{"id":9483,"date":"2016-09-18T01:00:10","date_gmt":"2016-09-18T08:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/community.nrs.com-2\/?p=9483"},"modified":"2019-04-26T08:59:34","modified_gmt":"2019-04-26T15:59:34","slug":"falling-freestone-drifter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/community.nrs.com\/duct-tape\/2016\/09\/18\/falling-freestone-drifter\/","title":{"rendered":"Falling for the Freestone Drifter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s just say what everyone is thinking: an inflatable drift boat just looks weird. <\/em>I mean, what is that boat anyway? A\u00a0mutilated SUP board? A boxy raft? The strange redheaded-stepchild of a fiberglass drift boat?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll explain it this way: if the Freestone Drifter is a fisherman, it\u2019s that guy who shows up to the boat ramp in a Carharrt jacket and ditch boots. He isn\u2019t flashing you a Headhunters trucker hat and only has one (ONE!) fly rod. The rest of the fishermen roll their eyes and go back to stringing their four Sage rods and clipping into their fancy waders. Behind the boat ramp,\u00a0the Freestone-Drifter-ditch-boot man rips a twenty-inch brown out of the eddy on his thirteen-year-old Le Croix his dad gave him. The Freestone Drifter sure as hell isn\u2019t a dory, a driftboat, or even a raft. It\u2019s a big gray gaper-mobile. But, in certain situations, the Freestone out performs all three of its traditional stepsiblings.<\/p>\n

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The Freestone didn\u2019t catch me 94.7%* more fish like I\u2019d hoped, so I\u2019m pretty sure the trout magnet is broken. It did, however, catch me 87.9%* more young, single, bearded men inquiring on what I was towing behind my rig. I\u2019m sure it was just the boat they were interested in. The Freestone comes in at a few thousand dollars more than a Craigslist raft but if you\u2019re a woman, you\u2019ll likely recoup your costs in free beers from aforementioned bearded fishermen at the bar.<\/p>\n

I fished the Freestone on the Blackfoot, Bitterroot and Clark Fork Rivers in Montana. Similar to a hard drift boat, the Freestone was easy to stop in the current to pester the hell out of that foam-pile rising trout. Back rowing through boulder gardens\u2014no problem. The internal frame and fishing bars helped catch more than one enthusiastic caster before they launched themselves out of the boat.<\/p>\n

The anchor worked like, I don\u2019t know, a heavy thing behind a boat. Coming from a whitewater background, the idea of dragging some piece of steel down a riverbed still sort of freaks me out. The pulley system was simple enough for me to decipher. The lower external profile made it easy to row the Freestone through the wind. HA! Just kidding, no inflatable boat will ever be easy to row in the wind. But it didn\u2019t totally suck.<\/p>\n

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The main advantage of the Freestone Drifter on day fishing trips is you can ram it into rocks with gleeful abandon. So when you decide to take the \u201cadventure line\u201d down the left corner of the Blackfoot River because you\u2019re trying to impress a bearded fisherman and completely botch it? No worries. When you decide you definitely need to take a side channel\/irrigation ditch route so you can pull up to Imagination Brewery and buy an IPA and some popcorn? No stress. It\u2019s also much easier to bash the Freestone Drifter into rocks when you\u2019re just demoing it for NRS and it isn\u2019t actually your boat. Product testing, guys, product testing.<\/p>\n

After determining the Freestone was a highly adequate day fishing craft it was time to give it the whitewater test and see if those drain holes were good for anything other than chilling beer cans.<\/p>\n