VolFan

This is really my mindset. I think the aficionado stuff is great but I really have a few combos that I really like catching fish on that can cover most of the ways I fish. The vast majority of days I could take a MH bait caster and a M spinning rod and not want for anything other than a net man. also - winter seems to have arrived.

They’re definitely not nothing - they’ve been really impressive. As someone who saw a national championship season in person in college - it doesn’t matter how you win, just win. I can’t wait for Saturday. Hoosiers get an Ohio state university and we get Georgia.

Within an hour of Knoxville you have Douglas, Cherokee, Norris, Melton Hill, Fort Loudon, Tellico, and Watts Barr reservoirs. You have the Clinch, Tennessee, Little Tennessee, French Broad, Houston, and a few other smaller rivers. Cheap living, tons of great golf courses. It depends on what you want to do when you go to the city but there’s almost nowhere in the US that has the diversity of freshwater fishing as around Knoxville. Also the greatest university in the history of education. And we saved the Texans butts at the Alamo.

@Deephaven I missed the tag on this original post - what do you like to do?

@Deephaven - Hard to tell you what you should like about it unless you tell me what you like 😀. The outdoors opportunities with lakes and public hunting areas are significant all within an hour or so drive and that goes from cold water trout to striper to musky to all of the normal freshwater fish. Great hiking, four seasons, great smaller towns around it. There’s a few fun downtown areas with theaters and restaurants if that’s your thing. There’s the university with educational and sports opportunities if you want to learn something and/or paint your face. It is a manageable size of a city to get around in as well. It just depends on what you want.

Chattanooga and Knoxville are both really cool cities. Maybe not quite Charleston but really great. You could do much worse than any of the lakes surrounding them. There’s also Huntsville, AL.

@Glenn I can’t decide if Geno is great or a bust. Great drive to tie it but some boneheaded stuff in there too…he sure threw a few pretty balls on it though.

UConn in the top 5 (or really top 10…) totally invalidated that list for me… but at least they got #1 right.

Did you try it before you took it apart?

No, a new tip shouldn’t affect the action in any appreciable way.

He’s saying ‘definitely fix the guide’ because it’s about a $10-12 repair. A more expensive rod will not save you from damaging a guide. Treating the rod better and/or recognizing when something happens will. Do the q-tip test start from your tip guide back and then fix the fuzzy one. My guess is you reeled a snap into the guide and scratched or cracked it.

Maybe? I use the palomar and improved clinch and never had a knot problem that wasn’t my fault.

I don’t respool every trip, but I do retie every hour or so when throwing big baits. That front couple feet take a lot of stress just from casting big baits, add rocks and abrasions and it’s cheap insurance. I’ll throw math in - say you fish a 1/4 oz bait on 10 lb test. Now you’re fishing a bait that is 12 times as heavy on line that is only 2 times the strength. There’s much more cumulative stress on the knot and the line outside the tip as you cast, as well as the angular stress on the line at the top guide as you cast. The weakest point in all of this? The knot.

You shouldn’t be using a clip for convenience. There is no convenience with bigger baits - you need to retie every hour or so or more if you’re pulling through rocks or bouncing that bait off much of anything, which you should be. I use 15 lb CXX on baits up to 3 or so ounces but I retie after every fish and every hour or so, more if I’m fishing around rocks or mussels or concrete. I would bet that your knot broke or it broke somewhere near the knot. That area takes a beating.

Brad Paisley FTW with a little Nashville in LA for the National Anthem! Let’s play ball!

Your assumptions above are fairly correct. I doubt they have a noticeable affect on the sink rate, and depending on the bait and size of feathers they can actually turn the bait over as it sinks from the drag of the feathers. They do create noticeable horizontal drag and shorten the glide distance. Whether this is detrimental or enhancing depends on the day and what flavor gum you chew.

They are pretty good. My mom went to IU. Play Georgia or Alabama and then get back to me. 😀

I would say Jordan or Badin, both are fantastic.

Drive safe and good luck over the next few weeks.

It was going to be the best day ever, and then it wasn’t. Oof.

I will say on a lighter note that many of the people that live in some of these corners are like the 101rst in Bastogne. They don’t need rescuing and are taking care of each other.

If anyone wants a good workout, come to TN or NC and help shovel mud. It’s way more exercise than shoveling opinions or typing on the internet. We will be finding deceased for weeks after this, probably in the lakes on the Catawba chain that a few of us fish. As far as the airspace, it might shock you but you need to know where helicopters and planes are going t ok take off and land and refuel and what they’re doing to avoid accidents, confusion, and wasted resources. This is not Florida or New Orleans; the land is treacherous and what roads were there are significantly impassable the further off main roads you get (and even still on some main roads). Even helicopters can’t get into some of the narrower areas safely so it’s rescue squads going on foot through the mud in many places. Politics has absolutely no place in this.

From hurricanes? Look it - there are large parts of western NC that don’t have power or internet or water and likely won’t have those things for days and in some cases weeks. People are asking fly fishing groups on Facebook is anyone is in the area of loved ones that they can’t get in contact with, and frankly won’t be until the above is resolved and maybe never in many cases. So maybe we hold off on any political/government criticism for not protecting us from a catastrophic storm.

Are you happy with it?

That is utterly insane how high it is. Just awful the amount of damage. My buddy that lives in Wateree is also flooded and without power. I’m afraid of how high Mountain Island is going to be with all this coming downstream.