fishwizzard

I often do a hiking/minimalist fishing trips and use the following, either alone or in concert with each other, to carry my tackle: 1) A rock climbing chalkbag, good for a small ziplock or three of plastics and a small 4-compartment Plano box, pliers, hook hone, and snips 2) A flyfishing chest pack. It holds the same, plus a second small Plano. 3) The hip belt pockets of my hiking packs. Really only good for a few bags of plastics and the small Plano. What is missing from all of these is a way to store hard baits, especially ones with treble hooks. Even with hook covers some sometimes end up with a snagged lure, which is annoying at best and damages my bag/pouch at worst. While your design addresses that problem, the issue then becomes the huge range of sizes and shapes that hard baits take. Fixed pockets are going to exclude a ton of lures, or be so oversized as to be useless. I have been looking at making something like a small wrench roll to keep my finesse lures in so that I could just pocket it, but that wouldn't work for most guys who use larger ones. Not super helpful info, but good luck with you project and let us know what you come up with.

I am pretty excited to get out and try the large worms. I am mostly a finesse guy but I am going to start trying to learn a few heavy styles. Oh, and since bass pro didn't have the line I came in for, I may have made a small TW order last night. I also may have hit up ebay looking for a computer cable but stumbled on the Powerteam Lures store, where they had a very good price on some mis-colored tubes. The first friend I can convince to take up fishing is going to make out like a bandit with all the extras I will dump on them.

Hit basspro on the way home from the airport. They didn't have most of what I was looking for, so I escaped without too much damage. The Z-Mans I actually bought months ago, but just rediscovered them in my car. The senkos are actually the first I have ever bought, not sure why I never picked up a pack before. I got the hooks to use with them. My girlfriend has expressed an interest in fishing, so I wanted to get her some easy to fish and productive baits. The Jelly Worms are just to add to my little collection of big ol worms.

I have a Rav4 with a factory rack and crossbars. They are so low to the roof that both my yaks, but especially my new one, a Slayer 10, will rub the roof when tightly strapped down. I have some foam I wedge inbetween but it is a pain, especially in the wind. I also want to be able to load both boats and the factory rack is not rated for enough weight. The Slayer is too fat for J-cradles so if I want to double up I am going to need to stack so in addition to the weight I would like a bit more width

I have been out of town for work and am dying to get out. I fly home tomorrow morning and hope to hit a local pond in the afternoon. It's funny, I live within 20 min of a ton of great salt/brackish spots but I have bass on the brain and keep going to the same dinky little pond. Can anyone recommend a good place in the AA County area to get a roof rack installed? My factory one is too low to easily load my kayak on and I need to hit some better water ASAP, but I hate driving far with my current set up.

I have been having great luck with both the Fat and normal Impacts. The Fats are more expensive but they seem to last longer, so the price difference might be a toss up. However, the Normals are far less of a pain to lug around. I found this the other day, a chart of suggested hook sizes from Keitech. They all seemed really small to me, but the downsizing really improved the action.

I wonder if using a weedless wacky hook might help the grass issue?

I have had some of your baits in plastic sandwich baggies for almost two years with no issues. I have never needed more that a few of any given type or color in a given day so it seems silly to lug whole bags around. I have switched to storing my Ned/finesse baits in the same box as the poster below. The connivence of it is too great to resist. I can carry a long days worth of lures in a small fly fishing chest pack. I really wish you guys would partner with someone to make a durable hard case that is safe for your baits. With the durability of eleztech, one could carry a huge assortment of plastics in even a small 3600 sized box. As a bank/kayak fisherman, I would pay a substantial markup over a normal Plano box for something like that.

I have never had any luck from shore, but have only been there when the water was at either a very high or very low extreme. Talked to a guy who was getting his boat out of the water and he said that the best bite there seems to be on sunny days casting to shade, otherwise it's tough. I plan on brining my kayak up there this summer.

Slightly off topic, but how the hell did the "green pumpkin" color aquire that name? I know there are all sorts of green gourds, but "pumpkin" is so linked to a orange color, and I cannot detect any really orange in any "green pumpkin" plastics I have handled.

I have been out of town for a week now, dying to get back home and out on the water. I am really interested in trying my hand at some of the assorted top water lures I have collected over the winter. When do you guys usually find the topwater lures start becoming productive?

I have tried to fish a Damiki Hydra 3" rigged backwards on a 1/0 EWG. It sinks very very slowly, more then I can stand. I am experimenting with small nail weights to try and speed it up a touch. I have had good luck fishing the Tiny Ikas weightless for white perch, but they seem to sink much faster and I tend to throw it in very shallow water.

Hah, almost the same thing happened to be the other day. I took my first outing in my fancy new kayak, which is big enough to hold a crate with 3-4 rods upright in it. My old yak was smaller and I only ever brought a single rod. All day I hear this high-pitched whistling noise, it was driving me crazy. My buddy, who does not fish, was out with me in my old yak and I kept yelling over to ask if he was hearing anything. Obviously he was not and it took me a shamefully long time to figure it out.

