fishwizzard

This is more an more how I am doing things, but using a fly fishing slingbag so I can carry some little first aid/comfort items along, but I never take more than a single 3600 box and a few loose bit and pieces. But once I got into jigs and chatterbaits, the single 3600 box got too heavy, so now I am on the hunt for a few little boxes or heavy duty baggies to pare down even more.

Since you can weld you have some good options if you have a way to get your hands on some cheap unistrut you could easily make up a rack that would be able either work with both you yak and your bikes, maybe leaving a bar "loose" so it would only be a matter of a few bolts to pop it in and out. I was working up some plans for my old truck along a simpler path, but the truck died before I built it. I was able to tack a few sticks onto a larger order and iirc I was only going to be like $100-200 into materials, but I was going to use bolts and brackets for most of it, it would be far cheaper if you did most of it with welds.

I have found my Ned Rig sweet spot in a ML/F rod rated 1/8-3/8oz. It will load and cast a 3/16oz Ned very well and I have a near perfect hookset record with an open hook Ned and a decent-to-good one with a weedless one. I have used the zman heads and have only broken them when pulling out a snag by holding the spool and walking backwards, I don't feel like the rod has enough power to break one with any reasonable hookset. I tried the Ned on a L/F rod but even with open hooks I was missing a lot of hooksets.

I use a gel glue as well, anything less thick gets all over my fingers.

I tend to only go out with maybe two-three rods in my car and only bring a single one with me at any time, so I am usually limited to three or four presentations per trip. Even when I am in my yak I go so minimal on tackle I end up with maybe 8-16 options per trip.

I have a little spool of super fine lead wire ment for fly tying. I will sometimes wrap it around the shank of the hook before I put the fluke on. You can tune the plastic to have whatever drop weight you want and the lead wire helps keep the head of the fluke in place.

I wacky rig any worm once the nose is too ripped to t-rig it. So far nothing has worked as well as a senko, but 6' robos on a light wacky jig/flickshake are showing some promise.

He does, but only with #1 hooks. I like Gophers mainly for the smaller hooks. It looks like the new mold can take smaller ones, but I have yet to try these;

I just got an order in from them last month. On an order I made in March! They were never fast to ship, but that is a bit absurd. In the meantime I got some from a seller on ebay called "Yank Tackle". They are from the new mold with wire keepers, but the seller poured them on #4 light wire hooks for me.

I feel like a lot of the missed bites I get on the Ned are just very small panfish grabbing it and running a short distance. I have actually managed to land a few panfish that were not hooked, they just had a death-grip on the plastic. I use megastrike most of the time I fish the Ned, so that might be helping, but it is amazing to me how long a fish will hold the lure when not hooked. I have even landed a single super dink (maybe 6-7") smallie whose teeth were stuck to the lure like velcro, but was not hooked.

I am also an bank fisherman who has been tearing them up on a drop shot the last month or so. However, in the last week or so the basss have been showing a strong preference for jerks/cranks. I have some smaller jerks that work well on my drop shot rod and will work say a 100' run of bank with the DS and, if nothing is biting, tie the other on and refish the same area. Last couple trips, one or the other has always worked.

Got another 3 pounder from the same little pond I have been focusing on. The current hot presentation is cranks/jerks ripped through submerged vegetation. Got this on one a Pointer 75 and by the time I got her to the bank there was only a single treble point hanging on. I really want to switch them out for single hooks but the prospect of endless fussing and testing to make sure it still suspends is not super appealing. I really wish manufacturers would publish hook weights.

I have some of those Decoy HD Hooks as well, but I have yet to use them. I have a vague plan involving bubba-shoting some larger Z-man lures but haven't gotten to it yet. I did a destructive test on one with some pliers and they are quite strong for how thin gauge the are.

I have maybe three buzzbaits, all different brands, and none of them run straight and true. Is there a trick to tuning them, other then just fussing with the wire a bit every cast?

My first reel was an Okuma Avenger 3000 and, other than weight, I have had no real complaints with it. It does not feel as smooth as a Stradic FJ or Ci4+, but it is like 1/5th of the price of those reels. I also had an Avenger 500 and that little thing was a tank. I used and abused it for about two years and jsut gave it to my nephew who is dragging in 3-5lb catfish with it.

My youngest nephew has gotten bitten hard by the bass bug so last time he was up here I sent him home with a banker's box full of plastics with instructions to sort it all out and give what he didn't want to his friends. By Thanksgiving I am going to have a box of hardbaits for them as well.

I also have the Genesis version of that rod and throw Hudd 68 Specials (~2oz) on it and the rod handles it just fine.

That is likely, but I did end up with a pile of chatterbaits that were too heavy for my rod. I mean, I did the sensible thing and bought a heavier rod to throw them on, but still.

That gets heavy if you are fishing on foot. What got me to buy the scale was getting into jigs/chatterbaits. A "3/8oz" chatterbait, once you account for the skirt and blade, often weighs a bit north of 1/2oz. Throw on a trailer and you are north of 3/4oz. Trying to fish that on a rod with a printed max of 3/4oz, who's real upper limit feels closer to 1/2oz, was incredibly frustrating. Knowing what my lures really weigh and learning what my rods really cast best with is something I would rather do in my yard with a beer next to me then 3 miles from my car in the woods.

Yes, I have never broken a shroom head hook on a fish, but have broken dozens of them on snags with 6-8lb line. I guess I would rather break the hook and not leave a lure in the water, but I would prefer a hook I can bend back even more.

I would buy this reel; http://www.ebay.com/itm/Daiwa-Alphas-Finesse-Custom-105HL-Left-Handle-Baitcasting-reel-Made-In-Japan/352161098534?_trkparms=aid%3D222007%26algo%3DSIM.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D46087%26meid%3Db040623907a74b94b1a1afbe776c1c73%26pid%3D100011%26rk%3D3%26rkt%3D12%26sd%3D172849217823&_trksid=p2047675.c100011.m1850 It will be great for light lures out of the box and a simple bearing swap will make it better. If it is too wild, a $60 DIY spool will tame it down. If you decide you don't want it I bet you could get most of your money back out of it. If it were RH I would have added and removed it from my cart a dozen times by now.

I did try that once, but couldn't tell if it was doing anything. It is also incredibly awkward to do so with the rod tip in the water, trying to do it with the tip up got hot in a hurry. I am really really digging the technique though, so I have to figure something out if I end up wanting to use straight floro.

I am new to dropshotting and am trying straight 7lb Sniper to start with. I am about 15 trips in and the line twist is just enough to be noticeable. I am using weights with both halves of the swivel exposed (per Rick Z's blog), so maybe that is helping? I am fishing it from the bank so far and often have the line semi-slack as I pop the weight over the bottom, so I am loving the straight floro so far. I backed my spool maybe 1/2-3/4 of the way with 15lb braid, so when my main line gets too short I am going to give braid/leader a try.

Very nice! Despite living around here, I have never taken my kayak into the tidal Potomac. Something about that river makes me wary in a way the northern tidal rivers dont. I gotta just do it some day when there is a big televised sporting event on to hopefully cut down on the traffic.

I cheat and printed out a fractional ounce to decimal ounce chart and hung it over my little fishing workbench. Buying a little scale was one of the best tackle investments I have ever made. Nothing weighs what the package says, rods don't seem to have accurate weight ratings, so the only way to really tell is to test stuff in the yard and weigh stuff on the bench.