TOXIC

Just a word to the wise, braid is not immune to line twist. It’s still there, you just don’t see or feel it the same as mono/fluro/copoly, etc. It’s still a good idea to stretch it out once in a while and allow it to unwind. It’s especially more prevalent with the lighter test braids. That undetected twist aids “wind knots” that appear with no wind. 😉

Since I did an article for Yamamoto showcasing 75 different ways to rig a Senko, I disqualify myself from this conversation. 😂

I wasn’t allowed to fish tournaments on the lake I guided on. The tournament directors all fished but were the last out and the first in.

@ATA I don’t lay my boxes flat, I stand them on their side. Only the top one is flat. I also have a 2 sided Plano that is a bit larger than normal. Can’t wait to see how everything fits.

If your wife/husband/significant other is not into our sport, or if you’re single, you/yourself, are you going to buy yourself anything for the holidays? As a result of my current situation, I’m not lacking in baits or gear and my wife has no clue what I would ever want, I decided to pick up a few things that I know I will use. I have a small lanyard originally offered by Calcutta that had a few tools, eye punch, clippers, small knife, hook sharpener all on a retractable lanyard. It is somewhat sentimental and I consider it a good luck charm since it was given to me by a fishing friend who has since passed. I haven’t been able to find it after returning from my trip to the St Lawrence but I’m sure I will. In the meantime, I ordered myself a new tool made by Rapala that contains a lot of the same tools and in addition a line funnel to help threading smaller lines into jigs heads, hooks, etc. I also picked up a Gerber retractable lanyard to attach it to. I almost got a tool that Gerber offers but it was more suited to fly fishing. Last gift I got for me is a new travel tackle bag since my old one is over 15 years old and I have torn it to shreds. I have based my entire travel bait boat bag on this old Plano bag because it fits perfectly in the rear compartment of my partners Ranger and of course it’s no longer made. One of the things I really wanted was a strap closing system as opposed to a zipper. In my planning, I can take a smaller terminal tackle Plano box and lay it flat on top of all the other Planos I loaded vertically. I can do this by just loosening the straps a little. I found out that the Plano boxes that use the strap system are labeled saltwater because zippers clog or rust in the salt environment. So there’s a new saltwater bag coming my way as well. Pic is bag on my front deck. Here is the tackle bag.

Polygraphs.

Wow! I’ve seen some of their beds on Okeechobee that look like dinner tables and I’ve seen some bigguns in Headwaters but never caught one.

I take whatever the body of water I’m fishing will give me. Sometimes it’s great other times it sucks but I quit trying to keep count either by weight, length, or numbers long ago. Takes the fun out of it for me. Imparts competition that ruins my attitude on the water. For example, we’ve been going to lake St Clair for 21 years straight and we have had tough years, bad years, good years and the vast majority are great years but in all that time we’ve only had 1 year that everything came together and we had the week of a lifetime both in numbers and size. It in no way diminishes all of our other years and won’t affect our returning in the future because that’s fishing and we never know what the day holds until we get out on the water.

@GoneFishingLTN all you have to do is feed out your line with nothing on it and then retrieve it using your fingers to add tension. Your line twist will easily spin all the way to the end of your line where the lure was and dissipate. If on shore or at home just prop up your rod with an open bail and walk out a good amount of line, at least a couple of cast lengths , and reel it back in once again using your fingers for tension. When I am in the boat, you can do it by just hand feeding line or since I also fly fish, I let my line out a little and then use the water tension to help strip out line by just quickly lifting and dropping my rod with the bail open. In fly fishing we call it a false cast. I can strip a spool doing it. There are other tips to reduce line twist like opening and closing the bail by hand and never reeling against your drag but there are presentations where line twist is inevitable especially since I do not advocate using a swivel. I’ve never liked them except on c-rigs.

Depends on where I am going and whose boat I am in, mine or someone else’s. In my boat I have boxes dedicated to 1 bait (Senkos for example) and it will contain multiple colors and sizes. It will hold enough for multiple trips and I restock it as necessary from my home storage bins where they are all stored in original bags by type. I found a Plano box that is double sided and it is great, otherwise regular Planos work fine. If I’m in someone else’s boat, I will pair down my plastic numbers/colors and mix and match in Planos to conserve space.

