Lund Explorer

With that beast strapped on the transom, you'd better be looking for a new Ranger 525C or 530C!

It is impossible to understand a society that calls Child Protective Services when children play outside without parental supervision, and yet cheers on freedom when those same parents refuse to immunize their kids from curable illnesses. Now if we only had a vaccine that would cure idiocy!

Yeah, which one of us instigated this?

They sure look like some kind of suckers to me. What have long been known as "Whistle Trout"! The question I've got is where the h*** is Bayburt?

LMAO! It must be a rough winter when our southern fried presidential candidate feels snowed in!

LOL! My PB came from Lake Fork many years ago, but it didn't come off a bed. The guy in the front of the boat had spent a half-hour flipping at a spawning pair locked on a bed with absolutely no luck. After I got sufficiently bored watching him I tossed out into the middle of the creek we were in and it was Fish On! Having said that, I'm surprised you mods haven't figured out that this subject is as beat up and bruised as one of those spawners!

Cabin fever will not set in until we see a thread titled: "If We Could Only Have One Moderator....."

You just need to wait a little longer. Someone will post yet another thread where live bait becomes cheating, trolling is boring, the I don't believe your weight claim, or my all time favorite, the bucket fishermen keep everything they catch and they're all illegal aliens without a license!

Living in a small town with a college, I get to read about these young folks whose party lifestyle turns ugly and quite often deadly. Just last year there was a student who staggered away from a party in the middle of winter. Passed out in a snow bank, they didn't find him until the next morning. Somehow still alive but frost bite took a bunch of finger and toes. A number of years ago a drunken young gal climbed into the upper bunk and promptly rolled out, through an open window, and fell three stories to her death. On the bright side, I see on the news this morning that Johnny Football put himself into rehab. Maybe he'll be able to post as many tweets about the dangers of the party life as he did about how much fun it was!

Are you marking any fish at all? I love my Vexilar and would hate to fish without it, but there are days when you don't see any fish and it can get frustrating. I would still suggest that you rig up a Hali Jig to use while you are doing your searches. Even if the fish won't bite it, it will draw them in.

So when is the game? I fell asleep four hours into the pre-game show!

Speaking of Steve McQueen, don't forget Detective Frank Bullit. Best Car Chase, EVER!

They're about the only game left since AMC went to producing their own shows about zombies and druggies!

Spoken just like a Charter Captain. I like it!

Fishin' in the Mitten! Unless the DNR changes its stance on a possession season, almost every inland lake in the LP is going to be at either late spawn or post spawn by the time the Memorial Day weekend opener. My records show the spawn always takes place between May 15th and June 1st in the west central part of the state. This year's opener is the earliest possible date and then next year it becomes the latest possible date. With all that said, here is what I would suggest. Try to find maps that actually show bottom content, and look for areas with a hard bottom. This is where you'll find the majority of fish during any of the spawning stages. Then after ice out, get on the water to confirm your map study. But, the kicker is that you should be spending a lot more time looking at those maps to key in on where summer weed beds will form. Goggle or Bing aerial pictures will show many of these if they approach the surface. Those pictures will also show you where potential docks are located. Bottom line is that the tournament season here isn't going to give you much in the way of bed fishing unless the calendar happens to give you a weekend or maybe two where fish will be tied up in the spawn. I'd spend more time studying summer and fall locations.

Speaking of challenges, maybe we should consider the need for 60lb braided line to drag in a 5lb fish. What about the use of (gasp) live bait. I won't fault anyone who finds that fishing beds as being not enough of a challenge for themselves, but I will point out the humor in trying to shame others to adopt that same point of view. No one person knows exactly how everyone else should enjoy the sport. There is one gentleman who is a member that has posted pictures of some truly impressive fish here, and I know many of those fish were caught using several nightcrawlers stuck on the same hook and thrown on a bed. I'm sure he isn't alone with a PB that was caught using a method others look down their noses at. I guess the only way to proceed is to go all the way down that slippery slope to where we don't celebrate anyone else's accomplishments, or to accept the fact that not everyone marches to your chosen drummer!

From the title of this thread, I was almost sure it dealt with trolling.

