Elkins45

I try really hard not to pull out my phone when I’m in a boat. Having taken one swimming after doing the boat splits, I’m not in the mood to drop one overboard.

I use a Brother pTouch label maker and stick it on the reel. I have a lot of identical reels/rods so without the label it would be hard to tell some of them apart. What I really need to start doing is putting dates on them so I know how fresh it is.

The email with the code ended up in my junk folder. Thanks for posting this. I now have two reels on the way for the grand total of $76. I think this year I’m going to fish with fewer rods but take some extra reels spooled with a bigger variety of line types and weights. I ordered two different gear ratios so I can have a slower reel for worms and jigs and a faster one for deep cranking.

I’m not sure which was bigger. The spinnerbait was Rodman and the crank was Eufaula.

Is Seminole fishable or have all the ramps and hotels been wrecked by the hurricane? I’m looking to fish a few days over the holiday and trying to figure out where to go.

I retired last November and thought I would have a lot more time to do stuff like that, but in the year since I retired I have taken only four weeklong trips. Twice to Eufaula, once to Seminole and once to Rodman. I didn’t even get to do much in-State fishing because the weather was either freeezing or boiling almost all year. I’m hoping maybe next year will be better, but I wanted to go somewhere south this week and now I’m babysitting a sick pet instead. Life gets in the way.

I'm thinking about going to Lake Eufaula in Alabama next week, but it's an eight hour drive. Is the bass fishing even worth the effort in early December or should I just hang it up until the spring? I would be fishing around Lakepoint State Park.

I was there in the spring and stayed in the campground by the Dam. The ramp was fine but the channel out into the lake was so shallow at one point that my light aluminum boat was churning up mud. Doubt the storm made things any better.

I found my boat on Craigslist. It was three hours away, but it was priced well and looked like it had just rolled off the showroom floor despite being 10 years old. It took a few weeks of checking and a couple of dead ends, but it worked out great in the end.

14’ Sears Jon boat from my grandfather 16’ Astroglas bass boat 16’ Lowe Jon boat 16.5’ G3 V hull The Astroglas is the only one I don’t still have.

I carry if I’m camping on the shore. When I was at Eufaula I carried a 10mm with 200 grain solids because of the giant gators everywhere. I guess it’s because I didn’t grow up around them, but those things scare me worse than bears ever did.

I bought a 25 pack of unpainted 1/2 ounce round head jigs from the local Cabela’s retail store for $7. Hook quality is very good. Add some fingernail polish and some replacement skirts and I have enough jigs to last a while. They aren’t weedless however. There are some eBay sellers that do a good job casting them and that use decent quality hooks. I bought some well made weedless ones at a pretty good price. The seller was jkbfly.

I will keep a fish that I don’t think will survive, but for the most part bass are for fighting rather than eating. I would much rather eat catfish or crappie.

Is there a baitcasting setup that is useful for casting lightweight top water lures like hollow frogs or unweighted floating worms, or is this strictly spinning reel territory? I’m thinking a really whippy 7 footer might let me get some distance without backlashing on every cast, but I figure that as popular as frogs seem to be that somebody else has already figured this out. I have a new Diana Tatula that I’m planning on dedicating to the task because it is very low friction and has the T wing. Or should I just give up and learn to be better with a spinning reel?

Once I replace the transom wood, my grandfather’s 1967 Sears 14’ Jon boat will head back onto the water with my BIL and his two sons. The 1965 Evinrude 9.5 Sportwin is starting to develop lower unit problems, but it still starts right up. i think he’s just going to run it with an electric motor.

I’m thinking about taking a scouting expedition to Okeechobee next week. I’m calling it a scouting expedition because I’m thinking about driving my car rather than my truck with my boat. I’ve never fished anywhere in Florida but a friend told me he caught a bunch the week after Christmas. I thought I would scout out some places to stay and maybe make some reservations for later in the spring once I see the places in person. I also thought about hiring a guide for a couple of days so I could possibly have a good experience on the lake while I’m there. Are there any decent places to tent camp on the northern part of the lake? There’s a KOA in Okeechobee but they charge $40/night for a tent. That doesn’t seem like much of a bargain to me. Also, are there any recommended places on the northern end to rent a Jon boat for a day or two? I’ve found J&S Fish Camp that has small Jon’s with a 9hp for $90/day. Anybody else? Thanks in advance for any suggestions, and if anyone wants to suggest a guide that would be great as well.

