Some of the best structures are ole Christmas trees. So, off time collecting Christmas trees around town and stockpiling for warmer weather. Well, with a pile of trees and concrete blocks. Drilling a hole through the trunks and ropin’ 3 trees to one concrete block. Dropping in the lake every 10’ doing at 100’ square would make 2 mat structures.
We couldn’t find any pictures of the old days, but did find some modern manufactured versions, to give ya an idea.
Next comes cutting switch Willows and nailing them onto pallets making them 3 deep for structure weighted with pyramid blocks dropping them in the deeper parts of the lake.
After that a trip to Helena AR for cotton seed meal. Putting 15 lbs. in a burlap sack, tied off to bricks with holes, wetting the meal down so it would sour, and drop 3 of these in each mat structure.
The souring meal would attract the fish to the mats, both small and large fish. Bait and supper for all.
You would give Mat maps to your best customers, so they would bring more customers to your ramp. This worked well and on any given week it was easy to have 100 boats launch on Saturday.
The same went for the fishing dock, baiting with cotton seed meal was the best. One mat sack would last a month. So you would do this all season until Dove season rolled around when most fishermen become hunters in the fall. Then business would drop off until the next January and start all over again.