I could write a whole book on the changes in the bluegill fishing this year as compared to last year before the winter kill kicked in. Your lake may very well have suffered a winter kill like ours did, but based on what I've found NW of you, I doubt it took every fish in the lake. Here's what I've found this year during my three trips to the same lakes I fishing on the ice during the winter of 2013/14. First, there are less overall fish but the keeper to dink ratio has shifted to more keepers and way less dinks. My take it that it was the dinks that died and the surviving fish grew better due to reduced competition for food during last summer's growth season. Second, First ice produced like normal, but January trips have proven much harder to get bites. I can watch fish swim up to my bait on my Vexilar, but they either sit there ignoring it, or bite so lightly it is hard to hook them. Finally, I made dramatic switches to my presentations in order to get consistent bites. I dropped down to lighter line, reduced the size of my teardrops, and went back to using a slip bobber. My current rigs are made up of 24"-30" UL rods (Cadillac Elites) with small spinning reels. Main line is the same stuff I was using before (3# Vicious Hi-Vis Yellow) but I now have a 18" leader of 1# or 2# Berkley Clear Ice Line. Teardrops are either 1mm or 3mm Tungsten, and baits have shifted to almost nothing but White or Red Spikes. The bobbers I'm using are Thill brand slip bobbers (small yellow top size and slightly larger red top). I also use an extra rod rigged up with a Hali Jig that I will use to attract fish into the area. My last day on the water was this last Saturday afternoon. I setup on a weed bed that still had green weeds in 18' of water. My rigs were setup 3' to 4' off bottom. Jigging the Hali until fish showed up on the flasher, I would gently work both bobber rods until the fish rose up to the baits and at that point I would deadstick them. The bites were still light, but you could see small ripples form around the bobber as they nipped at the bait. Several times, all I saw was the bobber slowly moving on its own across the hole! It's tough fishing right now, but here is what I would suggest as you are on new to you water. Drill a lot of holes, use a flasher to look for fish, and use a small an UL offering that you can to get the fish you find to bite. It takes a lot of teasing, but I think you'll find some biters if you look hard enough. BTW - If you are targeting perch, I would really think about picking up some of these Hali Jigs that you can bait with minnows or wigglers. They are great producers through the ice. Dang, it almost was a book!

If you want to experience crowded water, try a trip in August up north of "The Bath House" off Ludington on Lake Michigan. And those guys run anywhere between 10-15+ rods per boat. Always one or two that can't just get in line, or think they have to run leadcore 300' behind their boats in those conditions.

The Little Tough Guy - Edward G. Robinson - Rico in Little Caesar & Johnny Rocco in Key Largo

I can understand your desire to distance yourself from the term, but the fact remains that when you consider all of the bass fishermen involved in bass fishing, it is indeed a Blood Sport. Even with all of the protections you try to provide, no one can insure 100% survivability.

Congrats, you've answered your own question! Mr. Perry didn't have the technology we do today, so he had to rely on the practice of trolling spoonplugs to realize what the structure/cover that was below him. He had an amazing talent of being able to recognize structure and cover using a simple technique while using fishing gear that none of us would even consider today. Buck Perry wasn't fishing with today's graphite rods, or superlines, and he sure wasn't sitting in a $85k Ranger. What you really want to do, is go back through his writings and pick up on the real lessons he was trying to pass along. That is how bass relate to the structure and cover available to them.

I was likening it to the fantasy land he obviously lives in. It's going to come as a rude shock to some that Bambi really doesn't speak English, or that a spider named Charlotte doesn't really speak to a pig.

You're going to try to compare a female bass on a bed to your pregnant wife, lament her being "kidnapped", plus all of the other ........ And then you take my completely tongue in cheek reply and suggest that I do some research? Wow! Care to tell us how much it costs you to belong to PETA, ASPCA, & HSUS?

So how do you feel when a tournament fisherman pulls Mama from her babies two months after the spawn and keeps her hostage for the day before releasing her miles away from her family? What about when some "bucket fisherman" murders her? It's almost too bad that Bambi was a deer and not a bass! Anthropomorphism: an·thro·po·mor·phism n. Attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.