These days with electronics able to accomplish just about everything on your boat you used to have to work at — GPS to put you on the spot, spot locks on your trolling motor to keep you there — you rarely see what used to be an old standby: the marker buoy.
But marker buoys still have their place, especially if you’re a lower-tech sort of angler. I find them useful when drift fishing. Catch a fish, throw out the marker, then drift past the same area. Marker buoys generally come in two shapes — they look either like dumbbells or goal posts — with the line wrapped around the middle and a weight attached that pulls line off as the weight sinks to bottom.
You can make your own, of course, but at $8 to $10 for manufactured models, it hardly seems worth it. My only advice is to get brightly colored markers — for obvious reasons.
— Bob Gwizdz