Here is mine: Caught an unexpected pickerel and in a moment of deep foolishness, I deliberately lipped him to get the hook out. There was a lot more blood as I used the pocket of my shorts to compress the wounds, it looked like I had 4-5 small razor slices on my thumb. Still made my girlfriend take a picture of him before I dropped him in the water and waddled back to the car for the first aid kit. Funny thing, on the way back to the car we passed another fisherman walking in, he saw the blood and asked if I needed any help. I said "no" and explained what happened. He wished me luck and started to walk away, then stopped and shouted back "Where did you say you caught that pickerel at?"

It helps to think of youtube as it is now like television was when it first started. A lot of sponsored shows and very very blatant advertising and product placements. Right now the advertising industry is going through a huge upheaval and there is a big scramble to "claim turf" online. Like any bubble it is going to burst and normalize but right now it is pretty nuts. I work on the very outer fringe of the advertising/marketing industry and the "oh lordy how do we sell to millennials?!?" money keeps me well stocked in rubber worms. That being said, what turns me off the quickest is poor audio and editing. I used to work for a small production house and I understand the incredible amount of work it takes to cut 3-4 hours of footage into a 15-20min video, but nothing makes me click away faster then a ton of wind noise or dead camera time.

I only started fishing at 35 and didn't know a single person who fished. Without youtube videos I would have never figured out how to cast properly (not that I still don't mess it up about 2/3 of the time) and likely would have gotten discouraged and quit. I still far far prefer reading a well written review or set of instructions but for some things there is really no replacement for seeing how something is done.

I have some Okuma Avenger spinning reels that I have just dogged and they are still going strong. I fish a lot of saltwater as well and am just awful about remembering to do more then a quick rinse at the dock. I have hooked a cat big enough to tow my kayak a few hundred yards with an itty bitty Okuma 500 series reel and it still works fine. I think they are usually around $30-40 per, but I have had no complaints with mine and have only bought nicer reels because I can, not because I really felt I needed too.

Hah, well clearly I would keep my receipt to show the officer. I have been, with some success, fishing the 4.8" Fat Impacts in the stocked ponds. One of those on an 1/8oz underspin is about as heavy as my current rod arsenal will let me go, unless I brought my surfcasting rig into play. Seriously though, that Huddleston is more reasonable in both weight and price then I expected. However, I am still inexperienced enough that my lures still end up in trees often enough that I would be afraid to toss something even at that price. But maybe next year I will up for something like that.

Man I would love to try one of those huge rainbow swimbaits in the local ponds after they stock it with trout, but I do not want to pay what those lures and the rigs that throw them cost! Maybe I can buy a frozen trout at a fish market and add some hooks?

I have only been there once, after an afternoon barhopping with my girlfriend. She was driving, so I was maybe 4-6 drinks in when I got there. It was ....expensive. But really, it is a great shop with a ton of stuff jammed in there. And now that Ostrowski's Famous Polish Sausage is back with owners that give a dam, there is even more reason to visit the neighborhood.

I bought a pile of these from TW and have really like them. I wish they made a lighter wire version, but I suspect they will work very well for stripers and blues this year as well. I also have a few of these, which work great for the smaller Fat Impacts. I get them from a local company, who's name I have forgotten. I guess I need to head to one of the stores that carries them and find out.

Hah, I will sometimes drive the 90m to that Gander Mountain as I feel the Bass Pro is lacking. I try to support local shops, there are two of them near me, but they are both very saltwater focused and only have tiny little bass sections. The on closest to my house usually has a bass guy behind the counter, so I can always find something to buy to justify picking his brain. I do end up buying from a lot of very small online places, one in particular doesn't have a shopping cart, you have to write up a list and email it. Guy makes great jig heads though.

I have been meaning to hit Black Hills in my kayak, but have never gotten around to it. I live on the other side if DC so the though of dealing with 495 on the way home in the evening kills me.

Spent the weekend at a local pond. Caught about a dozen dink-12" fish, then finally this guy at the end of the day today: It's is hard to see in the pic, but his lips were bright red, as were all the fish I caught. Anyone know what causes that?

It sounds like the YH is the way to go and that the 6lb will be versatile enough for both of my small reels. The smaller of the two rods is almost always used with inline spinners or kastmasters, so the fish tend to hook themselves and I rarely notice missed hits. The 1000 reel does get a lot of use with a Ned rig and other exposed hook finesse plastics, so I am not sure if I will miss the inelasticity of the 10lb braid+floro that I currently use. I will say that a lot of the waters I use these two rods in are very very clear, either shallow creeks/rivers no more then 4-5' deep or shallow man-made lakes where visibility is similar. I was out this morning to chase some stocked trout in one of the ponds I bass fish in and I could see the bottom as clear as day.