We placed these hooks on the front of the bait tank to hang our throwable Type IV PFD. Having a readily available Type IV has been a top priority for us for a while (long story, explains the scar on the inside of my right leg). This works out well.

We decided to keep the ditch bag in the luggage rack, where it is easily accessed. As mentioned earlier, we also stick our wallet, car keys, etc. in the ditch bag in a ziplock plastic bag. It would be ironic if we survived an abandon ship incident, only to discover that we had left the car keys and driver's license in the boat...

One thing that we want to change soon is the fire extinguisher location. It's currently positioned under the console top, which seemed to make sense at first - handy to the captain, and protected from the elements. 

But about a year ago, we had an incident where we managed to smoke a solenoid that was located under the console. Fortunately, it was just the Corrosion Block being flashed off, but there was a lot of white smoke coming out from the console for about 5 minutes. In retrospect, if the console had started on fire, we probably wouldn't have been able to reach the extinguisher. 

If you stop and think about it, the two most likely places for a fire to start in a center console like an Edgewater (which has almost no bilge to speak of) are in the fuel system back by the engine, or in the console electrical wiring. It is probably not a good idea to locate the fire extinguisher so close to a likely fire source. The only problem is, we haven't figured out a better place to put it...yet.

The last point in this section was actually mentioned in one of the earlier issues - avoid hooking yourself! With exposed horizontal rod racks, the potential to be impaled by a hook on one of your rods is fairly high, so it deserves some attention. Warn your crew, and as we mentioned, try to place any hooks so that they rest on the side of the rod facing the gunnel. For a conventional reel rod in the starboard rod rack (which will naturally rest in the rack upside-down, reel on the bottom), a lure should be hooked on the side of the reel seat or a guide foot away from the reel handles (left side of the rod). This will place the hook in a position where the rod itself shields the hook point when the rod is in the rack.