moguy1973

Yeah I agree with the crate holders. I don’t fish enough open water to be able to use them. They are useless on our local rivers with all the low hanging branches that drape across the water. Would be getting hung up with rods sticking straight up in the air.

I usually carry three, two casting and one spinning. The spinning I usually have a tube or Ned rig on. One casting is for top water and the other is usually for everything else whether it be jigs, or cranks, or spinnerbaits or chatterbaits. I only have a Scotty rod holder mounted between my legs and two flush mounted ones behind me. When I’m actively fishing though one is in my hand and the other two are laid between my legs within easy access.

These Xuron 496 split ring pliers are the best I've ever used. They are about $12 on Amazon. They have a little groove in the not piercing jaw that holds the ring where it needs to be to split it.

I'm sure once they become more independent and my wife doesn't need the help on the weekends when they are older I'll be able to get out more. Problem is my wife likes to fish too, and she'll want to go with me.

It really doesn't need it. MacOS is far more secure than Windows will ever be. macOS - Security - Apple

Even though my oldest (8yo) daughter likes to fish, I screwed up by having my kids later in life and I fear I will not be able to enjoy my later years fishing due to lack of time. I would fish every day if I had the chance.

Mine is a Bass Pro tube color called Puke. It's kind of a yellowish green pumpkin with big green and black flake. It starts out as more green than yellow, but after using it for a while it turns into a more mustard color. I never thought it would work, but it's the ONLY tube color I've had consistent luck with in the rivers around me for smallmouth bass. And come to find out, if you look at the crawfish in those rivers, they all have a yellow and green pumpkin thing going on, so it makes sense on why it works so well.

I don't have any rods I truly hate, but I bought an Abu Revo S a few years ago when they came out with the new white model of it. It was my 2nd bait caster I ever had bought and I put it on an Abu Veritas (love that rod BTW). The Revo S never really cast right, and after about 3-4 trips it started making a really bad grinding noise, like it wasn't lubricated properly from the factory. I replaced that reel with a Lews entry level reel (LCS) I think and it works much better. Made me a Lews fan and have several Lews reels and rods now.

Navionics has some contours on it's webapp sonar chart, but there aren't many as it looks rather shallow.

To fish for gar on a fly rod people make nylon rope flies that don't even have hooks in them. All it is is about 5-6" of white nylon braided rope that is unfrayed except for the end where you tie your line.... It looks like a minnow streamer fly in the water. The gist of it is the gar eat it and the strands of rope get all tangled in their teeth enough that you can reel them in.

All these places look fishy to me. The red dots in the area I circled on the right side are rocks. In Navionics you can click on those and it will tell you what they are. That group of 5 black dots is a post fish attractor they've placed. There are several of those in the lake it looks like.

I'm not sure how low this lake gets or how clear the water is but if it's a few feet down you could run a 10-12' deep running crankbait across there. Bass will come up from the deeps to eat if they are active.

The blue dashed line is the old river channel, where the contours get close together is where outside river bend is and like said above is called a drop off. You can really see where the river used to be by clicking on the little circle with the zig zag lines inside it and then click on Sonar Chart. That'll make the contour lines more defined. I would bet to say in your picture with the circles, the circle at the top, where the 35' mark is would hold some fish. It's on the down stream side at the beginning of the little cut you have circled. If you have a boat, put it in the deeper water and cast to the shallows. Bass should hold in the deeper water and will watch for baitfish to swim from the shallow water out over the drop off where they ambush them.

Kuerigs make the worst coffee I've tasted. Even if I use one of the reusable K-Cups and fill it with my favorite coffee it's still a weak underbrewed cup of coffee. It just doesn't allow the water to steep through the grinds long enough to make a good cup of joe. Worst appliance I've ever bought.

There’s a coffee roaster local here to St. Louis called Kaldi’s Coffee. Amazing stuff. No heartburn and never bitter like Starbucks usually is. They have a lot of exotic roasts from Ethiopia, Columbia, and El Salvador as well as typical roasts. It’s not super cheap but is all we drink when we are home.

I don't have one, but when I was looking at the hitch extenders the only issues I saw people complaining about is going from a flat surface to an incline. As your front wheels go up the incline they hit the ground before your back wheels start going up. There were a couple that curved up or could be adjusted up to help with this though. What about a removeable side mounted ladder rack? Although your tool box may be in the way to put the front rack upright. Apex 250 lbs. Adjustable No-Drill Steel Ladder Rack-NDSLR - The Home Depot

Skeet Reese uses the same yellow Wright & McGill rods you can buy off the shelf down at Walmart. He designed them to be affordable for all anglers.

A half ounce really isn't that much weight. I don't think you'll hurt your rod. I've thrown my Shell Cracker g2 which is 1.5oz on my rods that only go up to an ounce and never had any issues. Just don't try to whip cast it or anything. A nice lob cast will work just fine.

Well, Tracker lists the boat I mentioned above to have an 1100lb weight limit for passengers, motor and gear. So you get about twice the max weight of passengers to put other stuff in the boat. A 60hp 4 stroke Merc that comes on the boat weighs about 250lbs, so that leaves about 300lbs of other stuff you can load into the boat. It has a 21.5gal tank, so full of gas that's another 180lbs, 21gal live well, fill that sucker up and you are out of max weight if you have three 185lb guys in the boat. And that's without any gear. I'm sure there's a lot of fishermen out there that overload their boats on a regular basis.

Boat weight capacities are weird to begin with. A 2021 Bass Tracker 175TWX has a capacity of 4 people and 555lbs. So if you put 4 people in it they can only weigh about 135lbs each. Yeah, that's not happening... I guess you could run with half a tank of gas and that frees up about 80lbs.

Could always go with a jet prop and no tunnel hull. They'll get you shallow and no worry for breaking a prop or lower unit. Guys run them all over the rivers here in inches of water.

Mine was an old Diawa something or another that I never used but maybe once or twice because I didn't know how to use it. It wasn't good, and still isn't even though I still have it but it just sits on a shelf in the garage. The first one I really started using though was a BPS Pro Qualifier. It was a great reel for a first bait caster and I still use it for some things I need to take a 2 piece rod with me as it's on a Shimano Clarus rod.

I added that option

I thought about this earlier on how many of you fish tournaments. Me, personally, I've fished a few here and there with my uncle in the USA Bassin' series. Never really done well, although the locales weren't the greatest and conducive for catching a bag of fish.