Jolly Green

"He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind..." I'm no Bible scholar but I think in the New Raider Version it translates to "Even if she says 'OK' trust your gut or risk a double ladleful of whoop-@$$." Best of luck to ya.

I think the acidity is overall about even between lemons and limes, but I know my mother has always used bottled lemon juice (yuck) for consistency's sake; fresh citrus can vary in acidity quite a bit, she says. You might try crystalline citric acid, which will bump up the acidity without amping up that awesome vinegar flavor. Personally, I'm planning on gutting and freezing our extra tomatoes. I'll let you know come February if they make acceptable salsa or not. Good luck!

I don't use any kind of jig spinner except for panfish sometimes, so I can't comment on those other than to say you takes yer chances with them, maybe they'll never pop open at an inopportune time, maybe they will. I use the regular minnows without the spinner on occasion and they do catch fish. The hooks are not heavy but they aren't wimpy, either; I've landed some feisty pike on them, and of course, bass. Because I mainly fish my local river, and it's pretty shallow for the most part, I have to fish them a little faster than I'd like to keep them out of thick weeds and rocks that are big enough to eat them. I used them quite a bit last fall (as well as bucktail jigs) in deeper areas of the river where I can rig them under a float and let them drift downstream, twitching them back, just like you would a marabou jig for crappie. I was surprised at how well it worked. Good luck!

I almost don't care what I catch. I love it when a bass sucks up a jig off the bottom, and when a pike comes rocketing out of cover and crushes a lipless crank, and when a bunch of blue gill are all head-butting each other trying to be the first to gulp a fly. It's all good.

I run 20# PP with a fluoro leader on my main spinning reel and I get very few wind knots, usually only if I'm trying to whip a lighter weight lure a little too hard. I do use a swivel for flukes or other soft jerk baits but not for anything else. Are you using a leader, and if so, what leader knot do you use? A bulky knot will potentially get hung up in the tip guide, and it only takes a fraction of a second for the line coming up behind it to loop through itself. What lures are you throwing? Some are more twist prone than others. I'm of the opinion that even if you spool the reel correctly, spinning reels twist you up after a while, no matter what, unless you periodically take measures to untwist it. Imagine your line is flat like a ribbon; you spool it on perfectly flat, but on your first cast you would notice that because the line comes off the end of the spool instead of unwinding perpendicular to the spool as on a baitcaster, there is a twist for every turn that comes off, it's just the way spinning reels are. I usually end a long session of fishing by tying on a swivel snap and attaching a 1/2 oz. spinnerbait and tossing it downstream. (I mainly river fish.) Retrieving against the current nice and slow a couple times seems to eliminate any huge amount of twist that might have built up over the hours. You may also want to make sure that the line roller is moving as freely as possible. I don't know if the Trion has a bearing in there or not, but a sticky line roller will twist you up in a hurry.

When your rod does break, keep the grip section. When you hang up with your new rod, you can let out some slack and wrap it around your old grip a few times and pull free with that instead of busting your new rod. Or you could just keep something similar handy now and save yourself a busted rod.

In all seriousness, I know of one or two fish traps a person could make out of sticks and live bait, but technically it would be illegal here to take a bass that way. There's a video on YouTube I can't find of a guy spending hours (mercifully edited) creating a rod and line out of stuff he found in the woods and using a whittled bone hook. He didn't catch squat. I can catch squat just fine with regular tackle so I'm gonna pass, but I give props to anyone who undertakes it and succeeds. Best of luck to ya.

For my money, raccoon small intestine makes the best all around natural line. Squeeze everything out of it, making sure to save the tapeworms for bait, then soak it for a while and stretch it out to dry. (Fly fisherman will find that they suddenly have all the flies they could ever ask for at this point.) Although mono-gut is fine for panfish, for bass you should strongly consider braiding several lengths together, because braid is awesome. You'll find that its refractive index is nothing to brag about, but it's certainly better than that of twisted plant fiber. Coon-gut braid's superior diameter to pound-test ratio and above average abrasion resistance make it a no-brainer in my book, but lots of guys still use twisted plant fiber and do just fine. It all comes down to confidence. Tight guts!

The nice thing about our industry is that, barring torrential rains and tornadoes, the nice weather months are a perfect time to take a day here and there; it's the winters that keep us hopping. Our leave time policy is very flexible; we can take vacation time almost at will with the proper notice. It's another smart move on the owner's part to make time off so accessible to the people who have earned it; the current policy went in place eight years ago and almost immediately eliminated those mysteriously common Friday/Monday morning fevers. The VP, to whom I report directly, is also interested in having someone show him and his kid a world beyond worm and bobber fishing and he's just the kind of guy to push the schedule around to make that happen. If the boss says we gotta go fishing today instead of work, well, who am I to blow against the wind? Pretty soon. Turns out the guy they bought it from never had it titled in his own name when he bought it from his dad, so I'm working on getting that cleared up still and it is staying in the garage until that happens. She only fits in the garage by a half inch on either side (really) and four inches total fore and aft, and the driveway is a goofy slope such that it took three people to push it inside without damage. During the brief test run we took I was so excited to be on the water I didn't even think about pictures. I'll snap a few when it's time to take it out for a real.

