Boat Security at Campgrounds and Hotels

Hey, folks. Glenn May here at BassResource.com, and today I wanna talk to you about a subject that comes up often in our forums, and that is, "How do I secure my boat and my fishing gear when I'm at a campground or say, parked at a hotel?"

So there's a lot of different ways to do this, a lot of different answers you could give to this, and so I'm not gonna go through all the options. I'm just gonna walk you through what I do to make sure my boat is safe and secure, starting with the electronics.

What I do with my electronics is actually remove them from the boat. I don't want them to be in sight and to attract attention of hungry eyes, if you know what I'm talking about.

So I completely remove them. Now I know there's some mounts that lock securely and will definitely keep your electronics in place and no one can tamper with them. Unfortunately, that doesn't prevent people from vandalizing them. For example, cutting the wires, all right? So I like to remove the whole thing and just avoid that whole possibility. So I take these off, I have a couple of cheap backpacks that I use that I throw my electronics into, and then I take that in my room or in my camper for safe storage. 

Next, I clear everything off my deck. Everything has to be completely cleared and stored away, all my rods, my reels, my baits, any pliers that I have, scales, all that stuff. Anything that can be easily lifted and taken, that all goes. It's either stored away in the compartments, or I put it in my truck, or I take it into the room with me. That way, there is nothing that's easy to be lifted.

I've got a stereo on my boat and it's got a faceplate. I take that faceplate off, I put it in the storage container, and then I put it away in the glove box. After I'm done with that, I lock all my storage units. Everything, every storage compartment is locked including the glove box. 

Now I know that's not 100% foolproof. People with a crowbar can break into your boat just as easy if they're prepared. However, it's gonna thwart most of the crimes of opportunity. People that just happen to be wandering around in the middle of the night looking for something to steal in the campgrounds, you're not gonna be a target.

Now if you wanna go a step further, you can get something called a Loc-R Bar. I think it's L-O-C-R, that's how they pronounce it. It's a big bar that goes across your lids, it helps secure all your lids in place and prevents people from forcibly opening up your rod lockers. I know some pros actually have double rod lockers across their lids twice. Pretty safe and secure system, nothing is foolproof. But it is a better system in case you happen to be in an area that's really prone to crime and activity, I definitely recommend getting one of those. I'm fortunate I don't have some of those issues so I don't have a Loc-R Bar. 

And next, I wanna show you something that I think you're really gonna like. Now, there's a lot of boat alarm systems and boat security systems you can have in your boat. I know a lot of friends of mine actually get car alarm systems installed in their boat. So the latches when they open up, the alarm will go off. They’ll be alerted. Some are pretty sophisticated.

The problem with those systems is that they're pretty expensive and most importantly pretty expensive to install. My wallet doesn't like expensive things, so I found an alternative, a baby monitor. Yeah, go along with me here for a minute.

I was looking on Amazon and I looked at baby monitors and I sorted by the bestseller, and I got one of those as my boat alarm system. What that is, you've got a head unit here that goes by your nightstand, and then you have a camera that goes in your boat. Now, this is really interesting system.

First of all, you can be any distance. So far, I've never had any problems with them connecting. You can see that there's a screen right here and you can see everything that this camera sees. And check this out, you can control the head unit simply by controlling the buttons. You can hit the buttons here and you can turn it left, right, up and down, almost a full 360, so you can see a full panoramic of what's going on. 

Now, I could take this and I put it inside the boat before I put the cover on. It gives me a full... It's an infrared night-vision camera and it sees better in the dark than even the human eye can see. It's got amazing clarity even when it's pitch black outside, no lights. When I'm sitting in my room, the comfort of my room, I can look on the screen and I can see everything inside the boat just by panning around and looking. It does more than that though.

It has audio. I can hear everything that's going on around the boat. It's got a microphone built-in on the head unit here. And this microphone is extremely sensitive.

It picks up everything. I'm not kidding you. A few campsites down, people sitting out there, sitting around the campfire, I can hear what they're saying. I just turn the volume up on this and I can hear every word they're saying. And in fact, you can hear people walking around the gravel, walking around the campground if you turn the volume up really high. 

It's actually a running joke between my wife and I, that there's some owls sitting in some nearby trees here and it woke me up one night because they're up there hooting and hollering up in the trees, and the camera picked it up, and this is next to my nightstand. I could hear everything that was going on. Those owls woke me up. So it's extremely sensitive, and that's how it'll wake you up if someone's messing around with your boat. No one can touch your boat without you knowing about it. 

The other thing is that it's completely wireless, although this uses power, which is fine. I'm plugged in here to my batteries so I just put a three-way adaptor on here and plug this in, and we're good to go. This is obviously wireless and it has battery backup on it, battery power, but I plug it in the nightstand as well.

Now you might be thinking, okay, well, people can thwart that really easily by just unplugging the cord. Not so much. If the connectivity is lost between this and the camera, then it sets off an alarm here. So you know right away if someone messed with that. So it's an amazing system. 

Oh, oh, one more thing that I really like. You can talk to people from this head unit on the camera. All you gotta do is just push this button and say, "Hey, dude, back away from my boat." It works great. People can hear it. I actually mess with some my friends sometimes because this voice is coming out from underneath my cover on my boat, so it's a great way to play practical jokes. But a heck of a lot cheaper than an alarm system and it works really well in my opinion. So before I put the cover on, I just take this, I put it between the seats on my boat, and now I put the cover on. 

Now, the last thing that I do before I walk away from it, is the cover itself. And that is I tie everything down really, really tight so prying hands can't get up underneath the cover and reach for something. The other thing is these loose ends on the cover itself. I've got these tug ends, I just tie them to whatever I can. Tie them to different things. The idea here is you wanna slow down progress of anybody trying to break in your boat. The more obstacles you put in their way, the more you slow down their efforts, the less likely it is you're gonna become a crime victim. You wanna make it difficult for them.

So I just tie them up in random places. It's fine in the daylight, actually it looks pretty easy to undo, but when it's really dark out at night and you’re someone who’s trying to break into someone's boat, you don't know how their system is and what unties what. It becomes kind of a pain and it's not worth the effort if you're trying to get in and out really fast. So just these little things all add up to helping prevent you from becoming a crime victim. 

Now with all that said, you can't prevent a determined thief, you can't. They're just gonna break in if they're gonna break in, they'll come armed with the right tools, and they can do whatever they want. There's nothing that's gonna totally prevent that from happening, so you need to make sure you have the right insurance. And guys, listen up. Boat insurance doesn't always cover this stuff, especially your fishing gear. Boat insurance often covers the boat, not the stuff that the thief steals. That sometimes falls under your home owner's or your renter's insurance. Even if you don't have a house, if you've got an apartment, make sure you have renter's insurance. A lot of times the gear that's not attached to the boat, all the stuff I just mentioned, your fishing rods, your lures, your electronics, that is covered under a different policy.

Now that said, there are some boat insurance policies, you can get riders on them and add the value of whatever fishing gear you have, which I recommend you do that as well. But just make sure you're covered before you become a victim because the worst time you wanna find out you're not covered, is after the event, right?

So that's how I secure the boat, that's how I take care of everything. I hope those tips helped. For more tips and tricks, visit BassResource.com.