MIbassyaker

Why post pics? Because its fun and people around here enjoy seeing what you caught, whatever it is. Nobody else cares about my stupid fish, so I post pics here when I catch one.

FF in the middle but if I had to choose a side, it would be on the right, as I am usually trying to land left with the rod in my right hand.

I started using side imaging in the kayak for the first time last summer, and immediately found it very useful for locating deep weedlines. I fish mostly natural lakes where a typical situation is an irregular weeded slope going from around 5 to 20 feet or more, where the deep edge of the weeds is around 15-18 feet. I can position over deep water parallel to the break and see exactly how close I am to the weed edge on that slope. It's less useful in the weeds, unless there is some irregular feature, like a bare spot, rocks, or something like that. I can't really see fish in the weeds though. Different kinds of weeds can look a little different, such as cabbage vs. milfoil, because of density and height.

Yeah, my first bass is probably at least a month away. More likely it will happen in April.

As I said, it didn't work! Or at least I proved to myself that blindly crunching data is no substitute for knowledge of individual angler strengths, weaknesses, home waters, and history. Since you follow the Elites closely, you should be able to field as competitive a set of picks as anyone.

There is no secret! Pick a guy you like in each bucket, and you get points based on their ranking. Sometimes your picks do well, sometimes they don't. When I was planning the season for DTL, I thought that if I had some hammers that weren't obviously better picks for any other particular event, I'd save them for the classic. I also wanted to include at least one angler who isn't an Elite, as that increases the pool of regular Elite members available for other events.

OK, here we go -- Classic Team: a. Feider b. Ito c. Kennedy d. Mullins e. Rivet DTL: Cobb, Arey, Powroznik, Christie, Lehew, Swindle, Marc Frazier, Nania

Welp, time to pin some names to a dartboard and put on a blindfold....

I'm a cranky loner. I fish by myself and keep my spots to myself. In my area there are lots of small bodies of water rather than a few larger ones, so a "spot" is more likely to be one small lake than a particular location on a large lake. Everywhere I go has public access, but many are a bit off the beaten path and some aren't very well-known. Even a minor increase in traffic would probably affect the fishability of some of these places. I figure since I had to spend a lot of time and effort to find some of these places, anybody else should too. Price of admission, as it were.

27, 31, 33, 45, 50. Nobody in the top tier, but 4 fishing tomorrow... Nicely done! Do you have Gross? I'm wondering if they include the first-place bonus points when they update each day, or whether they're only included at the end once the event is officialy won. I didn't think to check last week. I'm at 94.3% (924th overall). Was mostly hoping just to not slip too far, and so far so good.

You can join multiple groups with the same team.

Hey, we all have our strategies -- as it happens, mine didn't work very well...

My first couple seasons, i dug up extensive data on the anglers regarding lake history, recent performance, career performance, and so on, and ran regressions every event to see what factors predicted the number of fantasy points earned. In the end, the ability to predict fantasy points was minimal. The only factor that regularly came out as a significant predictor was overall ownership percentage (which is largely useless, as you are always competing against other owners), and the effect was always small. I found that if I removed ownership percentage, the only other predictive factors I could ever find were whether the angler was obviously fishing home waters, and the total number of top-20 finishes they had in the last 5 years or so, but these effects were even weaker and less consistent. And this was before the MLF exodus, when the anglers fishing BASS had a lot more historical information i could draw on. I stopped doing these analyses because, in the end, they made no difference.

Going with sheer value plays initially for Harris Chain: A. Walters B. Powroznik C. Christie D. Seth E. Ike Will revisit on Wed and see if ownership % scares me off some of these picks.

Landed at 63.5% with a score of 953. Not a great start, but not nearly as dire as it looked after Day 1... But my Drain The Lake was another story: My DTL picks were Hackney, Crews, Menendez, Prince, Morgenthaler, Benton, Davis, & Cook. The weird thing is, I don't really think I picked this event "better" for DTL than for the regular Fantasy game. Only 4 of the 8 guys above made the cut for day 3, and only two on day 4. Two overlapped with my regular fantasy team, including Crews, the winner, and Prince, who didn't make it past day 2. Rather, the key difference seems to be the bonus you get for picking the winner. In DTL you get double points for the winning angler's ranking (and it will be triple for the Classic). So while Crews was worth 320 points in regular Fantasy for this event, he was worth 620 in DTL. That's too much bonus, I think -- I fear it reduces DTL to a game of "how many times can you pick the winner".

5.5lb on a texas-rigged Rage Tail Space Monkey:

Nothing hypocritical about wanting a higher standard of handling and care. They do things like that because BASS allows them to.

Meh. 1, 34, 66, 68, 83 54%

Welp. I got the top angler on day 1.....and nobody else above 60th place.

I totally missed the MLF fantasy launch. maybe next time. Honestly, though, I watch MLF for the action but I find the structure of the events so weird and confusing, I can never keep track of what's happening in the league, who is doing well, who is favored, whatever.

My St. John's picks ended up being: Cory Johnston Crews Combs Prince Tacoronte

Basic plastic storage crate I probably bought for $8, with a some rod holders in a surface mount zip-tied to the sides.

First time I went fishing was probably the summer of 1982 or 1983, when I was about 7. Dad took me down to the river in town, and we bobber-fished live worms we had dug up in the backyard. I remember hooking a good-sized fish that got away, which dad said was a catfish. He caught a little bullhead, but said my fish had been a lot bigger. I fished a lot growing up, usually for catfish, pike, walleye in the river, or other species like like perch and sunfish if we were on vacation somewhere. I caught bass occasionally, but was never into targeting them specifically. After leaving home to go to college, I didn't fish much for awhile --I had so many other things going on, it wasn't a priority. But I got back into it 17 years ago, when I was living very near some park lakes where I thought, "hey I should do some fishing...wonder what people catch here?". Turns out it was bass, so I tried fishing specifically for bass, for the first time. And then a couple years later I moved to MI and really got into bass fishing upon discovering there are bass everywhere here.

Wow, what's your PB flathead? Oh, it counts.... ******************** Okay, enough procrastinating -- I should finish what I'm supposed to be doing right now...

3 generations of bassers, what a great pic! "Floppy green thing in net. Most curious." That's @galyonj, no? Nice to be able to put a name with a beard. Itty bitty sounds just fine about now, since I've got ice everywhere here.... Good lord! congrats on the DD! heck yeah, congrats!