TOXIC

I’m not advocating any brand because of the boats you listed or any boats you are looking at for that matter, you need to know the issues with any of them. Lund, Phoenix, Ranger (I am an administrator on an owners page) or any other brand will have owners pages and will contain the most prevalent problems. Keeping in mind that the internet is the biggest gripe outlet, so you have to wade through a lot of BS but there is good information in there as well. Likewise you need to run every option of boat on the water and you will find that one boat will “fit” you better than all the others. That’s a fact.

Whatever boat(s) you are looking at, go to the owners pages on good ol social media and you’ll see the good, the bad, and the ugly. Kinda like picking up Ben Milliken running Caymas and having the hull delaminate and him switching to BassCat🤔😉

Make sure you check back closer to the date for more precise information.

On our trip to Headwaters in Florida where a purple worm is king, they wouldn’t touch it. We threw one color for an entire week and it was the only color that worked….a green pumpkin laminate Senko with some red in it. I did catch one that spit up the worm in the pic and believe me I had a Plano full of purple Yamamoto worms 5”-6”-7”, Fat Senkos and both of the new big worms but they would eat the 5” in the green pumpkin/black/red laminate all day every day.

All part of the vernacular. Cold front, warm front, pre front, post front. To me and my research, how each affects the barometer is my key. Of course it’s just one of another dozen reasons I can blame on not catching. 🤣😂

Sure they do, you just have to find someone familiar to the area you are looking at. We plan a year out to go to Florida in February and I already have lodging lined up for Headwaters in Fellsmere. We also go to Lake St Clair every May for smallmouth and the lodging is reserved a year out. Maybe identify some of the lakes you are looking at and you’ll get better responses.

I can give you both sides of the storage options. Obviously, inside storage is the best but you can store outside with a bit more work and considerations. I have a 21 foot Ranger and there’s no way it will fit in my oversized 2 1/2 car garage. My house is located on a cliff preventing me from bumping out the garage from the back and the a-joining lot is too close to expand out to the side besides the fact it would need major loads of fill to get it up to grade. So my options were to store offsite or store outside. Because of the size of my boat, getting an offsite spot was going to be very expensive. I chose to expand my driveway and store outside. Your main concern is sun and moisture. You address the sun by covering everything when parked including fenders, tires and motor and for the moisture, make sure you have a good cover and I put a small fan under the cover in summer months to keep the condensation out. My boat is relatively unscathed from being stored outside. My boat is a 2005 model year and it gets fished, so it has normal wear and tear but if I were to drop 60-80k on a new boat, it would be stored inside.

Very good point. In my opinion, you are going to see more impoundments like Headwaters in Florida which was developed, constructed and managed as a trophy fishery. Existing lakes could easily be converted to this model.

Whew, good thing we’re not talking about the price of glide baits, jointed swim baits and plastic swim baits like a Huddleston. Because we all know those cost $2 in parts and sell for $100+. (Insert sarcasm). 😛

Don’t forget that ”some” of the more expensive hard baits have higher quality components, stronger/better finishes and run true to specs.

Let me also say, I was not getting good hook-sets on my dedicated Senko rod. After some reflection, I realized I was routinely making longer casts, so my preference for a lighter action rod was working against me. I went to a stiffer action rod and it solved the problem. For reference, I am a mono user with a 4.0 ewg hook on a spinning setup for my Senko fishing.

You need to back up and identify a basic item. What kind of boat you need. After that is established, you can get suggestions on manufacturers, etc. Tin/glass? Deep V/bass boat pad hull? If you need a deep V because of the water you fish……and I consider LOZ a very good candidate…..any glass bass boat hull is going to fall short. Sure, you can run them on the great lakes if you want but are they the best? Not in my opinion. If you spend the majority of your time on a lake or lakes that you risk your safety in bad weather or boat traffic, then be honest with your skills and abilities as well as your boats. Going to Lake St Clair for the last 21 years and riding with some of the most talented boat drivers I have ever seen in the worst conditions I have ever been in educated me to my and my boats limits.

