Nibbles

Ah, gotcha. Misread your post when I saw mention of "FICA reducing disposable income", thought there was some implying that needing to pay both halves of FICA was necessarily a financial disadvantage. And I have no idea what you're talking about as far as the books - I only have one set. Information that exists solely in my head doesn't count

Gotta love the Owner Deepthroats! Still have a few bags of 1/4, 3/8, and 1/2 oz jigheads with 3/0 and 4/0 3x wire Deepthroats - stocked up on 'em from back when NSCB still carried them.

If you're working on a 1099 basis, yes, you do pay both portions of FICA, but you also get a lot more leeway as far as deducting business expenses from your taxable income. IIRC, both FICA and income taxes for contractors are calculated based on net income, which is gross revenue minus qualified expenditures (qualified, as in based on IRS expensing guidelines). If you're diligent about keeping receipts and smart about how you spend money for work-related things, your annual disposable income should be around the same, if not more than if you had a comparable income on a salaried basis. There's also the matter of employers tending to be more willing to pay you a higher rate than a salaried employee since they know they won't have to cover your FICA taxes or other misc. benefits. That also helps to offset the extra amount of tax you pay as an independent contractor. Just my 2 cents

How'd she get unhooked? Head shake? Or did the line just suddenly go slack? Some other way perhaps? If you are losing them after they reach the surface, there's no discounting the possibility it is due to a hookset issue, but it could also be a matter of remembering to keep your rod tip low.

Would not discount a Daiwa Sol/Fuego for lighter applications. They are solid reels capable of handling anything from 1/4 oz. to 3/4 oz lures like a champ. The Sol performs somewhat better toward the lighter end of that range, whereas the Fuego performs somewhat better toward the heavier end. The Sol is more or less a slightly heavier US market version of the Alphas (it is still a very light Magnesium body reel). They can usually be found for under $200. I honestly use my Fuegos more often than my Zillions. They have that sweet spot for lure weights I like to use - 1/4 oz to 3/4 oz, whereas my Zillions tend to perform better in the 3/8 oz to 1 oz range. Please note, however, that "performance" is subjective and is based on my personal fishing habits and biomechanical quirks. Your mileage may vary. I've fished with everything from Sols, and Fuegos, to Alphas, Zillions, Curados, Chronarchs, and Cores. Currently fishing with a few JDM Daiwas, my Fuegos, an old Ryobi Varius F200, and a Conquest 50S for very light (1/8 oz) applications.

Recently moved to Minneapolis for work (Uptown, specifically). Any BassResource people around the Twin Cities?

You'd think they'd be able to cough them back up if it starts to irritate them. I've seen bass puke up half digested shad and bluegill when they're stressed.

Until the sun comes out... How come no one has mentioned elaztech type soft plastics yet?

5" Junebug DT Grub tipped on various jigs. It just seems to be outperforming my other trailers at the moment.

Try $1800. You have to factor in the cost of the case, an adequately powerful power supply, fans, a P67 chipset for Sandy Bridge architecture, a keyboard, a monitor, a CD/DVD drive, a card reader, and regular HD's to run in Raid 0. If you're only running an SSD, you're probably not going to have enough space to store all your stuff unless you get a massive one, which is just not cost effective. You're not going to need more than 8 GB of 1333/1600 RAM either unless you like to flood your temp folder with several processes loading massive amounts of data running in real time. That being said, viruses are only part of the issues with Windows OS. Drivers are another huge pain in the butt. That being said, I'm perfectly fine dealing with all this if it means I can get the same processing power in a rig for about half the price of a Mac.

If they were spawning last week, I would say disregard the cold weather and flip jigs into places where you think they might be bedding. From my experience, bass aren't all going to stop spawning half way just because of a cold front (some might, but I really doubt all of them will), and the females usually won't just abandon their beds, especially if they already spawned on them. Work them slow, since the cold weather may make them a little sketchy. Maybe turn off the transducer too if you're a big believer in not spooking the fish.

