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Thanks g! I pick the boat up at the builder and will be using it on the Pere Marquette River the weekend its ready. Ill try a 15hp on it when Im up there. Also thanks mhowerton on the tip for Heidi's for burgers sandwiches and deserts. Eric

Thanks guys! I don't plan on breaking any speed records but just in case I was out a bit far and the weather changed quickly I would want to be able to get off the river. I would love to get a 25hp not sure its in the financial cards right now. I'm pretty excited about the location, Its a sleepy little spot on the White except for when the train comes by I slept under the stars at the boat ramp in the back of the truck a few weeks back was blown away at how many stars I saw because there is so little light pollution down there. I did manage to mess up a teen grope fest. At 1am. A young guy and his gal decided to park down by the river where I was sleeping and when they pulled down the ramp and into the parking lot area they saw me in the back of the truck sleeping in my sleeping bag. I didn't bother to raise my head up seeing how they had their headlight full on me in the bed of the truck, the guy says "Look there is someone in the back of the truck", then I hear her say "is he dead". So I decided to raise my head and ask If I they needed something (just wanting the lights out of my face) and she screamed bloody murder (was wondering what the campers there thought at the campground). Was good for a chuckle and decided to do some more stargazing seeing how I was back to being wide awake. Anyway. I digress. Having grown up in the North East in the Kittatinny Mountains along the Appalachian trail I remember starry skies like that. I am looking forward to trying PJ's restaurant the week I come down to close on the property. BTW - I love a good pulled pork sandwich and I noticed that about 28 miles from the new place out to the bypass there is a slew of big name fast food places. That's great.. But I'm also looking for some hidden favorites. Maybe in Norfork or Cotter or Calico Rock. If anyone has some suggestions on hidden food gems that would be great also! Thanks again for all the input Eric

@Peet Thanks. I see you're from St Charles Mo. Find myself down there frequently for work. Siemens has an office in Maryland Heights. Great restaurants in St Charles. Eric

BTW the hull is rated for up to 25hp.

I was just curious if 15hp will be too little or maybe just fine for the White at the flows you guys are seeing now with minimum flow? The boat is very shallow drafting and weighs 325lb. Most of the time it will be hauling one person or maybe two people. I'm just trying not to spend any more money on a motor than I have to right now because I want to get a house built and the White is the big unknown for me. I know the 15 will be just fine for tooling around and doing what I want to do with it up here. (walleye on the mississippi and cedar river and reservoirs in Iowa) Will the 15hp be capable on the White and Norfork river? I like the 15hp as its not too heavy for this small boat. If anyone has experience on the forum using a boat with a footprint close to 1654 on the white with a 15hp I would love to hear from you? what were your impressions? Some specs. 125lb motor 325 hull 32lb fuel tank (propane) 200lb person 61lbs battery 50lb gear misc Total weight will be somewhere between 800 - 1000lb (up to 2 people) Eric

sweet view Ham!.. We wont have much of any view but the timber. Who knows, we might be able to see the ridge opposite the boat ramp in the winter. Looking forward to making some new friends down there. Already count you as one of them.. just need to wet some lines together. Hopefully soon. Eric

Thanks Ham! Just waiting on the surveyor to finish up and I'm planning to come down for at least 5 days. I also ordered a stealthcraft 1654 ATB about 2 weeks ago and I hope (doubtful) that its done in time for the closing.. I will definitely get ahold of you as the plans are finalized for the close. Already bought house plans, and will start on building the "Hawks Nest" soon. a little 900 sq ft home away from home. It will be a rental and a weekend place for the wife and I once completed Eric hawksnest.jpg.lnk

Thanks, I had to push back my mini vacation/closing a bit as the surveyor cant get in to do the marking for a week to 10 days.. While I was down there 2 weeks ago checking out the property I had gotten into chiggers and had over 60 bites on my legs. scratching turned into a staff infection so now I'm laid up taking some pretty powerful stuff they use for Mrsa.. pretty scary stuff.. Lesson learned dont scratch!