Whew….lotta different opinions. What do we do? For example, there’s a wreck on St Clair that we fish pretty regularly. Our first time there years ago with side/down imaging we motored over the wreck placing MULTIPLE waypoints following the hull of the wreck. When we return to fish it, we know exactly where it is, how it is positioned, and where to set the boat up. I’ve done the same with smaller targets like brush piles and rocks but it makes it super easy with multiple waypoints.

What swayed you to the Raptors vs Power Poles? When I was looking, I went with 8 ft gen 1 power poles with the old stomp switchs up front and toggle on the dash. As I have said, I am the King of affordable upgrades. 😂

Little clarity on my part. First, line digging is when you get a fish of good size and your drag is working. The tension on the spool with braid has a habit of pulling the line under looser loops. As has been said, you’ll find out on your next cast as the line can’t flow off the spool being buried from the tension after fighting a fish. It’s pretty common with braid. It can also happen with mono but not nearly as bad. Happens to me a lot on St Clair with hard fighting smallmouth when I’m using straight braid. I always make a light cast after battling a smallmouth with braid. As for the wind knots, it’s really not a product of wind or line twist. It’s when the braid leaves the spool. If you watch, all line come off a spinning spool in loops and is tamed by the line guides. Braid is so limp that it can actually tie itself into knots as it comes off the spool. It will also tie itself around the last guide on the tip. I’m in no way against braid and I do use it in some applications but not with a leader and normally 35lb straight braid.

@Crow Horse there are some drawbacks to braid. Line digging and even though it’s resistant to twist, the lighter braids will severely knot up when casting after a while.

Tom, the $9 I paid for shipping was the charge no matter how you paid. I actually used PayPal because we canceled the card that was on that account and I had to add a new one. The shipping charge was part of the checkout process. I don’t pay any shipping with Amazon but that doesn’t square 3X the price.

I vertical jig SteelShad blades and have done the same with Damiki blades, both on 8 or 10 or 12 pound straight mono on spinning rigs. Have caught largemouth, smallmouth and walleye. As has been said, just keep an eye on the amount of twist you have and periodically feed it out without a lure to remove it. I will do it an average of 2 times in a full day of fishing blades.

Once again, I’ll be the “odd man out” and I’ll say I’ve never felt the “advantages” or that it’s a “game changer”. I fish straight mono on my spinning rods and I’m totally happy with the performance, casting distance, sensitivity, Yada, Yada, Yada….😂 it’s not that I haven’t tried it, I have, but maybe I’m just to “old school” or “set in my ways”. I watched my fishing partner struggle on our last outing with his braid to leader tying itself in to hangman’s nooses on every other cast. Picking wind knots out of mono is a lot easier than braid, that I do know. I watched him struggle with learning how to tie the proper knot to bind the braid to leader but he seems to have that figured out now. So while I may be in the new world minority, I at least get the trophy for the most air quotes in a post. 😂🤣

I have a lot of these dividers but I have found and not really paid attention to why there are some subtle differences between them. Some have square bottoms, some are rounded and there are some odd sizes in the mix.

Just a little reminder with the holidays coming up and everyone doing more on-line shopping, to be careful and be prudent with a little research before just hitting that “add to cart” button. When I parked my boat in my daughters carriage house on her farm I have been doing some upgrades getting it ready for our winter season on lake Anna’s private hot side where a nuke plant discharges it’s cooling water. Water temps stay fishable all winter. Anyway….my last trip up, I noticed a puddle of hub oil around a tire and fearing the worst, thought I might have a bearing failure. I have 2 full hub assemblies as spares so I was getting ready to change it out when I noticed the seepage was from the black hard plastic hub cover that holds the fill port for my oil bath hubs. After examination my buddy who is my go repair guy advised that I not cannibalise my spare hub for what he was certain was just an o-ring failure inside the cap and he was sure he had an o-ring to fit but he wanted the cap to make sure. I pulled the cap and got it to him and after examination, he found it was the cap itself that had cracked at the top of the threads. So it was time for me to go out to the web and find a cap assembly because he told me not to tear into my spares. Being a Prime member of Amazon, that is usually the first place I go. I had the part number and pulled up what I needed. I felt like it was a little steep and there were no other alternate sellers listed so I went to google and put in the part number and the results are below. Yes, I had to pay $9 for shipping and it won’t be here tomorrow but there really no excuse for that markup in my mind. So the moral of the story is to do your research before you buy.

