MrPeanut

That’s a good idea. I like adding a chunk of a bright chartreuse stick worm to add a little color flash on a black blue jig & chunk

It's starting to get to the point where open water may be right around the corner after the 60's for a couple days this week

I’m excited this is set up again, winter blues are real

The season was fun as usual. Even more usual I had a couple of tanker events that were hard to recover from.

touche 2020

I love being up in the northwoods

Both are really good points above. The ponds I head to more often than not have pretty small bass. If I have a whole day to dedicate to fishing I’ll take the boat out, but maybe I’ll try to mix up which ponds I frequent

I feel like a 4lb in the burbs is like finding bigfoot, nice work dude!

hopefully not too much longer - cabin fever is taking it's toll lol

That's awesome for the small lakes in the southern part of WI I frequent

I miss warm weather after reading this thread lol

that is absolutely insane lol

A - Drew Cook B - John Crews C - Brandon Cobb D - Bryan Schmitt E - Austin Felix I was going to go with Cox in bucket A, but so many others had him picked I guess I wanted to be different to try to sneak in more points.

I'll go through it usually when I get cabin fever pretty strong towards the end of winter. I say every year I need to reduce the amount of baits (specifically plastics)...yet here we are. touche monkey.

It's fairly difficult for stores to keep a large selection of fishing lures in stock in multiple colors/sizes and still be profitable, so I'm not shocked Dick's is failing to keep up a fishing dept in some areas. Unless location wise they're by some good fisheries, they just won't have the product turnover needed. It sucks for us as the consumer, but I'd imagine it's pretty difficult for a store manager to explain why the space is needed for all the packages of just the worm section - if you think about how much shelf space it takes up just to have a couple sizes in a small handful of colors - compared to other items/sports that may sell year around. Particularly up here where the water is hard for several months. Compared to fly shops, where their inventory is a lot smaller and can keep hundreds of flies in what is practically a dresser drawer.

I'm in again - typically once summer starts i get busy and totally forget about a tournament, hopefully I'm less smooth this year haha

In my experience the beat up jigs catch (seemingly) more fish too. It might just be coincidence in they've been used more, but it also could be the more beat up looking they are the more natural they are. Most things in nature aren't perfectly shaped, the beat up skirts may appear more natural under water

This whole story is crazy. Kudos again to the journalism in the article, that was one of the better written articles I've read in a long time with everything laid out clearly with back up evidence. Reading stories of the dark side of people with fame and fortune always sucks. It puts such a bad taste in people's mouths about the sport in general. On that note, it really does make you appreciate even more the true good people out there who have a celebrity like status and use it for good.

I basically got destroyed at Winyah Bay lol. Oh well, on to the next one

That's awesome. The pic of him holding the smallie is even better.

oooh that could be handy hopefully they never go on sale and the monkey leaves me alone

I have a gramin striker that works well for what's needed. I was in the same boat and limited by a budget when I picked it up, it works good for traditional 2d as well as down imaging. It doesn't have mapping, but can store waypoints if needed. I'm not sure what the plus models add since I picked it up before those came out. I typically use the navionics app on my phone for mapping. It can be annoying to switch back and forth visually, but it helped the budget quite a bit.

Swim jigs can be fished with any 7' MH rod. I typically run 30 or 40 lb braid on swim jigs, and then adjust the floro leader based on if it's more open water or in cover. At times I'll go down to 12 lb on the leader, or up to 17 lb. Just make sure the hook fits with what leader your using - don't use a thick gauge hook designed for heavy cover with 12 lb and vice versa. In really shallow water, or if there's a lot of pressure I often drop down to a finesse swim jig (1/4 oz) and throw it on a 7' Medium rod on 12 lb floro

That looks like a great idea. Garage/shop innovations are the best

I've been staring at @A-Jay pics for a few minutes instead of working lol, spring can't come soon enough up here. I think long arming a fish in a pic is fine as long as you're doing it for the picture value, and not trying to say it's bigger than it really is. There's a lot of fish, even if they're not giants, that just look cool and should be a focal point of a photo.