Type of wood for stake beds?

Im gonna make some 5 gal. bucket stake beds and was curious which type of wood will work for the stakes. Obviously oak would probably be the best but not sure where I can find any. Yellow pine would be the easiest to find, but will it last very long submerged before it decays and breaks off?

find you some cedar limbs. There are still cedar trees in lakes here from 60 years ago. I use tobacco sticks (oak i guess) but couldn't tell you how long they last. cane works too. anything free should be great.

I would lean towards a dense hardwood oak hickory or cedar. Pine just seems a little light to me. like it would soak up water and tend to break down.

Yeah I had my mind on precut wood stakes and soon after I posted this I realized I could just go to the woods and cut some oak or cedar limbs to use. The precut would be more convienant, but harder to find.

cjones,

check the "our crappie build" thread. In it one of the guys talks about how he gets his stakes or slats for free from a woodworking company. Try asking and looking around for stuff like that too.

cjones,
I've used pine on beds before and there still there but I would recommend hardwoods. Pine beds are hard to sink. The pine is very bouyant. If you have a sawmill around you, go there and see if you can buy their scraps. We have one here and he sells us the edges that are left over from cutting lumber. They work perfect.

Lots of small tie mills will give you scrap hardwood. Helps to take them a fresh mess of fillets or offer them a fishing trip.;)

You can just find yourself some old pallets and conform them to however you want.

You can use one as a base and tear up others to use as the stakes and weight them down with rocks found on the shoreline.

Works great if you have two people...but almost unmanageable with just one person trying to 'load' the bottom with rocks and precisely sinking the rig where you want. It also is better to take a bigger boat with more room if using pallets. They just are bulky (but usually free) but once in the water and sunk...you will just smile as you make your waypoint. :D

aj

Another good find is scrap PVC pipe. Lasts forever and you don't get hung up as often. Most PVC sinks on it's own, so you don't need much concrete in your bucket (less concrete = less work!).
I usually use my PVC trees that have a hole drilled in the bottom so you can just attach a brick with galvanized wire. But I often do a stake bed also - using my scuba gear, and just drive the PVC pieces into the muck that is so thick in most of our older reseivors. I've gone back and checked it out over 2 years later, and only one of the pipes had somehow fallen over. The pier owner said he caught a lot of fish from it - but it also has 2 reef type structures extending from 2 different corners of it. If he doesn't catch them in the stake bed, he tries different depths along his reefs.