Team9nine

Water temps now up to nearly 80 degrees and slightly stained. Scattered the fish after 3” of rain, but caught a handful. They aren’t much, but I’d be near the top of the leaderboard at Sabine 😉 😝

Growing up on a diet of Buck Perry and Rich Zaleski articles, the Bait Monkey died in that lab experiment a long time ago. For the first time in my life, I now live within 30 minutes of two of the best tackle retail shops - Academy and BPS. A year and a half later, I still haven’t stepped foot in the Academy, and visited BPS once…and bought nothing.

It wouldn’t work well with down scan due to the beam characteristics - wide but extremely narrow in thickness. You’d likely get nothing but dots and dashes, if that. But if you had a flasher or a traditional 2d sonar, especially with a puck type transducer, you can get it to work, though it won’t be quite the same as modern live imaging units…but you’ll see stuff ahead of you, including fish, once you get everything dialed in. Lowrance diagrammed exactly how to do this, albeit through the ice, in their 1972 Lo-K-Tor manual, and on my 2002 Triton I bought new, I had the marine dealership rig up my bow unit (flasher) to do this exact thing. I refer to it as FLS - forward “leaning” sonar - lol. It worked great, and almost nobody did it l, or thought about doing it, back then. I got the idea after fishing with a guide on Table Rock the previous year who had adapted an LCR (2d) version of this. I was impressed enough after seeing it to take it one step further, rigging it up so I could scan ahead of the boat by putting the puck on the trolling motor head. To this day, we’re the only two people I know of who ever had our boat electronic units set up that way.

Most are probably "spot locking," as boat control is becoming a lost art thanks to technology. Line up downstream/down current/down wind of your target so the nose is pointing right into and at your target area is the easiest and best way if everything allows. Sometimes it doesn't. You may have to line up with the nose of the boat pointing one way to hold position, and cast at a completely different, even odd, angle to reach the fish - having to do a couple things all at once. That is the lost art that many don't appreciate these days because newer motors and other gadgets (Power Poles, etc.) have made it almost obsolete.

No fish symbols lol A few guys use them in specific situations, but I've never been a fan. Don't think your unit has it, but running a split screen with traditional 2d sonar and DI side by side will pretty much teach you everything you need to learn about 2d interpretation. Otherwise, experience, time on the water and a jig or jigging spoon will answer an awful lot of questions about what you're seeing - lol.

I love deep structure fishing, but most of the waters I fish, the bass are pretty much year round in good numbers out to about 18 ft., with 8'-18' accounting for most of the fishing I do. That said, I regularly fished out to 30 ft. or so back in IN in the fall/winter on a few lakes, and have gone deeper at times, into 35'-40', but prefer not to due to barotrauma concerns.

You could go "old school" Use your graph to find the fish relating to the ledge, toss a buoy off to the side and get lined up properly, then cast away.

Mostly the bolded above. You know it will be somewhere in "the cone of coverage," which is likely a fairly small area under the transducer; for example, typical 20 deg. cone angles cover about 1/3 the depth, so in 10 ft of water, you might only see things in a 3-4 ft circle; in 30 ft, that would be about 10 ft of coverage. This will vary though based on the frequency, and modern units often use a CHIRP or dual frequency mix that will expand that coverage area somewhat. That unit lets you upgrade CHIRP transducers, if I'm not mistaken. Also, since it is behind you, especially if you are moving forward or drifting, what you see on the screen is basically "history," meaning it is now behind you by the time you interpret it, largely. That said, you can often tell by signal strength (colors of the arch) and arch definition (full/part/etc.) whether you went right over something or if it was a little off to the side, and specific settings can let you optimize this, but that will take some time on the water and a bit of experience to get better at understanding. Lots of good resources online though to help you understand what you are seeing.

If I were in your shoes facing that dilemma, I’d go 10 lb. clear Big Game and call it a day. Thick enough to handle most topwater work, but thin enough I can work around any depth/action limitations with jerkbaits, and plenty strong for whatever you might hook with either.

I had the same questions about length between measuring styles after reading through this thread, so I measured several of my bass from yesterday’s report (while out fishing) with mouth open/lip touching and again with mouth closed/nose touching. To preface, having fished bass tournaments since I was a teenager, the official measuring technique was always mouth closed, nose bumped against board on a Golden Rule. I didn’t even know open mouth measuring was a thing until researching it a bit after this thread. Anyway, after measuring several both ways, the ‘mouth closed/nose bumped’ method was pretty consistently about 1/4” less than measuring ‘open mouth/lip touching’ across a range of bass to 17.5” long - closer than I expected. I had previously compared one other time to a vertical hold using a cloth tape measure for bank angling convenience on bass up to 22.5” long and similarly saw a 1/4”-1/2” difference (longer) compared to a closed mouth on a flat surface measurement. YMMV - but would be curious what you came up with when comparing @Swamp Girl if you care to message me. Thx