The southern part of the lake was a bit iffy for everyone on Sunday. Lots of people gunned for it in the morning, but we saw a bunch of them head the other way within an hour. We tried fishing it in the afternoon, and gave up due to white caps. The depth for us in that area was around 45-50 feet of water, coming up slightly near the banks to about 30. The depth finder didn't read 20 until we were only about 10 feet offshore. Overall the water is really deep there right now. Water was pretty murky. On the southwestern part of the lake the depth should come up a bit. If I recall correctly there is a cove somewhere around there with some flats that you can try. We didn't fish that place because another boat was camped out there pretty much all afternoon. If you do fish a jig, try using contrasting colors between skirt and trailer. Fish wouldn't touch my Rusty Craw jigs when I tipped it with a green pumpkin 5" DT Grub, but that changed when I swapped the trailer out for a Junebug colored one. When I was fishing, the fish didn't really seem to like the jig hopped, rather yo-yoing was much more effective. My guess is you'll have a better chance emulating a baitfish with your jigs than a craw. Lastly, I wouldn't worry about the mud. I was tossing small pointer 65 jerkbaits on prefish day in 15+ feet of water and hammered some white bass. This tells me that despite the clarity being so poor, even a tiny bait was visible enough to fish when worked right. If I were you, I'd fish it like the water was gin clear. Make efforts not to spook the fish, as they're a bit sketchy and will get lockjaw despite the poor visibility.

Is there really that big of a difference between a fish head spin and a spinnerbait other than difference in bulkiness of profile and blade size? I feel like you should be able to do about as well by slow rolling a spinnerbait. Scrounger heads are very versatile, but you have to be careful to make sure they run true to avoid massive line twist. Sometimes you get a few duds that don't wobble side to side in the water, but oscillate in a complete 360 degree circle - that basically screws up your line unless you have a swivel tied on. I really like to tip mine with SK Caffeine Shads. The 5" ones are just long enough so that when you fish them on the scrounger, their bulbous tails whip back and forth in a very noticeable way.

I catch more white bass than largemouth with jerkbaits. It's pretty infuriating when something hits your jerkbait really hard, only to disappoint you when you reel it in.

I fished a tourney on that lake yesterday. Weather was terrible over the weekend, with heavy storming and water temperatures plummeting to around 55 degrees. The water level has gone up several feet. I talked to the guy who won 2nd place and he said he caught most of his fish tossing jigs into the beds of yellow flowers lining the shorelines of the many inlets on the lake. Apparently the fish were bedding there. As the water level goes back down though, the yellow flower beds may end up back on dry land, which means that you may have to look for alternate bedding spots. The typical producers for this lake though are moving baits. Black and gold traps seem to do well most of the time, followed by mid depth crankbaits in sexy shad and chartreuse sexy shad cranked across main lake and secondary points. That being said, I caught all my fish yesterday on a 1 oz. Jig in Rusty Craw color. The lake pretty much has humps and laydowns running across the mouths of all its various coves and inlets, so I was dragging it parallel to those for most of the day. There are also some humps inside the larger inlets, so don't discount those either. The bottom contour from the mouth to the end of an inlet typically goes something like this: I did it because the water levels had risen so much that I would not have been able to get to the depth I wanted with my normal cranking setup. I was pretty much fishing 22+ FoW all day. If the water levels do go down, crankbaits may end up doing better again.

A scrounger head work well for me as a crank substitute in places where I'm leery of throwing a treble hook bait. Give it a try. The nice thing about them is you can work them fast or slow and they don't float up like cranks, so you can experiment by crawling them past the fish, crawling it near the fish and then speeding up a lot, or just burn it the whole way. I like to use 4" and 5" SK Caffeine Shads as trailers, but just about anything will work. Try threading one of your brown tubes on one, it may just work. They typically look like this:

I've found that using a snap of some sort improves the side to side wiggling action of the scroungers. Same concept behind tying to a split ring on a crank.

The whole point of a scrounger is to impart a rocking, swimbait-like action on a bait, so your trailer really doesn't need to have any of its own. Often times if the cadence of the wobble of the scrounger is different from that of its trailer (like a paddle-tail swimbait trailer) they will just interfere with each other's actions. Try threading on a 4" or 5" KVD Caffeine Shad or Elaztech Fluke and just watch what it does in the water on the retrieve. They swim like a wounded minnow even though the trailer itself doesn't have any kicking/flapping appendages.

Swimming on its side just makes it look more wounded and helpless if you think about it. Every time I've come across a dying shad it was flopping on its side struggling in the water. Same with bluegill. Then there's baits like the power tackle lateral perch... Try fishing it on its side and see what happens first!

I use an old Falcon Lowrider MHXF for my spinnerbait fishing, and it works just fine for me. Doubles as a decent plastics rod too!

#2 Owner Mosquito Hook Zoom Tiny Fluke in Baby Bass Hang on tight.

Heads are lighter plus smaller. Not sure if the hooks are smaller too or not, but IIRC his 1/4 oz jigs had hooks that were about the size of a 2/0 or 3/0, which is still plenty big.

Just do a google search for "siebert outdoors".

For some reason that video reminded me of this one.

I've found his round rubber finesse jigs to be a great bait for numbers.