BassNJake

Where I put in at is 2 left hand turns and probably a mile from the house I'm glad I take advantage of it. On this very short trip I pass 2 houses where the bass boats have not moved for at least 5 years.☹️

Thats awesome!! You always hear people complaining about customer service (rightfully so most times) so it's good to hear of examples of the good experiences

I run a 101 Maxxum on my 16 foot crestliner and never wished for something smaller

Love fishing tubes- smallies and largies both eat em I'll drag one around points and over large flats but I like crackin' it on channel swings or bluff walls the most

Yeah, I know. I forgot to use the sarcasm font. Ike is very good and has had a very successful career. He is also known for over dramatizing his fish catches and quite a few times he exaggerates the size of his fish until it hits the boat One strategy is to hear on scoretracker who is catching them and then proceed to try and find out where that person is fishing. I like both formats, I just prefer one over the other.

Cuz all of Ike's giants are less than 2 lbs lol

You already listed many of them finger on line, sensitive rods, keeping line tight, watching slack line presentations and knowing what a bite feels like.... Add experience and you are on the way to getting better The problem is that a jetski will be close by or some girls in bikinis are on the shore or you turn your head to sneeze and you miss the bite. Hard to line watch 100% of the time

Were there any idiots surfing? I remember getting bad waves on Lake Erie in the winter and it always brought out a few crazies wanting to surf.

I would like to know where he gets the numbers to make such a claim? Do "most folks" consist of the thousands of people who only fish once or twice a year? How many people were tested? under what circumstances? What quantifies as a strike? Braid, flouro or mono? What types of rods, lengths and sensitivities? This would involve a large set of data collection and tons of variables .... not sure I'm buying the claims of a guy that sells scent for a living, regardless of his past as a fisheries management guy. But I am skeptical by nature, a numbers guy and like looking at the raw data

Strategy is based on the game being played. BPT is a different game than BASS Just like NASCAR and INDY are 2 different games but can be lumped under "racing" I like that it is new and different because it changes the strategies that were used. Scoretracker is the big game changer IMO. Swindle(when fishing BASS) said sometimes he would get a couple good bites on a jig and then he'd toss that jig into every bush into the lake, knowing he could get a good bag by the end of the day. But scoretracker just let you know some dropped 20 lbs in one spot catching 15 fish. How confident are you in grinding them out now? Still want to stick to the same strategy? Strategies still come into play, just not the same exact ones used in the 5 biggest tourneys

Leave my rims out of this, ain't never hurt nobody

I will get a few smallies a year that come flying out of the water next to the bait and they grab it on their way down. I fish a toad a lot and it seems there are days that they just smack at it like they are trying to stun it. I used to follow up with my wacky rig and sometimes I would get that second hit not very often though. I see a lot of people talk about making sure they have their follow up bait ready. I dont think my success with the follow up is as good as theirs

When I went by the boat ramp near me this weekend there were at least 50 boats both days just out of the 1 ramp. Of course we were 72 degrees on Sat and 63 on Sun

5.7 lb largemouth Keitech Noisy flapper (hand poured copy using remelts) 4.6 lb smallmouth Shower Blows Mat Hot Tiger Love a topwater!! Seems like the bigger ones just suck it in, where as the smaller ones can get crazy attacking a topwater

Thats a cool story to have!! I have the quantum commercial on my ipod, I play it before I make my first cast. Just puts me in the right frame of mind ...

I think Ike has learned. He's learned that his big reactions leads to more recognizability. He's parlayed his big mouth into a very lucrative career. Without his antics he's just another pro squeaking by

I'll toss this in here too. As for the grassroots-level events, Duckett said some technological advancements are in the works that will allow weekend anglers to compete in MLF-style tournaments without the need for an official in every boat. "There's a project that we're actively pursuing that will create the security so there's no funny business and nobody will be able to pull any punches, so to speak, and we'll offer that to everybody at every level,” he said. “I can't talk a lot about that technology because we still have another competitor in the space (B.A.S.S.), but we do have a plan so that everybody can fish under the MLF format and I think a lot of people are going to be excited to hear about it when it's available.

