With 85 pounds of gear strapped on the cargo decks of our pontoon boats, we watched the Beaver float plane lift off. We were on our own, 50 miles from the nearest human and over 100 miles to the nearest town, at a mountain lake at the head of Alaska's Alagnak River drainage. It was as close to heaven as I had ever been. There were no cell phones, no radio, no Internet, and nobody else but our group in sight. The best news of all was that there were crimson-red sockeye salmon stacked in every run. Before us lay 60 miles of Alaska's Alagnak River, inaccessible to conventional boats-a wilderness of salmon runs and giant egg-eating rainbows.

Before purchasing your pontoon boat consider all of your options. Some are rated for whitewater (above) and some are not. Many come with accessories that make your fishing trip comfortable, such as a platform for a cooler, rod holders, and bags for holding gear. You can pack and ship many pontoon boats on the market.

While not all trips will be as extreme as this, pontoon boats allow anglers to fish water they've only dreamed of fishing, whether it is exotic as a virgin river in the Siberian wilderness or Belize flats, or something closer to home like your favorite trout river or lake. Shallow floating, lightweight, and able to be steered by oars and fins, pontoon boats have the mobility and portability to allow you to fish the best water in solitude.

Pontoon boats have taken the independence float tubes provided for lake fishers to another level. These boats allow you to sit higher out of the water than in a float tube, so you can spot fish better and make longer, more accurate casts. Plus, you can navigate rivers better in them.

A pontoon craft is a floatable craft that uses parallel pontoons as its floatation base. The pontoons can be separate with an adjoining framework or joined at the ends. Many of the new V-shaped float tubes fit into this category.

 

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One person can easily load a fully inflated pontoon boat into the back of a pickup or on a car roof rack. Since most models have a packable aluminum frame, you can take these boats places where you could never haul a boat or carry a canoe. Some frameless pontoon boats can be rolled up, stowed in a conventional backpack, and hiked, biked, or motorcycled into remote waters.