Thanks, y'all. Though I've certainly worked hard not only at the day to day job but also to help the company improve as a whole, it's not lost on me that the owner is a one-in-a-million boss; he's one of the most generous employee-first people you'll ever meet. I work in property damage restoration, a big part of which is emergency service, and it's a lifestyle that the whole family has to get behind in order to make it work, so I owe many thanks to my wife as well. Can't say that she's quite as excited as I am, but she feels the love. See ya out there!

Saturday marked ten years with the company and when I got to work today there was a nice breakfast spread and lots of kudos from everyone, and then I look outside and one of the guys is towing a boat right up in front of the windows. Speechless! It's used but solid, 16 more feet of boat than I was ever going to own anytime soon, outboard, trolling motor, GPS, depth finder, rod locker, live well, plus everything I need to legally have on there; she's totally water-ready! I even got the rest of the day off to go with one of our guys who knows boats so I could start learning my way around it. Not a bad day at work. If you have to have a boss, you'd be darn lucky to have mine.

There's a little glare under the eye where the black stripe looks to be, but besides that I see pretty much blank fins; any pike I've ever seen has black spots on the fins.

... to retrieve a bobber. His buddy got hung up, but couldn't bring himself to jump in after his own bobber. Takes a pretty good friend to strip to his shorts and swim out 10' on the shady side of mid-sixties water first thing in the morning to save your only beloved red-and-white 25 cent special.

Have you used 15 lb. braid on a baitcaster before? Seems a little skinny and dig-prone, similar diameter to 6 lb. mono. I've not used either of those reels, but I think it's always worth considering finding a way to actually use or at least cast them. Might save you the shock of using a Revo one day for the first time ever and saying to yourself, "Man, the three Tatulas I bought are worthless crap compared to this."

Bell's makes an awesome wheat ale called Oberon. Matter of fact they don't make a bad brew. Their Kalamazoo Stout is a must-try for fans of darker stuff.

Yeah I think it ended back on May 11th, lol.

I'm no help, but here's some sympathy: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers

Truth. My son and I had a head-slapper moment two years ago when we went to fish off of a local pier. The walk is stationary but the pier floats, and as soon as we stepped onto it, it moved under our weight and there was a virtual explosion of V-shaped wakes blasting off away from us in every direction. We both kind of looked at each other and said, "Ohhhhhhh...." Since that day, we always cast our way to the water's edge.

I won't leave everything else at home, but I will make a commitment to work with a particular lure on certain outings or whole weekends. It's kind of like the serenity prayer; the patience to stick with the lure I'm learning, the prudence to change up, and the wisdom to know if fish simply aren't present where I'm fishing. I've purposely kept my beloved flukes in the bag for weeks this year, and it's paid off with some eye-opening experiences learning a bottom-contact jig; normally I stick to swim jigs. But if I've been skunked for hours on end I figure, before I give up altogether and leave, where's the harm in tying on a roadrunner w/grub just to see if I can get any kind of interest at all? The hardest technique for me to stick with long has been a C-rig; I don't like fishing it so I give it up relatively quickly, but I've caught the occasional fish with it and I figure it's good to make an effort to stay well-rounded.

Looks like you tie a jig head to each end of a piece of 3' leader material. I don't know how critical it is to get the loop in exactly the right spot along the leader, but if you end up with 30" of line after tying knots, you would just tie a loop in the leader 10" from one of the jig heads. If you pick the whole thing up by the loop and let it dangle, the bait (rigged with the eel or whatever) on top should be completely clear of the bait on the bottom.

Somewhere on Lake Erie there's a walleye guy cursing all the monster smallies he keeps hauling in.

http://www.dgif.virginia.gov/fishing/regulations/licenses.asp

I wait until I feel some weight on it, and by "wait" I mean less than a second. The visual cue of seeing the fish blow it up can still make me jump the gun sometimes, but generally unless the first thump is the take - and sometimes it's not - I wait half a beat until I know the fish is there, reeling down during that pause, and set it firmly up toward my shoulder. Works for me. You're bound to get a few suggestions to use a trailer hook. I tried them twice and all I got was a couple of fish who ate the main hook and got face-stuck with the trailer hook, so I do without them, and I do just fine.

Looks like a Boo-Yah Pond Magic spinnerbait.