his bottom anchor, he can loop the rope around any nearby stump off the other end of the boat and hold his fishing platform firmly in place — even if the wind is blowing.
And it’s easy to make.
Soileau uses the conduit instead of PVC for a simple reason.
“The key is you can’t use PVC, which will shatter,” he said. “You’ve got to use electrical conduit.”
His choice is 3/4-inch conduit with an end cape.
First, he drills holes through the conduit just below the end cap and feeds his line through both holes, tying a knot to the end of the rope.
Another hole is drilled through the end cap, and the other end of the line is fed through that hole so it snakes all the way through the 4 feet of conduit.
The line can then be fed out to form a loop; just make the loop, swing it over a stump and pull the loop tight.
“No more bending over and grabbing a stump,” he said.
Soileau keeps two in his boat so that he can use stumps instead of traditional anchors when fishing stump-ridden areas.
“Sometimes we want to tie off in the front and then tie on the back to position the boat,” he said.