Not having good brakes on a flats boat is a real aggravation. You’re drifting across the flats and hook a big redfish that takes you four or five minutes to land. If it’s a healthy sized fish he’ll actually spin the boat around if you’re on the bow or stern. Then you heft the fish into the boat, get it unhooked, measure to see if it’s a keeper and then either toss it back or slip it into the live well. By that time you’ve drifted at least a hundred feet or so past the spot where you hooked up. If there was a school of big reds, you’ve got to crank up the trolling motor and go back to try to locate them. You can try putting out a traditional anchor, but the noise you make getting the anchor out of the locker and the rattle of the chain as it deploys pretty much alerts anything within a hundred yards to head for the underwater hills. I did devise a crude little grappling anchor out of aluminum rods and PVC pipe filled with lead. It’s quieter than the Danforth anchor, but it doesn’t hold well in any sort of wind and it isn’t easy to store.

But those days of fiddling with anchors and drifting beyond the schooling fish are over now. I’ve got a Power Pole on the stern of my little Hewes Redfisher and it’s like having a set of power-assisted disk brakes. As you can see from the pictures, a Power Pole is a hinged arm. When stowed, the two pieces lie snugly against one another and out of the way. When deployed, a hydraulic pump lowers the assembly, driving a fiberglass spike into the bottom to hold the boat in place. The original Power Pole was good for water six feet deep, but lately the company has produced an eight-foot model that my installer, Mike at Master Repair in Stuart, told me is the only way to go.

With a remote control switch around my neck, I can set the hook on a fish with one hand and drop the Power Pole with the other in a matter of seconds. I can play the fish, land it and be ready to cast to its brothers, sisters and cousins immediately. Everything I had read about the Power Pole on various web fishing forums said it would be the best addition to a flats boat that anyone can make. A week into using mine I’m a believer.

There are only two downsides. First, the motor that drives the hydraulic pump is a little noisier than I would prefer. I would prefer total silence, but we’re talking about a mechanical device and total silence probably is too much to hope for. Second, the Power Pole deploys fairly quickly. That’s good, of course, if you want to stop on a dime and it works fine in shallower water. But if the water is over four feet deep or so and the main arm of the Power Pole goes underwater, it does so with a noticeable splash that might spook nearby fish. I’ll just have to keep experimenting with it to see if that happens.