I have read various reports where FLW was bleeding money and Irwin Jacobs was basically playing the shell game where he took money from here, paid it over there until he could get more money to put back into where he took it from to begin with. This caught up with him in the form of 110 million in alleged debt being fought over by his kids as we speak. So I am starting with the viewpoint that FLW wasn't going to survive on its own. This has been the writing on the wall since walmart left. IMO I cannot in reality see where the owners of BPT let the pro level tour fail and keep the minor league teams running. I see it as just the opposite, take money from flw to help pay for BPT. Hard to get the same companies to sponsor you when you recently have failed doing the same exact thing.

hahahahahahahaaaaa .... I've only fished there a couple of times.. not a favorite There are just better options close by

MLF now owns FLW. FLW isn't going back to what it was, it's now directly related to MLF's success IMO. They have stated multiple times that they are going after non endemic sponsors If you remember this was the FLW 90's strategy, it worked for a little bit too. Then Chevy left and more non endemic sponsors left too Finally, Walmart left as the Tour Title sponsor If something happens to the market - war, recession .... whatever The first thing that companies will cut is sponsorship money.(see FLW example) If your sponsors are all fishing related, you've got a chance. You have a bunch of non fishing sponsors, you might be in trouble When the market got tight last time, I sold the glass boat with a 225hp and kept the tin one with a 25hp As much as I love fishing- compared to other household needs it's still a hobby

Looks like post frontal conditions and those are tougher no matter the time of year. They drop my lake every year 20+ feet. When they drop the water, the fish will also go deeper than what they were holding. So lets say I've been catching them in 12-15 feet of water, if they drop the water 5 feet. I'll usually find them 18-22 ft but usually not that far from what they were holding on to previously. I dont know if this is East TN specific but I have found this to be true fishing Cherokee, Douglas and Norris lakes where they drop the water 20 feet or more (most of the time as winter and draw down often affects catch rates)

The information that has been trickling out of the MLF'ers is that not all sponsors are not basing pay on viewership numbers. So the sponsorship money might not be as good for all the anglers but I'd bet the owners will make out well with their contracts with Discovery Channel and others. Corporate sponsorship money >>> individual sponsorship This is gonna take a few years to sort everything out, both for the anglers and the sponsors. Hopefully, everything works out for everyone involved. It would be an absolute disaster for Professional fishing if either one of these failed.

I watched FLW try this and fail. Sure, for a couple of years there were a bunch of non endemic sponsors. Then the markets got tight and they pulled all their money out of fishing. FLW never recovered and eventually had to be bought out because of money issues. Speaking of target audiences, who are they trying to attract with their SAT 7-9 am broadcasts on Discovery Channel? I guess a bunch of people are looking for something new to watch early Saturday mornings.

Many of the complaints are that they are not showing enough outside of catching. A lot of times they are just jumping from one guy to the next showing their catches. Earlier in the season they were not catching as many, so you could watch multiple casts to the same target, where they were focusing their casts(this helps when seeing multiple casts to the same structure or the same section of water) Later in the year they just bounced from one guy catching to the next, you didn't even see the cast. I would enjoy seeing more outside of the catching especially when its just a scorable bass. Show me more of the casting angles, boat positioning in relation to the structure/cover they are fishing, more talk about why and how you determined the bass were in that location. I love watching days 2 and 4 of a BPT event. The drama of the cut and the pressure of scoretracker make it very exciting IMO, but still second to a weigh in. I was at the Bassmaster Classic weigh in and it is a powerful moving experience. I watched live as Edwin Evers won the 1st Redcrest Championship, it was like watching football on TV. Glad I was able to see it but nothing like going to the game.

I was wondering what he was going to do, didn't see him on the FLW pro circuit roster You obviously never saw the Tex/Mex commercial for Carl's JR