Just came back last night from an impromptu one day trip down Reds landing. Had to get eyes on my new vacation/retirement property and make sure it was all I had hoped. I close in a couple weeks, hopefully when I come down for a bit longer stay sept 18-24th i can fish from norfork dam down to calico rock. I did the longer trek last year from Bull Shoals to Buffalo city. Im going to spend a bit more time getting to know this section of river seeing how I will be vacationing here more often. It's a great feeling to know that I have the 2 acres to call my own and can camp and make it my own. Having the drive put in and get a perk test done and . It's only a stones throw from the public access and not in the flood plane. pretty excited. Have any of you fished the catch and release section below Red's? be curious to hear about fishing the section from norfork to calico rock. Eric

Excallibur XX $1800.00 Two person Lazer-lok frame with sliding platform and leanbar. painstakingly executed transom mod so the unit can be changed to a one person frame under in zodiac orientation and then unpin and repin back to original two person configuration. Seat bases upgraded on rotating bases (makes easier to run tiller) Oar holders two set of oars (non frame and frame oars (standard)) Port and starboard insulated cooler/rod holders Flip fins nylon seat to use craft in frameless orientation

yeah. I have a full hr of high def video. I had a net cam all rigged up for the trip to capture every trout I caught! So before I set up to launch the first morning I tested the camera to make sure it was working and thought I turned it off. Well.....I guess I didnt and managed to catch an extremely exciting hr of the white river rising. I did manage to use my phone on the last day to capture a video of a rainbow at Rileys Station. I will try to get that on here.

Had a great trip. Set off at 8:30 am at the Dam on Thursday. Was into my first trout across from the camp ground just down stream. Did equally well with the fly rod and spinning gear. Day one caught and released 15 trout. Hooked my biggest brown ever over a weed bed with a hopper, but never got to land him. he broke the line just as I reached for the net. I wasn't paying attention to the leader, it was inside the eyes of the rod and he gave one last slap and away he went. I did get a good look at him though and after about a 10 minute fight I was a bit disappointed but glad for the opportunity to play a fish like that. Set up camp at Blue Heron around 3:30pm. headed back out at 7:30am the next morning. The fly rod was not doing so well that day.. the water was low just about the whole trip. I had all my catches with the spinning gear and the zig jig Friday. Olive and yellow, all black, and black and olive were the name of the game. I caught and released another pile of fish, stopped counting around 12. Set up camp at Rileys station Friday night. Accidentally went around the back side of the island and missed my take out, did managed to land a nice fat rainbow just below the mouth of the Buffalo, but I ended up getting into too shallow of water and gave my prop a few white river scars. By not by having enough umph with my little outboard, I ended up dragging my boat through the shallows for about a 1/4 mile upstream (not fun) till some nice gentleman in a jet boat gave me a lift back upstream to Rileys station. I ended up staying there at Bill Thorne's suggestion as this was where he would bring my truck for the shuttle service. Great folks at Rileys station, would definitely stay there again. Caught and released another 8 Friday morning before I headed back north. Will definitely do it again but I will not be using the inflatable next time. I will likely get another boat before I come back down. Thinking about getting a StealthCraft 16' atb to walleye fish up here on the Mississippi and for future bigger water trout fishing outings. The Excalibur was awesome but it would have been nice to get up once or twice and stretch throughout the day without having to beach the inflatable and to have enough motor to go upstream.

@ham, et al, do you know of any shops locally that sell zig jigs?

Getting stoked for some R&R on the White. Gear is assembled... purchasing my license online, weather looks to be perfect. Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I have all my fly fishing/camping gear needed for the two and a half days of fishing. 7 ft and 9 ft fly rods, a box full of terrestrials, nymphs etc., so I should be good in the fly fishing department. However, I still need to round out the spinning gear.. I have 6'6" fast action st croix and pfleuger reel. if that's too small I have bigger stiffer rods and reels I used for walleye. What would be a good lure/jig selection for the spinning rig for this time of year over the two and a half days of fishing? I will be doing a combination of drift and wade fishing.

Ham, moving permanently will be a little while yet but i plan to purchase some property as soon as the farm sells. as far as the float trip is concerned, I am coming down the end of the month to do a three day fish camp trip. If you are available it would be great to fish with you or anyone else for that matter. I Plan to arrive late on the Wednesday 24th sleep in the truck and start the float trip early on Thursday at Bull Shoals. Float all day and then set up camp for the night at Blue Heron Thursday (I already reserved the space), then head out early again on Friday morning till I get to the mouth of the Buffalo River set up camp upstream and fish the confluence there for the remainder of the evening. The next morning I'll motor out to meet up with Bill (hes on vacation so I still need to arrange the place) and head back to the truck to look at property below Rim Shoals. Found a couple places I liked along the river and want to take a closer look.

