Micro

What's your brake situation? How may do you have ON? I have 2 brakes ON, 4 OFF. I use this for all fishing techniques.

Change techniques. The shaky head bite is OFF at the lake I fished this morning. I fished some sandy shoals with Football Head Finesse jigs/Zoom Finesse Worms and some Spot Remover Pros/Zoom Trick Worms and got nary a bite. I've been having decent luck with them all spring. But today I didn't have any luck until I rigged my finesse worms on a Slider Head and flipped the nearby dock and pier. All got several bass on the same finesse worms I was using the the football heads. The main shoal I was fishing was only a few yards from the pier. The worm was fine, the presentation and location made the difference. Right now were having cloudless, relentlessly hot days. It was nearly 90 degrees by 9:00AM. The fish I found were deep, in about 10 feet of water, directly in the shade of the pier.

I'll have to tell my Revo Ss to stop handling light baits well. They cast 1/4 baits as well as my SCs, SXs and STXs. They must not have known they weren't suposed to do that.

The good news is that the higher it climbs the harder it will crash. And it's going to crash. High demand is, in large part, driving current prices. Much of that demand comes from emerging markets in Asia - India and China. India and China HEAVILY subsidize oil for their people. Once the price gets too high, the government won't be able to subsidize ti enough and the high costs will be passed on to the average Indian or Chinese. That lead balloon won't fly too long. Demand will fall and so will prices. It's inevitable. Here's a article from today... Why Oil Prices Will Tank

How do you NOT catch a bass on a cicada? No bass in the lake? We only got the tail end of the 2004 17 yr cicada hatch here in SE Virginia. But we get, like everyone else, annual cicadas every summer. Put a float on your line about 2 feet above the hook, then hook the cicada through the thorax and throw it out. Many times they will buzz on the water letting out a ultrasonic ring around themselves. It's like a dinner bell.

Beer is always a good investment. It's a miracle product. It makes you smarter when you drink in quantity, and it makes ugly women pretty.

I have two Pro Qualifiers - 7' medium/fast. I like them well enough. They are sensitive and I use mine for shaky heads and such. They have nice alconite guides. But I think you really need to examine the rod before you buy it. I've seen quite a few on racks with flaws - cracked epoxy over the guide threads, deep gouges, bent guides, etc. I got mine for $59 ($119 reg price) each on sale and for that price they are great. But I think you can do a lot better for their full price. This $119 rod doesn't compare in sensitivity or quality to my $100 Fenwick HMGs. In fact, my Johnny Morris Elite really isn't as sentsitive as my Fenwick HMGs, and that was a $170 rod (got on sale for $110). When I have enough money, I'm going to replace my PQs with HMGs.

http://www.aardvark.co.nz/hho.shtml

Really, it's just Natural. I picked up tips from him. He is the Martha Stewart of tackle organization.

How does backplay protect a reel? Isn't that a like having a seatbelt on a little too lose?

We've had an ever-growing population of F-22s here where I live - near Langley AFB, Virginia. Awesome airplanes. I love seeing them fly over.

I have not fished with my Elite Tech yet. I've cast it a little with a Revo I don't plan on using with it. Right now I'm trying to decide on the perfect reel. It is a little wippy, but that's the nature of fiberglass. In that respect, it's comparable to others I looked at before I decided on the Fenwick - Lamiglass and American Rodsmith. For small cranks, I've been using my 6'6" M Fenwick HMG with a 6.4:1 Revo STX and 10# Trilene XL. It handles light cranks very well. For the Elite Tech, I'm really considering a Abu Garcia EXT customized with a 4.7:1 gear set.

+1. This is also a great way to do it if you are wanting to learn a specific technique. Just take those lures you want to learn and nothing else. You'll either learn them or not fish.

+ One Million

Sometimes we lose focus of what's important. You're right.

We have that now with the Colorado and Wyoming oil shale deposits holding some 1+ trillion barrels of oil - five time the amount of Saudi Arabia's reserves. Oil had to reach $100+ per barrel before extraction and refinement was cost effective. That has happened, and Shell has developed a way to get it out of the ground rather easily. While we may never see $2/gallon gas again, it very well could be that one day the the United States will be the largest oil producer in the world and countries will look to us for crude.

A nice non-bass. 3.5 lbs southeast Virginia

Live cicadas are the best live bait ever. Hook it through the thorax and throw it out and let is buzz on the water. When cicadas are hatching, nothing goes hungry.

Stay safe, man. We're ALL rooting for you.

Here are various ways I rig my HTs. 1) Gamakatsu 5/0 EWG. Very weedless, decent hookups. 2) Zoom HT Hook (Owner has an equivalent hook). As effective as #1 above. 3) Matzuo 5/0 offset light wire long shank work hook. Rigged in the manner of my previous post. 4) Eagle Claw 5/0 weedless hook. This one draws stares sometimes, but my experience is that it is very effective. It keels very nicely, and hook ups are very easy. (If you rig it hook-up, it will roll over on its back.) It's a great rig for buzzing. Fewer bottom lip hookups than you might think. Not quite as weedless as the others - the guard sometimes gets knocks loose.

That's less and less true as time goes on. Used to be that what went on in the United States had the biggest influence on oil and gas prices. We still do, but China and India are catching up and diluting our influence. Demand there is, everyday, at an all-time high. That means a little reduction in demand in the US will have a much lesser effect on oil/gas prices than it used to. We need a global demand reduction.

Didn't say how old she is. I had an elderly neighbor whose car stalled when she backed out into the street and she did the same thing - got "locked in." She broke the window with her umbrella because she panicked. Never thought about the sliding lock. Truth be know - bet she was very old.

If you qualify, USAA is the only way to go. Best customer service in the industry. Best customer service - period. #1 Customer Service - Business Week

I can't think about it now. kid's college............... megabass ............... kid's college ....................... deps .................

I like Zoom Horny Toads. The Zoom Hooks, and the Owner brand counter-parts, are pretty good. But there is a better way to rig them for maximum hookups. I take a 5/0 long shank offset worm hook, in this case a Matzuo, and T-Rig it. But instead of pushing the hook point up through the body I run it up behind the crotch of the frog and stick the point in the skin on the back. This is a very weedless method, but the much easier to obtain hookups. Only occassionally does the hookpoint pop out - mainly if you hit a stump or something hard.