OCdockskipper

That would be a shame. Right now they are Forrest Gump & Lieutenant Dan out on the only shrimp boat in the entire Gulf of the Sports world.

I understand your intentions are good, but if you give out misleading info, you do damage. How fast the virus is mitigated does not in & of itself lower the fatality rate. SK is the best example to determine the fatality rate because of their testing, not mitigation. They have best determined (so far) the raw infection number because of the massive testing and that accuracy leads to a more accurate fatality rate. There are no drugs to treat this specific virus yet. There are measures that can be taken to lower infection rate and care for those infected, but there is not a cure for it (which is what scares people). Italy's supposed higher fatality rate is due to lack of knowledge of how many people are infected and the age of those infected. The average age of the Italians who died is 80. That is pretty close to the ceiling for an average.

Reread the WHO report. That 3.4% figure was not a mortality rate, it was a rate of current deaths compared to current confirmed cases. The WHO acknowledged that they had no way of determining the true number of infections, so they didn't even try to give a mortality rate. South Korea has tested the most people. Their mortality rate is closer to .6 %, which is about 600 percent less than the 3.4% number you cited.

With all of the major & most of the minor sports closing up shop for the next 3 weeks, there is a huge opportunity for both BASS & BPT. Right now, ESPN has nothing to broadcast while both of these tours will have two tournaments over the next 3 plus weeks. I think ESPN would jump at the chance to pick up the coverage of all 4 of these events and would probably pay an inflated price to do so. For BASS & BPT, it is also a chance for great exposure. The only possible change would be the BASS weigh-in, they may not want a crowd. Other than that, both of these tours have the great luck of being the only game in town. I am going to be a marshal for the Eufaula event, so this may be the start of my TV career ?

The BPS Carbonlite 2.0 spinning reels aren't in the ad, but as of this morning, they are listed on sale on the website when you click to get the details. Sale price is $49, a $30 savings. If you bring an old reel in, you can knock another $10 off, getting it down to $39. Half price, so I bought 2!!

I don't think many people are disputing the above, but rather the solutions that are being implemented. We know the group's that struggle to survive it (over 70, lifelong smokers, existing health issues), those are the people who need to self quarantine. If you are at risk, take the proper precautions. If you have a nut allergy, why would you expect the rest of the world to not eat nuts just in case they later come in contact with you?

Im going to correct you because what you are claiming to be facts is what is misleading. The mortality rate of Covid-19 is much lower than originally suggested because the infection rate was mistakenly thought to be lower than it is. Many people who contracted Covid-19 originally never reported it because they just thought they had the flu. As the true number of infections is revealed and increases, the mortality rate drops. Further, deaths from the virus of people over 70 and those will health issues is for all intents & purposes all of the deaths. Tom Hanks and his wife will be fine in less than a week.

This may sound callous, but I think the reaction to the virus has been more dangerous than the virus. If you are over 70, a heavy smoker or have existing health issues, then yes, this virus could kill you. Also, the flu could kill you. In Italy, the average age of those killed by the virus is 80. I would bet the median in those statistics is also about 80. If you are in any of these groups, this is a big deal. However, for the hundreds of millions of the rest of us, if we catch the virus, we have a fever & cough for a few days. No vomiting, no diarrhea, just a tough upper respiratory illness. Then our immune system figures out how to fight it and we heal. This is especially true of those under the age of 25, young ones seem to handle this virus very well. Rather than quarantining huge swaths of the population, those in the danger should self quarantine. This will allow the virus to burn through the rest of society until it has no more victims available. Unfortunately, I failed in my bid for both the U.S. presidency and king of the world, so most likely panic will stay as the current course for many people in the world. ?

I don't necessarily enjoy sight fishing, so I have been following the advice of guys like Brandon Cobb and making short pitches ahead of the boat to likely spots as I move down the shoreline. I can't see if there is a bed there until I get closer. What I have found is when I get bit, there is a bed nearby. Basically it allows you to target the larger females. I'd recommend a slower moving bait like a jig or plastic worm. They'll eat but don't always chase.

I've always thought that was more due to climate rather than water quality. Our very stable weather would seem to promote more days of feeding and less days of extreme weather (hot or cold) that would cause the fish to shut down. I'm thinking of the difference of the coastal Southern California lakes compared to say Lake Mead (although the bass in Mead have to compete with stripers). Mead has good water quality, but the broiling summers and cold winters probably eliminate alot of days of feeding for the fish, hence the largemouth don't grow as big there as they do in San Diego, LA or Santa Barbara. Just observation & speculation on my part.

L.A., Orange County, San Diego or someplace inland? I ask because I'm curious if there were any lakes in So Cal that you considered to be your home lake?

Cool, thanks.