Keep "the minnow," just FFS

Busy boat days are just good for the soul. They make the days targeting big fish tolerable

That's kind of been my plan the past week. Throw the big bait to specific areas that seem well set up for it. If it works, keep at it. If it doesn't, drop back and go with what you know and try and load the boat

Rain never materialized and I needed a change of scenery, so headed out to a different lake this afternoon. Spent the first hour or so throwing big baits for a big bite, but that didn’t work. Finally put the pieces together and was able to catch a double limit on swim jigs; also caught a limit of crappie to go with them - busy boat.

Back on the schoolers today. These are mostly 14”-16” fish, but every so often I catch a good one in this area mixed in with the others. Believe I hooked it today, but it ran me under some old bridge pilings and hung the bait up and pulled off. Never saw it, but it was strong, whatever it was. Who knows

Most braids “soften up” in my experience after some use, probably because many have some type of coating that probably wears away over time, plus natural stretching and bending. The line dragging in water seems to help mono and fluoro untwist, but I’ve never bothered with it using braid. I’m not convinced it reacts the same way. Braid twisting is usually more concentrated near the end of the line where you tie on, so I just pull out 20-30 ft and manually twist it back to normal between trips if it seems excessive or problematic.

Leave it - I throw the spool in the bottom of the boat and just wind the line on with braid. Wouldn’t surprise me if there was a little stiffness at first - seems common with most braid - but haven’t used 131 (have used 832 though). My YGK SS112 sinking has almost none, but everyone probably has their own perception of “memory.”

Guess I’m going to learn how to catch bass on bladed jigs this year …or at least the tackle box will look good trying - lol

Good stuff. Just read an article earlier this week in a 1981 Fishing Facts magazine by the late writer, Jim Brang, about wind-drifting with a two rod system to catch bass.

Breezy with a threat of rain that never materialized to more than a sprinkle kept everyone at bay today. Always fun having the whole lake to yourself, even if just for a couple hours. Scattered bite, but scored 6 keepers; jig (2); crankbait (2); jigging spoon (1); dark sleeper (1). Best of the day (> 5 lbs.) on the jig.

Might also try taking the unit out of “auto” depth range if you haven’t already and see if that makes it read normal in shallow water again. Some of the Lowrance’s used to have that issue from time to time, and that usually solved it.

Hate it more than I love. From the bank, I’ll take about any level of wind over calm most every time. But in a deep V aluminum on the lake, just the opposite - give me calm water regardless of skies. One of my favorite ways to fish is precise casting presentations to deep locations, and wind just makes that an effort in frustration. The more calm and sunny, the better those fish position, and the better I can present a variety of baits to them.

Changed lakes to a very clear, deep body of water hoping to catch a good post spawn bite. Ended up looking like I was really early or really late…I think more the latter. Only saw one bass on a bed, along with a handful of shallow cruisers, but very little fry or signs of old beds. Water 74 degrees. Ended up catching 4 keepers on Ned, all between 14”-17.5”. A bit of a pesky breeze and only partly sunny skies somewhat limited my approach.

Started out deep for two hours, 15-22 ft trying to pick off a big bass, but that plan didn’t work. Moved up into 10-15 ft of water where the schoolers have been and caught a double limit, just nothing big. Most 14”-16”, with the biggest at 17.5” and 2-11.

This won’t mean much to most of you, but I’ve been after an original Nightcrawler Secrets rod for many, many years. Originally built for and sold by Northwoods Tackle back in the late 1970s/early 1980s, the sales arm of Fishing Facts magazine, they are pretty rare, as you almost never find one for sale. But after all this time, by mostly dumb luck, I now own two of them that I was able to purchase over the past month. The first is the shortest version of the rod they made called “The Little Workhorse.” It’s a 5 ft rod with oversized guides, a pretty turquoise finish and cork handle with gold trim. The interesting thing with this rod is it was advertised as also being a great Slider rod, and comparing it to my 50th Anniversary Slider rod, it is very close in build and action - so much so, I want to try and run specs on the pair and compare to each other, as well as to my Zman Ned rod. All are very similar. The second one is my prize - the original 9’ NS rod built by Fenwick on a fly rod blank with rod tube and protective sleeve. Nicknamed the “Big Yankee Whip Stick,” it was billed as THE rod “for the advanced or master Nightcrawler Secrets method man.” With both of these, I’m debating whether to fish them or just display them. I have to imagine at some point I’ll have to buy some crawlers and try and catch a few bass on each using the exact methods first written about in 1966 by Bill Binkelman before retiring them for good.