senile1

Nice PB and good story!

It sounds like you are talking about the slot on the top of the bait. Like you, I prefer baits without the slot where I can place the hook just under the skin. If the hook is left sitting in the slot and the worm/bait moves on the hook while in the water, it is much easier for the hook point to become exposed and hang on something. On baits with a slot, you can insert the hook just under the skin in the slot as well.

As I'm sure you are aware, it is quite rare for a black bear or coyotes to attack, though there are those rare occasions where someone has encountered a bear that has been fed, or a female's cubs and was attacked. A few years ago a female hiker was attacked and killed by a pack of coyotes in Nova Scotia which is really rare. A large bore handgun is your best choice especially in a close encounter. Talking a lot is one way to avoid encounters with bears as the normal bear will stay away from humans, but it is the abnormal bears that you have to worry about. My wife and I hike a lot in the mountains and we carry bear spray always. In grizzly country, which you don't have to worry about in New York, I feel a lot more comfortable with a good weapon handy and even then I would hate to ever encounter one of these beasts.

Missouri has a Missouri Hunting app for your phone. You download it for free, enter your conservation number from your license, and your birth date. Once that is completed you can display all of your licenses, fishing included, on your cell phone when you encounter a conservation agent.

No. It took me long enough just to learn how to tie the knots that work for me. I have yet to learn how to keep the Loctite/super glue off my fingers so my fingers aren't stuck to everything else.

In addition to fishing, guitar has been my passion but over the last year I have had to decrease my playing time due to Kienbock's disease in my right wrist. Additionally, hiking in the mountains (Rockies and Appalachians) is something I love almost as much as fishing. These pics are from about a month ago when my wife and I traveled to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. This was from the top of Mt. Pierce at 4310 feet. The two pics below are from the top of Mt Eisenhower (4780 feet) which we climbed after scaling Mt Pierce. Our combined elevation gain was 3300 feet. The two pics below are from the top of Mt Washington at 6280 feet. My wife wasn't ready to attempt this one so we drove to the top of it. In the bottom photo, if you follow the ridge that is aligned with my right knee up to its peak, that is Mt Eisenhower which is 5 miles from where I am sitting. The photo below shows what the trails we climbed were like. It was pretty much rocks straight up with very few switchbacks. On Mt Eisenhower we had to do some rock scrambling to get to the top.

You hit the nail on the head on that one for me. On another note, on large, busy lakes huge rolling waves from large boats do the same thing to me. Plus, I find I have to place one foot against the gunwale and keep my rear planted against my butt seat to keep from falling out of the boat while it rocks. It can make it quite difficult to concentrate on what your lure is doing.

Yes, I do. The one in the picture below was built a couple of miles back in a Missouri Department of Conservation area. Very few people hike back to it as it requires scaling some steep hills with your equipment to get there. The paths aren't exactly the best either.

Paul explains the use of horizontal retrieves in his long post above. I assume this applies to these videos as well. See below.

Where I live in Kansas City we were supposed to have a bit over a minute of totality. I stopped work and went out to watch. Just as it was reaching totality, the clouds came in and then some rain. The clouds haven't left. Unfortunately, I am now blind.

@Team9nine nailed some of the best resources for learning about the habits and movements of bass. A number of others have mentioned time on the water and @scaleface makes an excellent point about how much time may be needed. I think many of us often go to these resources and study the information but we don't realize what it takes to apply it on the water. How many of us have studied these guides, reviewed and chosen some likely looking places on a map of a large lake, and then proceeded to those areas and fished them only somewhat differently than we have in the past? I know I have. An angler may think he has discovered one of the best large points available on a lake, but he won't know the full picture of how bass use it until he has researched that piece of structure on the water and in different seasons. Don't shortchange the mapping of structure just because you have the best electronics available. Use those electronics to help decrease the time needed, but make sure you spend enough time to cover the whole area. Those tiny "spots within a spot" that hold lots of bass typically aren't found by accident.

I hope you had a good birthday, @A-Jay. I turn 28.5 years old in November.

Thanks for the support, everyone. That is sad and quite an obstacle to face. My thoughts are with you and your wife. Thanks, Sam. I actually did quite a bit of reading once I discovered Dad had the disease. I also did a lot of research on the financial requirements and the ins and outs of using Medicaid in Missouri. My parents have very little and this was the only way they were going to pay for his nursing home care while leaving something for my Mom to live on.

I've been away from the forums for the most part for the last 7 months and I'm not sure if I am back now. It is kind of hard to get back in the groove with posting when more important things are going down. I plan to try and be a part of things around here but only time will tell. My Dad is now 79 years old. We discovered in a startling way around Christmas that he was afflicted with Alzheimer's Disease. We were leaving his home, and he decided he and my Mother were leaving too, because to him, it wasn't his house. I had to drive him around for a while and humor him until he recovered and then we returned to the house. I thought I had detected some minor signs before, but since I live 7 hours away and our Mom wasn't telling my sisters and me everything that was occurring, we really didn't know how bad it was getting. By the end of January, he was placed in a nursing home because he was a roamer and my Mom could not control him. Two months ago he fell at the nursing home and broke his hip. Fortunately, he seems to be recovering well from that. He knows us most of the time but he is living in a different time quite often and thinks he is still working on the farm. Between traveling to see him and assist my Mom with financial issues, my work as a network engineer, and making time for my wife, children, and grandchildren, it has been difficult to find time for fishing. Below is the last picture I have of Dad on the water in 2016. I know I am not the only one to deal with this, but I wanted to let everyone know why I have not been around.

Classical conditioning (also known as Pavlovian or respondent conditioning) refers to a learning procedure in which a biologically potent stimulus (e.g. food) is paired with a previously neutral stimulus (e.g. a bell) Instead of getting hung up on semantics, lets lay that baby to rest. As Team9nine stated, conditioning is a type of learning, by definition. And even simple-minded creatures become conditioned.

This explains it better. The first recognition of someone doing this with the word, fish, was in 1855. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

I think there are only two. This is just a guess but I suspect that 99 percent of the time any woman who allows you to fish 200 days a year looks like Igor and has a hump on her back.

My, my . . . . a 12 lb upgrade on his personal best. That's heart attack city right there! Very nice fish!

Nice! Congratulations on the new PB.

Those are some nice looking fish!

Congratulations!

I use green pumpkin, black/blue, and to a lesser extent reddish and brown/orange colors. If you are trying to match colors and species, they vary across the United States so you need to do research for your region or state. In Missouri, we have at least 35 crayfish species and 7 are found nowhere else (https://nature.mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/general-species-information/aquatic-invertebrate-facts/crayfish-facts). The top photo, below, is a typical white river longpincered crayfish (Table Rock, Bull Shoals lakes). The bottom photo is a Devil Crayfish and it is common all across Missouri. However, in the bootheel region some of these crayfish are a blue color and I have seen other pictures of them where they were a green color with red on the pincers.

Now that's a fish! Congratulations on your DD!

I was rooting for the Cubs. Like K_Mac I am a Cardinals fan but after 108 years you have to feel some empathy for Cubs fans. I'm glad they got this out of the way so that I can go back to rooting against them. Now for the Indians . . . . 1948 is quite a long time to go without a World Series victory. I hope it comes for them too.

Congratulations on the new PB.