That's the thing about the Classic, the smaller field makes it easier to score higher, but tougher to gain points on the field. I had Paul Mueller in bucket B and he bombed, but his 2nd to last finish didn't create as much of a gap as there would have been with 80 plus anglers. Two people had point totals of 1495. I believe they had 4 anglers in the top 10, big bass, big bag, day 1/2 leader and the top bucket E angler. I don't know if I have ever seen a score that high.

Actually, a majority of time it was the opposite. In fact, the first decade, the concern was that the name anglers (Roland Martin, Bill Dance, Jimmy Houston) weren't winning the Classic. The original thought was that big names had to win the Classic to give it prestige. Turns out that it was the other way around, winning the Classic gave prestige to the anglers and made them big names. Many of the big names tend to be the AOY winners because they win the AOY by virtue of alot of top finishes. However, if you look at the AOY winners over the past 2 decades, only KVD, Ike & Skeet Reese have a Classic win under their belt. The other big name AOY winners, Amart, Hackney, Swindle etc have never won the Classic. Hank Parker was the first big name to win, but that was nearly a decade into the tournament. A few big names won in the 90's like Davis, Brauer & Hite, but that cemented their careers, it didn't bring prestige to the classic. Most winners are like Chris Lane, Casey Ashley or Randy Howell, where a Classic win makes their career.

Ott DeFoe, the 2011 Elite series rookie of the year, handing off the trophy to the 2013 Elite Series rookie of the year, Hank Cherry. If the 2016 rule about making X amount of money disqualifies you as being a rookie your first year in the Elites had been in place the year before (2015), then Jordan Lee would have been the 2015 ROY and the past 4 classic wins would have been by former ROY's.

Y'know, this got me to thinking - has there ever been an upstart organization in sports that unseated an established organization to become the new king of the hill? I can't recall one. The AFL & ABA had success and their legacy was the ability to force a merger with the established league (the NFL & NBA respectively). In the fishing world, FLW survived, but was always looked upon as a feeder league to BASS, much like the Opens are to the Elites. Other than that, I don't believe that a new league has ever pulled off what MLF is trying to do. Yeah, I know that the official word is that Duckett just wants to co-exist with BASS, but I think his actions show a preference for destroying them.

Even with the 3 Canadians in the Classic?!? That borders on traitorism... ?

With a full moon approaching on Monday and water temps having stabilized in the low 60's for over a week, I figured the spawn would be on this Saturday and I wasn't disappointed. The morning started with some of the females chasing crankbaits & swimbaits and as the morning clouds broke up later, I found I could find the fat girls around & under the docks. Not many were locked on the beds being made by their boyfriends, but they were usually nearby and I found they were willing to eat a ZMan TRD Bugz in Hot Craw pitched around or skipped under the docks. Near 11:30 am, I was approaching a dock that had no boat when I saw a large female cruising towards the shore. There was a male making a bed up shallow, so I pitched the little jig between her and the bed. She saw it, slowed down & nosed down over the bait. I twitched the lure, felt resistance and swept the rod to set the hook. I hooked up, but not with the bass. Instead, I had snagged an unseen canvas cover, probably 10 feet long and covered in dirt & zebra mussels. As I pulled the cover off the bottom, it kicked up a bunch of silt. I backed the boat out into deeper water, dragged the cover to the boat & unhooked the lure. I was sure the disturbance spoiled the spot, but as I circled around, I saw the large fish now hanging out under the corner of the dock, facing the shore. I skipped the jig under the dock in front of her twice, but as I retrieved it underneath her, she didn't move. I grabbed a different setup with a 4" Senko, weightless & wacky rigged and again skipped it in front of her. This time, the slow wiggling descent caught her eye and she moved forward & immediately slurped in the lure. I set the hook and after a short battle got her in the boat. She was just under 25" long and appeared to have already dropped some of her eggs, weighing in at a svelte 7lbs & 14 oz. Not a PB, but a pretty fish with a great story. Oh yeah, she was blind in one eye, hence why she probably wasn't too concerned with the disturbance and why she may have not seen the lure underneath her. The rest of the day was not bad either, I ended up catching a total of 59 bass. Most were females who had not yet committed to a bed and were just hanging out until their date night today or tomorrow.

Often the problem is cultural. If the folks fishing are new from a country where you keep everything you catch in order to eat that evening, then they will wipe out a pond. We see that in Southern California on the piers. Decades ago, people used to catch albacore from the piers and up until the 70's, you could still catch nice fish off them. Now there are hundreds of people fishing off them, keeping everything they catch. A huge majority of those anglers have a cultural background very different than those of us on this site.