With the weather cooling is it time to transition to our secondary winter spot on lake Anna’s private hot side? Well, we decided to head back out to the Rapp for what may very well be our last trip for the season. Surprisingly the water temps are still 60-63 depending on where we were. My fishing partners 60th birthday party is this Saturday so no fishing and with the cooler temps we might just be done. Nonetheless, we had a good day with largemouth, smallmouth, ring perch and of course a few catfish. I did have a very rare break off which felt like either a striper or a big cat. I never got to turn it to feel the fight. Most were caught on a Ned rig but unlike last week these fish did not want the 3 inch Scope Shad, they wanted a 4 inch Senko.

You do what you have to do. I have friends all with “full size” bass boats down to River Jon’s with jets and Kayaks. Everybody has different challenges. Of the big boats, out of 4 of us 2 have garages that work and 2 of us don’t. Myself and my other buddy cannot fit our boats in our garages. His is because he has converted his garage to a wood shop and me because my 2 and a half car garage is not deep enough for a 21 foot boat. My options are to remove everything from the garage including vehicles and angle the boat in, or to expand the garage space. Neither is a good solution. I’m not putting the vehicles in the driveway and I can’t expand the garage because my house is built on a cliff. What I did do was to expand the pad outside the garage. It took 5 dump trucks of fill just to get it up to grade. I had an elaborate cover routine with poles to drain water, a fan to circulate air and evaporite rodent deterrents. I worked well until my daughter got a farm with a Carriage barn. I now store in in there but it’s 20 miles away. My other buddy rents an uncovered space ant a storage lot.

I almost forgot….Back in the days I was sponsored by SPRO, for a very short time they manufactured some rods. One of my best friends whom I have fished with on St Clair for 22 years is Bill McElroy the creator of the Scales and Tales cartoon series. He now does some frame toons and miniature paddles with his copyrighted characters. He was a pro staffer with Bass Pro when I was, and he traveled the country drawing his characters and personalizing cork rod handles if you bought a rod. I had him personalize a rod for my daughter (she fishes it) and I took one of the rare SPRO rods with me to Michigan one year and had him put some characters on it. Let’s just say those rods were ahead of their time and were prone to breaking due to their lightweight construction, so they were discontinued rather quickly. I have mine displayed in my man cave. It will never have a reel mounted to it.

My first real fishing trip when I was 13 (I’m 67 now) was with my grandparents to lake Lac La Ronge in Canada. My grandfather made it an annual trip and took 2, 35 horse Johnson outboards to mount on the lodge’s wooden v bottom boats. We only kept walleye over 8lbs and back then the limit was such we filled 4 huge coolers of frozen fillets to bring back.I caught my fair share of walleye, pike and musky on red/white daredevil spoons and white hair jigs. All on a Zebco 33 and green fiberglass rod. I wish I still had them.

Well, I just got back from a trip to the St Lawrence river in New York/Canada and fished smallies in 35-60 feet. #1 catcher….Dropshot. Heavy dropshot because the current was massive. Believe it or not, a few were also caught on a sinking jerkbait and a heavy Ned.

My “Peak” was when I was guiding and some tournament fishing and traveling doing grand openings for Bass Pro and Cabelas when working for a rep group out of Kansas and I had a full load of sponsors that I was doing retailer visits and demonstrations. I pretty much overloaded myself with fishing related activities which included my pro staff requirements with Bass Pro. I was deep into it. I have cut back and now concentrate on a few of my sponsorships and have stepped back from retail obligations. As far as my fishing, I may spend less time on the water but with age comes wisdom and my time is much more productive. I am lucky enough to be financially able to travel and fish more for the fun of it and to enjoy the experience more. I have taken, and continue to take trips to locations away from my home base. Lake Powell, Lake Lanier, Okeechobee, Kissimmee, Headwaters, Wolf River, Waupaca Chain, Big Green, St Clair, St Lawrence River, are just some of my trips with a lot more on the horizon. I fish most every week year round and enjoy it much more now that I’m doing it strictly for me. So in some respects, I’m in my prime now more than when I was in the industry up to my ears.