I used to have to knock some kind of larvae out of the ignition key hole of my Massey Ferguson tractor when I started it the first time in the spring. I had to do it to my Dad's tractor too.

Thanks for all the replies. I’ve reserved a campsite on Lake Seminole for the first week of March. This will be my first Florida fishing trip.

^^^^^ This is a very good point. The Titanic was a pretty safe boat and it killed 1700 people. Safety is a behavior, not a feature.

I just finished watching several YouTube videos of nice shiny trucks being towed off of the bottom at boat ramps. Even if the vehicles weren’t total losses, it’s a pretty good bet they were never quite the same again. All of the videos were of the trucks being pulled out of the water. None of them were of the actual circumstances that caused the truck to get submerged. Knock on wood, I’ve never had anything like that happen to me. But watching the videos made me wonder what must go wrong for people to completely sink their trucks below the surface? Do they accidentally knock them out of gear, or did they panic and hit the gas in reverse? I find it hard to believe that the weight of an empty trailer could drag a full-size truck down the incline of a boat ramp unless the truck was in neutral. Have any of you ever seen someone sink a vehicle? Do you know what happened to cause it? Since I just bought a new truck I’m hoping to not be the next YouTube sensation.

I fished Cave Run and the Kentucky River for a lot of years in a 14 foot 1967 Sears Jon boat. I’ve fished Kentucky Lake and Taylorsville in a 16 foot Lowe (48” beam) with a 25hp motor. Unless you do something really careless you should be fine IMO. if I had waited until I could afford a “proper” boat I would have missed out on the biggest fish of my life, and some of my favorite memories.

This may be a useless post but it won't const you much time to skip over it if you like. I bought a used G3 167V last winter. It's 10 years old but looked like it had just come off the showroom floor. I've put more wear on it in one season than the previous owner in 10 years. It's a riveted boat (I think all the new ones are welded) but I have nothing but good things to say about it in terms of quality. My only complaint is that it doesn't seem very responsive with idle speed steering--and what I mean by that is that I have a heck of a time lining it up to drive it onto the trailer. Yeah, I'm sure it's the boat's fault... All this was to say that G3 makes a pretty nice V hull, or at least they did.

Why aren't there Japanese or South Korean bass boats invading the US market, as happened with the auto market? I know Yamaha is a big name in outboards, but if there's an Asian maker of hulls I'm unaware of them. Seems like there's a place for a KIA or Hyundai equivalent to sell you a nice 17' aluminum boat package for $8-$10K and totally kill the Tracker market share. Bass boats crossing the Pacific in container ships...I wonder.

Me too, and on both ends. In my old 25 HP Yamaha they had nested in toe inlet and the output hole. Took me forever to get it all cleaned out. This reminds me: I was going to put a strip of duct tape over mine for the winter to keep them out.

Yes, and the internet has made this even easier than it used to be. You can select campsites online and then take a look at them on Google Maps to see how far they are from shore. When I went to Eufaula in November I had a pretty good idea that I was going to be able to tie up my boat beside my lakeside campsite and I wasn't disappointed. A few years ago that wouldn't have been possible but thanks to internet campsite reservations I was able to pick the exact spot that worked best for me. I'm going to Lake Seminole at the end of January and I already have my campsite picked out and reserved. The best option are those places the offer primitive camping along the shoreline but unfortunately there's no easy way t find out where they are. When I was teaching I used to take a week every summer to go to Kentucky Lake. The entire eastern shore was in Land Between The Lakes and you could just pull your boat up on the shore at any spot you liked and set up camp. I've done it 10-15 times and never had a problem (well, other than the ticks.) I wish there was some sort of directory of Florida and Alabama lakes that had publicly owned shorelines. Pitching a tent on some guy's property is probably a good way to absorb a bullet.