I disagree. The anglers are different, but the end product (the Elite series & the Classic) is better than the BPT. The saving grace for the BPT is the MLF cups. The BPT tour is for all intents and purposes unseen. No TV coverage, no weigh-ins for fans to congregate, it is as if they are trying to keep the tour a secret. The MLF cups do a better job because they are a different product. No practice, not knowing what lake, small fields daily and TV coverage are what makes MLF popular, all things that the BPT does not have. The best possible result would have been back in 2019 for MLF to merge with BASS and have the MLF cup events be filled with Elite pros based on AOY points (maybe 80% Elite, 20% FLW). Since that ship has sailed and I doubt the two parties will ever do business together, MLF's best chance is to change the BPT back to a best 5 tour. They could institute a BassFest type formula, catch/weigh/release & bring in 1 fish over 24", but you need a weigh-in to allow the fans to have an in-person connection with the anglers. That is how everyone on this forum choose to like or dislike various anglers over the years. 3 minutes spent talking with an angler at an event can make a lifelong connection for many people. I'm not sure if a majority of the BPT anglers want that. Many seem happy not to have to deal with the fans. Two of the most fan friendly anglers (Swindle & Palaniuk) took the unprecedented action of paying $50K to leave BPT. That has never happened, anglers have never chosen to pay to leave a circuit. I think there is a lot more underlying the choice of those two anglers than was let on to by them or the BPT.

Well, kinda. To answer kayaking Kev's question, up until 2018 there was such a circuit, the Elite Series of BASS. Before the 2019 season began, Boyd Duckett led a group of investors who attempted to poach every big name from the Elite series to fish the new BPT circuit. They enticed about 90% of those they approached to leave, but the jury is still out if they have produced a better product by having higher name recognition or if they have just mucked up the sport for a couple of years. Before the 2020 season started, 2 of the more recognizable names in the sport decided to take advantage of a legends exemption and leave the BPT to go back to the Elite series. They & their sponsors had to cough up $50,000 each to break their BPT contract and leave. It is the only time I am aware of that anglers have been willing to pay to leave a circuit.

Starting when I was 5 or so, my moms sister & her husband spent time with me on family vacations helping me catch bluegill & catfish. Then as a preteen, I watched a neighbor kid throw a broken tail rapala in front of a laydown, retrieve it just below the surface and saw a 2lb bass hammer it. From that moment, it was all about the bass. I read everything I could about bass fishing and joined this fairly new organization called BASS. Originally fished out of a bright yellow dingy that couldn't have been more than 8 feet long and barely had enough room for 2 people, but I saw that the pros used electric trolling motors, so I added one to that. We would troll Mr. Twister worms through weedbeds during the summer, an extremely unorthodox method that somehow caught a few bass. Moved up to a bright yellow canoe, again with the trolling motor attached. From this boat we began to cast for bass instead of troll. Jitterbugs, river runts & Rebel crankbaits caught most of the fish, the whole idea of slowly fishing plastic worms or jigs was still foreign to me. For my 8th grade graduation, my parents bought me a 14 ft Sears Gamefisher with a small outboard. I put the trolling motor on the front & gerry-rigged an on/off switch so I could again fish like the pros. Not only did this boat allow me & my younger sister access to the other side of the lake, it let me stand up and attempt a new method of fishing that was sweeping the nation called Flippin'. Since I joined BASS at a young age just as they were promoting catch & release and since I am not much of a fish eater (unless it is breaded & fried), catch & release was a perfect fit for me. My aunt & uncle used to shake their head, they couldn't understand why I would let these perfectly good fish go. Then they thought I really had lost it when I began tagging fish and tracking them if they were ever recaught.

I was a official at Bass Fest back in 2018 on Lake Travis, going out with David Fritts the first day and Gerald Swindle the second. Both anglers caught well over 30 bass each when I was on their boat, Fritts best 5 weighed 8-0 while Swindles went 7-1. I have never seen so many 13.75" bass in my life. Swindle even had 3 doubles on jerkbaits, including a multi-species double (a largemouth and a guadalupe, or guacamole as some of the anglers called them). They were all between 13 - 14 inches no matter what he did or what he threw.

Here is a hypothetical question for James - If you had been on the Elite tour in 2018 and received an invite from the Bass Pro Tour, would you have accepted it? More importantly, what would have been the major factors in your decision either way? Thanks!!

Correct, only crawdads, bluegill and the young of the other species. That makes sense considering the time of the year and water temps. The bluegill are still in their winter patterns (in 6-12 feet of water), so if there are no crawdads to eat up shallow because they have gone back into their burrows, there is no reason for the female bass to hang shallow. That explanation also matches the success I have with different baits during different times of the year. Prespawn, when I find bass under docks, I do best with a wacky rigged stickbait. When falling or twitched, that bait does resemble a fleeing crawdad. Postspawn, when there are fry about and when the bluegill are up shallow, I do better skipping docks with a weightless texas rigged sluggo or fluke. That slow glide to the bottom more resembles a small baitfish.