Easy answer is that it’s born into our DNA we are a species of hunters. Even though we don’t always eat our catch, it satisfies the primal instinct we have to hunt. Doesn’t matter the species.

I will be able to promote the quality and value of your rods and why they are the best choice.

Could be a combination of things. If I am losing fish after the hookset a couple of things come to mind. First, I’ll sharpen the hook just to eliminate that issue. If I keep losing them I will change hooks. May not be the cause but I do it anyway. I tried a new Ned head and so did my fishing partner. We were both losing fish at the boat. I have a buddy who pours his own Ned’s and uses a stout trout hook and they never come unpinned. I’m going back to his Ned’s.

Predicted heavy rains for us tonight into tomorrow. We’ve lost a good amount of temp and it has caused the cherry blossoms on the mall in DC to bloom ahead of schedule and then get ripped by the massive winds we’ve had. I enjoyed the blooms when I worked in DC but quit going down to see them when the tourons would hold their kids up to strip the blooms. One good thing about the upcoming rain is that it will end the fires that have sprung up all across our part of the state. It’s been bad.

Made a quick trip out to the hotside. It’s been a month since I’ve been out but my fishing partner has been out the last couple of weekends. Last week they found males on the beds or hanging around the beds but no big girls on the beds. We had a cold snap during the week and on our most recent trip water temp was mid 60’s and they pulled back to the first drops. We even tried deep blade baiting and got -0- fish. We watched them follow the blades but would not commit. We totaled about 30 fish between the two of us and all were caught on Ned rigs in fairly open water around drops. We call this a “dues paying” day.

It takes a long time in different situations for a bait or technique to show its best application. It takes the same amount of time for you to perfect using the baits and determining when they work the best. Eventually you will get more comfortable and more skilled with certain baits and you will bend them to fit the conditions. You have to be flexible enough to know when to switch up as well which means different baits and skills. My advice is to try as many as you can and it will come naturally.

Something I have always wondered is how muddy or heavily suspended silt in the water affects a bass ability to “breathe” since they pull oxygen out of the water through their gills. It’s like we pull oxygen out of the air with our lungs. Would heavily silted water be like us in a smoke filled room? Do they get less oxygen because of the heavy particulate? 🤔

Funny timing. We are in a warm period with a hefty drop in temperatures during the week. Raked the front dirt patch and over seeded. As usual the seed will take and then in mid summer no matter how much I water it, it will die because of the monster sugar maple I have in the front yard. Landscaper who redid all of our yard told me that the maple will drink on average 150 gallons of water a day out of the soil so grass really can’t survive. We tried anyway and had it sodded but it took about 4 years to give up. Now we just have accepted it will be sparse grass and some ground moss. I do blow the leaves down off the cliff my house is built on. Because we are in the forest, composting is out of the question, I have literally tons of leaves. Pic shows the front and the maple trunk and the other shows the side yard. We are literally in the forest.

Just got back from my brother in law and sister in laws in Florida where he is part owner in a brewery. Was there for 10 days so I got to sample the current brews. Pics are of the current offerings (it changes depending on the brewmaster’s fancy) and what I brought home for me in crowlers.

Cold is dependent on where you are located. For me anything under 50 is cold. As far as mud, I have 2 rules. 1. Mud will push them to the bank normally and 2. They normally have lockjaw for 3 days after an event that muddies the water. After 3 days they gotta eat.

Cresent beach, St Augustine Florida. Brother in law and sister in law have a beach house. It was forecasted to be 85 there today. Got home and it’s 45. 😒. Rained from the Georgia border all the way home. Still raining.

It’s gonna be hard leaving here tomorrow morning and driving 13 hours through predicted rainstorms on my way back to Virginia.

Now that I’m switching to non ethanol, it would be nice to find it in the proper octane level. When I was using e-10 a very reputable Yamaha mechanic advised me that since my 2 stroke has no knock sensor and cannot adjust timing, that I should run mid-grade fuel. I do notice that a lot of non ethanol fuel is higher octane. Higher octane is not better for my motor.