RPreeb

Spent a day at Arches NP and the Moab, UT area last week:

I've known guys who pour their own bullets for muzzle loaders too. Should be plenty of uses for old lead that are better than just dumping it in a landfill to leach into the groundwater.

At the risk of personal embarrassment, I have to confess that any experienced fisherman would probably fallout his boat laughing at most everything I do. What little experience I have was self taught 55-60 years ago, plus what little I've learned here over the last couple of years. As a result my technique with just about any bait is lacking in just about every aspect. I have nobody else with whom to fish along side to learn anything more than just by doing. I don't have a boat (a small canoe is my ride), I don't have electronics, I have 2 baitcasters and one spinning rig, and don't always take all 3 with me so as to cut down on my own confusion. The last time I went fishing for bass, I caught 2 walleyes and a crappie. That should tell a lot. ?

Well, looks like I'm in the right ball park with the setup I bought yesterday. I've been using the only spinning rig I owned, and was not that thrilled with it, as it was bought for inshore saltwater and was just too heavy for most of what I wanted here. I went with a BPS/Cabelas Fish Eagle 6'6" ML F and a Pflueger President 30 spooled with 8# Stealth Braid. I seem to be at least in the general range of what I see most in this thread. Feels good in my hands, and I hope to at least get out to the town pond in the next week to have a go with it and see if I can hook a couple of the dinks that live there.

Right handed Baitcaster - Cast right, crank right. Spinning - cast right, crank left.

When my brother and I were kids growing up in Wisconsin and Minnesota in the late '50s, finding a lure that someone lost was real excitement. We didn't have "disposable income". What money we came by was usually from finding returnable bottles and getting the $.03 each for taking them to the corner store. Lures were valuable to us and finding a usable one hanging in a tree was always a significant event. I don't think I ever had more than 3 or 4 lures at any one time back then. We never had the sort of good fortune when lure hunting that several posting here did, but we always had our eyes open, and we would go to great lengths to retrieve one when we spotted it. We were even known to quit fishing and go home, park my friend's boat (aluminum rowboat with 5 hp Johnson) and take our 50 year old Old Town canoe back in to where the lure we spotted was hung up. Losing a lure was almost unconscionable. It could ruin an entire week, or longer, if I lost a precious Hula Popper. We were even known to go over the side of the boat to make an underwater recovery when a favorite bait got hung up and there was no other way to unsnag it.

Saw this a couple of years ago when I was back in the north country for my 50th HS reunion. It was next to the public boat ramp in Balsam Lake, WI. Seemed like a cool idea. Hope that most use it as it is intended.

My closest BPS is in Denver, more than 2 hours away, and they stuck it in an area where it is very difficult to get to if you don't know the neighborhood. I stopped in there once just to see what it was like and had to use the GPS in my F-150 both to get in to the store, and then to get out of that maze and back to where I was going. I have a Cabela's about 30 miles north of me right off I-80 in Sidney, NE. No traffic, 2 lane highway most of the way, easy to find. There is even another Cabela's on the north side of the Denver area that's easier to get to than the BPS. I'll probably never go back to that Denver BPS store.

I just try to think about how it was when I fished with a worm and bobber as a kid. Watching the bobber twitch and jerk, but never taking any action until it was pulled under, or started to move away. That's how I sort of expect it to feel when a perch or panfish is tasting my T-rigged worm. Sometimes a sunfish or perch would nibble for quite some time before actually taking the hook.

Although "catch and release" may not have been an officially recognized policy back then, even as kids we knew what was a "keeper" and what needed to be tossed back to grow some more. That was true of anything we caught, not just bass. I started in the late 50's, and for bass, if it wasn't worth filleting, then it wasn't a keeper. We only kept sunfish and crappies that were too small to easily fillet, and even then we had a self imposed minimum size. The real difference was that when we caught one that was destined to die because it had swallowed the hook, we could legally keep it, no matter how small it was.

Because they are there........................... ..............or at least because I hope they are there.

Playing golf with my brother this week... Colorado mountain golf:

71 here.... I don't do marathon fishing. If I had to stand when fishing, I'd do it even less, but in my Old Town canoe, that's not really an option. I fish only as long as I feel like it. Sometimes I take a break - just sit and drift, doing nothing but enjoying being there. Just as I don't play 100 rounds of golf a year now either (more like 30 now). Changing weather makes a lot of body parts hurt (or at least hurt more than they do every other day). Peeing has become a stage race rather than a pit stop. Hearing aids are expensive. You young bucks take heed and protect yourselves. All that said, if I lived on or near a good fishing lake, I'd be out there many times more often than I am now. I'm darn sure not too old to fish a lot more than I do.

The only poppers I have with no rattles are my 2 little Hula Poppers.

With only 2 boats even on a small 100 acre lake, there is no reason to be within 30 yards of each other. The OP was there first, and when they kept jumping in front of him he tried to get more separation several times, to the point of motoring to the far end of the lake from them. His antagonists still kept making moves to get right in front of him, moves that seemed to be aimed at an almost calculated rudeness. I fish a 100 acre lake that doesn't even have the multitude of coves, and it would still be easy for 2 small boats to avoid close contact without either one being shut off from decent water. These guys deliberately moved several times to get right in front of the OP. I agree with Dockskipper that these other guys were rude - not just clueless, but rude.