Thanks Ham! Agreed!.....happiest day of a boat owners life is the day he sells it!.... I have owned several and sold several so i can say that with conviction, my favorite has been my Gator tail 1754 center console mud motor boat for duck hunting that I tricked it out for walley on the Mississippi. loads of fun - not very comfortable in big chop though. My favorite big boat was a Tuffy osprey 1890. Some day I will buy another boat.... but this little scadden toon will have to hold me over till we move down.

Yeah. I took my scadden out with my wife to see how it motored around with the new transom and outboard. We were on a smaller river and we went a couple miles down stream and the trip back was labored with the 5hp (very enjoyable if you just want to cruise around but not for re-drifting a productive stretch). It did the job.... Im am certain i would not want to try it under any significant flow. looks like when I come down I will be putting in and having someone take me back. I did see a 16' panfisher by tracker that looks like it might be a good little boat.

I took the day off today to get a long weekend. Plan to take the Excalibur out on the water and try out the new Lehre 5hp outboard and the new transom configuration. I hope this runs well. I have seen issues with water coming up close to the motor on lots of the Scadden toons out there but with the Excalibur XX I have the rear cross section of pontoon where you sit when you don't have the frame installed, so I hope that keeps the water surge from the toons down. We'll see! Eventually I will cut the cargo plate down to fit inside new transom configuration. This should all but eliminate the water if any that may want to surge up around the motor.

I just created a blog and attached several images under 2 meg. each attachment is broken. can you correct the broken links for this blog site? I would like to reference the blog at some other fly fishing sites and possibly drive some traffic your way but I don't really want too while the images are broken. Sorta makes the blog useless. Any help would be appreciated Eric

Well I got my transom mod done. still hope to make it down in Sept/Oct but they just keep piling on travel at work. Anyway here is my transom mod to run a 5 HP on my Excalibur There seems to be an issue with the attached pictures. looking at the url there is a // in the url string. See below. ......../uploads//monthly_08_2014/blogentry-17362-0-53683500-1408035195_thumb.gif

Transom design for my Scadden Excalibur XX with the two person LaserX frame. I didn't want to use the regular cargo plate that comes with the frame due to it not being wide enough or strong enough to handle my 5hp lehre propane motor. I decided to Mod the second person frame section and make it modular take down configuration. This way I could make a transom that was completely attached to the first frame when I want to run this inflatable in zodiac orientation and then reassemble back to the two person when I want to run with another person. To start: I ordered 4 8" pieces of aluminum tubing from North Fork Outdoors that they use to connect their sections, so I could pin my cuts back together (it turns out I had to turn down the 4 sections (outer most parts of frame) as they were a different thickness tubing). luckily the local weld shop had some tubing they could turn down for me. I purchased 16 tab locks to hold the sections in place (5/8ths I believe). next I marked lines across the top of the tubing where I was going to make my cuts so i had registration marks to line back up after cutting. After cutting the frame pieces apart I drilled each section (starting with the small foot piece) and worked my way from the final transom assembly back out to the two person original frame. This was pretty tricky. The important thing to remember was drill and pin one hole at a time and think about what you are doing before any drill holes are made otherwise you could end up with pins and tab locks that dont match up. Fortunately it worked out great and no mis matches. I then had a block of aluminum welded to the seat section, which I turned upside down so I had room to screw tighten the motor and make sure the new transom block was not too high for my short shaft motor.

excellent! thats more my style. I want to completely disconnect from civilization when camping.

What is up the buffalo?

I changed the date of my vacation to avoid the crowd. Thanks again for that heads up. Arriving the morning of Sept 26th. Will float fish and camp - 29th.

Anyone tying these for fly fishing or have a link to a how to tie one? Looks like marabou type of pattern but I understand the head is lopsided to give it its unique action. I would be interested to learn how to tie a close proximity to one. Eric