Wolf - You are right on man! I never slammed Rob, Ranger or ANYONE. Heck, if Rob read my post he'd notice I said "I tell ya, at even $40k, I do not see your average bass fisherman/woman affording that MUCH for a weekend boat toy!" That goes for Ranger, Nitro, Triton, Basscat and all the rest! The top end boats and a lot of the mid-range boats are being priced WAY out of the average weekend boaters wallet!
Rob - Man who ran over you dog this morning!!! You are in a HUGE bad mood!!!
OK, let's see if I can respond in a calm adult manner:
1. "I tell ya, at even $40k, I do not see your average bass fisherman/woman affording that MUCH for a weekend boat toy!" See this just states plainly most folks on this board and the general fishing population can NOT afford these boats without "mortgage your house/life". Period end of story. Some folks do finance them, and great it's America it's their choice, but not for me.
2. "Now you pros and trying to make it to Pros, sure you can either get a team deal, get a sponsor deal or mortgage your house/life to buy a 40-60k rig HOPING to win a major Tourney or 2 to pay it back." Again, as even you said "Like tourney anglers. We never pay book for a boat. With out "deals" as you put it, we can afford the boats and don't have to mortgage our LIVES or our homes." So I read that we said the exact thing!!
3. Your comment "Your seeming lack of knowledge when it comes to finance is disturbing IMHO" is all the more interesting to me. You want to talk about how to finance a $15million (yes million) e-server infrastructure to run the education web systems for a 356,000 employee company, come talk to me. You want to talk about "knowledge about profesional tourney anglers and the sport" well i'll leave that to you, Mack, Mini, Dan and the rest. Not my specialy and i've NEVER claim it is.
4. "lower level national ones (Everstart, BFL...)" from me got you to say "And finally, if Everstarts are lower level tourneys....I'll try to remember that next month while I fish against Guido Hibdon, Dion Hibdon, Dave Lefebre, Marcel Veenstra, Kevin Vida, Pat Fisher, JT Kenny, and the other FLW pros that JUST came back from the FLW championship. " See my comment in #3, not my bag or experience. So see you have an opportunity to TEACH the large part of the folks on this site that are NOT professional Tourney anglers and do NOT KNOW the concept of Deals/Sponsorship and the like, instead of rant and rave - your choice.
5. "And finally, if Everstarts are lower level tourneys....I'll try to remember that next month while I fish against Guido Hibdon, Dion Hibdon, Dave Lefebre, Marcel Veenstra, Kevin Vida, Pat Fisher, JT Kenny, and the other FLW pros that JUST came back from the FLW championship. " See again you educated me and others who are not familiar with the Tourney ciruit. I thought Everstart was like the Bush leagues in NASCAR (and NO i'm not familiar with that either!!! LOL)
So I guess in conclusion on my above post, I just said DO IT!! If you have the deal go for it, if these boat manufactures (and again I NEVER mentioned Ranger specificaly) want to sell to me and others, their pricing themselves out of my market.
6. You said "It does NOT take 2 major wins to pay for a rig, only 1." See, you taught me something I didn't know, that a Everstart type tournament can win you that much - cool!
Now that i've shown you in an adult manner why I have NO IDEA where you got your pink panties in a bunch on my comments that were NEVER directed to Ranger or you, lets take a look deeper into one of your comments:
A. "And we don't HOPE to win a tourney. You HOPE to win the lottery, tourneys are in our hands. You either fish well enough or you don't. You educate yourself, prepare yourself, learn the water, learn a pattern, put time enough in, never give up, and fish until you're ready to drop. THAT's how you<