burleytog

First trip of the year. Took the canoe out for trout. It was cold cold cold that day. Air temp was in the upper 30s with a W wind of 10-15. I lasted an hour and a half. First fish of 06 First bass of 06 A good morning on the water produced these stockers Two days after the above photo Sunrise on the water

Photos promised in the Extra Lead thread. Smoked the mold and preheated. Here's the pouring setup. I pour under a fume hood. Here's the mold ready to go. After the first pour from the new pot. Detailed photo Pouring from the Production Pot is so much easier than using the Hot Pot. Wish I had bought the PP initially rather than spending an extra $45 by starting with the Hot Pot.

My friend fish a tournament today in a local TVA lake. He said there were shad and shiners floating everywhere. Water temps were in the mid 50s up to 60. I can understand it if we had experienced some cold weather in the last few days, but our daytime highs have been in the upper 70s with lows in the mid 50s.

Poor kitty indeed! ;D ;D ;D

I think it was Tony Stewart that said that driving the COT is like driving a brick with wheels. The next 15 COT races should be interesting. I am anticipating the fall Talledega race quite a bit. Give them these 16 COT races this season and they should get a lot of the bugs worked out.

Let your fishing style tell you what you need, not a bunch of people you don't know. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that you need XYZ rod and ZYX reel in order to fish this bait and ABC rod and CBA reel to fish that bait. Does it help at times? Of course. Sometimes I wonder if we'd all be better off if we just had 4 or 5 rigs. :-/

Need 200 lbs. of ballast in that boat?

Maybe we're concentrating on the wrong species.

That's the thing about it. We've got a lot of guys around here who own certain lakes. Put them on another lake and they barely get a limit. That is one thing that amazes me about the professionals. They can pretty much go to any lake and catch fish. For most it takes a long time to learn a body of water. For others, one look at a map will tell them all they need to know.

Don't know how much it weighed. Was right at 20". Caught it on a weightless T-rigged green pumpkin Kinami Flash.

Try a 1/2 oz bait.

What rod and how deep?

Because I bought all of it two weeks ago. ;D

Yeah, the fish might not get Fish Chris's heart pumping, but I'll take what I can get when I can get it. 8-) Small river/creek that doesn't really show up on any maps. That's a Zoom chunk, can't remember the exact name. Smallest chunk I could find.

There are waters without crawfish?

at work. Had a Strike King Bitsy Jig tied on from my last trip to the lake and didn't feel like retying, so I just gave it a try. Never fished a jig in this river, so I didn't know how I'd do. Third run through this hole Resulted in this fish I can't say enough about the sensitivity of St Croix rods. I could feel the jig bouncing off of rocks as it drifted with the current. That little one (9 ounces) couldn't resist and just lightly tapped it. Got another bite in the same place, but didn't get a good hook set. Moved about 300 yards down the river to a deeper hole with some good current coming into it. Couldn't get in a position to cast upriver and let the jig drift, so I threw downstream and hopped it back to me. Got the jig about 10' from me and started to reel it in quickly. This one bit on that fast retrieve. Two casts later this one hit in the same spot on the same retrieve. Wanted to hit a couple of other holes, but the day's light was gone. I'm really loving the Bitsy Jig in black/blue. And there is certainly something to be said for using a lighter jig and letting it drift with the current. d**n I love my job.

Makes me feel good to see that I wasn't the only one doing that.

That is one strange looking bait. What is the purpose of the wire loop on the front? As for everyone else, I assume you're talking about a specific buzz bait? If not, just where the heck are you fishing the things? I've been catching them on buzzbaits since I started using artificials. Smallies, largemouth, redeyes, spots, bluegill. Heck, I even hooked a carp on one last summer.

Trilene XL 10 or 12 lb. test. Almost as limp as braid. How long? Depends on your learning curve. I started when I was around 12 and it took me almost a year. But I didn't have the wonderful resource of the internet.

Enough teeth to make it somewhat painful to lip them. I would equate their teeth to something like those of a big flathead catfish. One word of advice, if you are planning on releasing a trout, don't lip them. Their jaw won't support their weight. When I'm catching a lot of stockers, I'll forgo the net and just lip them.

Usually a screw or two where the head attaches to the shaft. Remove screws and rotate head 180 degrees.

I keep hearing a lot locally about using a rootbeer jig & pig in most of the lakes. The only problem is that I can't really get an answer on what color rootbeer actually is. When I think of rootbeer I think of a very dark brown, almost cola colored. Yet I was talking to a pretty knowledgable guy yesterday who said that it was more green than brown. So what is it? I can't seem to find any rootbeer colored jigs in any catalog or even in the local tackle shops.

I bought some Powerbait shakey worms a while back and had them in a side pocket on my main tackle bag. I noticed my cat lurking around the bag, but didn't think anything of it. Earlier this week I opened that pocket up to dig something out and forgot to close it. Yep, not a good thing. It took him a while to find it, but find it he did. Nothing like getting woken up at 6AM by a raging 20 lb cat tearing into a bag of worms. Surprisingly, I had two bags of the Gulp shakey worms in that pocket too, but he only went for the Powerbait. All I know is that my tackle bag now smells heavily of Powerbait. And that my cat loves Powerbait, but is deathly afraid of trick worms.