posted 03-17-2012 10:23 AM ET (US)            

While I have no specific experience attempting to mount planer board reels to a Revenge WT rails, I have been designing, building, and fishing/chartering with side planers since 1970. If you keep a few things in mind, you should have no problems.

Many people overlook the worst case scenario when they plan and install their planer tow system. The worst case scenario is another boater steaming over your tow line and ripping the rails off your boat or hooking the planer up on a submerged floating dead head (tree trunk). This could be a potentially very dangerous situation. Don’t overbuild the design. If the worst happens, you want the planer board reel and tow lines to cleanly separate from your bow rails without taking the bow rails with them. The other main problem a fisherman faces with boards is that in rough water one of the boards flips upside down and swing behind the boat to the other side taking the tow line and every fishing line with it. These lines can and will wrap around the stern of your boat potentially entangling your prop and people inside the boat. At best, this usually means an incredible mess. Large boards also take up a lot of real estate on boats, even the foldable designs. For these and many other reasons, large planer boards have fallen from favor to the smaller inline planer boards like these:

http://www.churchtackle.com/Product%20Pages/Planer_Boards.html

http://www.yellowbirdproducts.com/Yellow%20Bird%20Planer%20Boards

http://www.offshoretackle.com/ (check out the instructional videos)

If you still want to mount reels on your revenge and use large boards, then I would mount the reels where they can be reached from the main cockpit. From there the tow rope would go forward on the outside of the rails to a more forward tow point where I would attach a pulley with an appropriate spring or snubber to help absorb shock. From there, the line would run through a tow line retriever and be terminated with a heavy duty snap to attach to the board. This configuration will allow you the fastest response to pull in a board in the worst case scenario because it will be close at hand, not forward on the deck of the boat. It will also be very convenient for you to set and retrieve your boards by yourself. As you stand at the forward edge of your cockpit and reel in the boards, they will pull up alongside the boat and you can reach over the side and bring them inboard all from one location. If you mount your reels up front, you have to have someone up front and someone alongside to actually lift the boards out of the water. I find it is a lot easier to have the reels near where the board will be going in and coming out of the water. To make this work on a revenge walk through, you may have to be creative with some pulleys tied to cleats to avoid chafing the line, but I think the extra rigging effort would be well worth it. Just make sure to have some kind of strain relief at your forward pulley to relieve the stress from the wave action.

If you have any specific questions please feel free to contact me via the e-mail in my profile.

posted 03-22-2012 04:19 PM ET (US)            

You might enjoy watching a DVD on fishing copper lines from inline planers, it's pretty informative. The DVD is put out by Dave Engel and Bill Bale of Best Chance Too. They are the Great Lakes top tournament winning team (over 45 tournament wins) and provide a wealth of info on using the inline boards. Here is a link to their website where the DVD is available; it's the one in the green jacket tiitled "Best Chance Too Heavy Metal Trolling with Copper"