Kayak Koz

Very cool. Where is your son playing? My son is only 11 (that's his A1K on the hook) and his goal is to play for the University of South Carolina. Of course, he wants an A2000 or A2K but I've told him he's too young for a $400 "forever glove". The only way he gets one is staying on honor roll from now until high school and making his high school team.

What was really nice is that when I was communicating with Wilson Ball Gloves via Twitter messaging when they asked me what shirt size I wanted I told them this was for my son so a youth XL or adult small will be fine. The Wilson rep then asked me if I wanted a shirt for myself as well. That was pretty cool. They didn't have to do that and I was definitely not expecting that. I'm excited to see what they send us. My son is working on his "Thank You" note to them right now even though we haven't received anything yet!

This ties in to fishing, I swear. I happen to be a Baseball Dad and a baseball coach to my son and every now and then I look out for giveaways, especially with Wilson Ball Gloves because they occasionally give away $400 baseball gloves. One of the promotions they have is Wilson Wednesdays where you submit a picture. This week they were giving away a custom A2000 special edition All Star Game glove. This is the glove they gave out to MLB All Star players that wear Wilson gloves. Anyway, this afternoon I get a message on Twitter from Wilson. I didn't win the glove but I did win some shirts and All Star swag with the picture below that we took at one of the lagoons that we fish. It's been blazing hot hear lately and other than a few two pounders the other day we haven't caught much so the pic was truly our best catch of the day. Here's the Twitter link from Wilson: https://twitter.com/wilsonballglove/status/885597763437723648

You can do what I do - during winter workouts I hand my son his new bats and say, "Here - this is what you're using this year." It's going to be brutal on the wallet this year with new new USA Bat rule. I can't buy last year's models at a discount.

Off topic, but the last thing a kid should do is pick out their own baseball bat until they're at least 14 or 15 years old, maybe older if they don't have a feel for hitting. I coach kids 6-16 and every year I see kids with bats that are too heavy, too light, too long, or too short and the kids struggle. Then we put the correct bat in their hands and their hitting improves immensely.

I bank fish a jig and craw trailer in our big and small lagoons down here in SC and it worked well in the spring. In fact, the 4 pounder in my profile pic was on a jig and pig setup. As the weather gets warmer and the fish go deeper (and further out from the bank) I haven't used a jig since it doesn't cast as far as I need it to go. I probably need to buy a punch jig, attach a 1 oz weight and try and throw that out there.

Yeah man - quit dissin' the Ugly Stick!

I had been fishing a Trion (35) spinning for years and I loved it. I picked up that rod/reel combo at Bass Pro a few years ago. Unfortunately the rod tip broke pulling in a 4+ pounder earlier this year. A few weeks ago my son dropped his rod through the spokes of his bike and sheared his Daiwa. You know what that means? No, not a new reel for him! I passed my Trion down to him and bought a President in the 40 size. I went bigger on this reel because we bank fish and I can get a longer cast with the larger reel. Anyway, I got in a few casts with the President last night just before the lightning started. This reel was smooth as silk. As mush as I liked the Trion, this one is so much better. Best of all it was $59 and there's a $10 rebate I need to send in. Awesome reel at a great price.

Using a snap makes fishing a lot easier for me because I need my reading glasses to see any knots that I tie. We bank fish and since we usually bike to the various lagoons in our area I carry only one rod. Not only do I change lures at the various lagoons and locations within each lagoon, but I also do not want to ride from one lagoon to the next with a lure clipped to me rod. If something bad happens I don't want to lose an eye to a lure.

Palmetto Dunes has over 11 miles of interconnected lagoons. If you don't want to bike you can always rent a canoe or kayak. There is one place on the mainland in Bluffton that you might want to fish - Hampton Lake. But you just can't walk in and fish because it's a private community. But you probably could make an appointment to look at houses, lots, or condos for an our or so and ask if you can try out some fishing. Why would you want to fish a stocked lake like Hampton Lake? Two words - Tiger Bass!

In the story above we fished at Jarvis Creek Park on Hilton Head (no entry fee). We do most of our fishing in lagoons all around Bluffton but our favorites are right in our community since the golf course is now defunct and there's very little fishing going on there. It's low pressure fishing, but we usually bring a machete to cut back all of the growth surrounding the lagoons. You won't have to worry about that fishing on Hilton Head. If you're vacationing within a plantation there are plenty of lagoons around that are not on the golf course or large lagoons where the course only borders one side. Palmetto Dunes, Sea Pines, and Port Royal are probably the most popular for villa rentals. You can rent a vacation home in just about any community. Best of all, if you're staying in one of the plantations there are bike paths you can use to go from lagoon to lagoon. Forget about taking a car - you won't have anywhere to park. You most definitely cannot park along the road within the gated communities. You'll want to get a fishing license as well. Plantation security may pull up and ask to see your license. You can get one on the South Carolina DNR website and print it out. An annual license is $10 and I think the temporary license is $5. You can check out villa and home rentals on http://www.hiltonhead360.com

Good news - the town of Hilton Head is calling in a company called Critter Management to relocate the aggressive alligators. We'll try fishing there again soon and next time hopefully I have a big bass story to tell.

I don't think we'll fish there again until they remove the aggressive gators. I did send emails to the town and SC DNR today telling them what happened and asking them to check it out. 9 out of 10 times when gators are around they are not an issue and usually the biggest issue with them is they swim slowly towards where you cast or make a bee line for your catch. That's why I thought this was interesting (and a bit scary at the time).

The guy below has other videos where he pulls out some decent bass. Here you go: http://www.islandpacket.com/sports/recreation/cast-blast-column/article33498510.html

Geez it's been hot out lately. Temperatures have been in the mid 90's with the heat index 105+ here in the South Carolina Lowcountry. To make matters worse, the best fishing the past few weeks has been late morning and early afternoon. We bike 1-2 miles out to our favorite lagoons and that gets real old real fast in the heat (I need to buy a bike trailer). On top of all of this, we fish on a golf course that has shut down and all of the banks are overgrown and thick with weeds and the lagoons are all out in the open. It makes it a pain to fish. I did buy a machete to help with that, but last night got stung by a wasp hacking a clearing and that put a damper on the evening. So at 6 a.m. this morning we mixed it up a bit and drove to Jarvis Creek Park on Hilton Head to give their big lagoon a try. The nice part was not having to fish through a thicket and foliage. They had an elevated dock with a walkway down to a slab dock that we were able to fish from. The slab was about 10 inches off the water and there was no railing to have to cast over. The water was a bit stained and had that beaded type green algae throughout so I fished with topwaters while my son tossed a Zoom trick worm. Immediately we noticed we had company. A small gator was hiding in the algae under the elevated dock. Then a 7 footer joined. Then a five footer. Then a six footer. Soon there were 5 alligators around us, but they mainly sat there or cruised a bit. Sometimes they'd swim by the pad reminding us they were there, but it was no big deal. We just fished around them. They didn't even take an interest in my big Whopper Plopper 130 splashing and ripping on the surface. That soon changed. I saw a bass jump in deeper water and with my WP 130 it was easy to get the lure close to that area. Within a few casts a bass hit the bait and I could tell that it was a decent sized fish. The only problem was that it was a L-O-N-G cast and two of the bigger gators immediately noticed the commotion. It was now a race to land my catch. It was a 50 year old man and his Pflueger Trion versus two prehistoric throwbacks. I wan't worried about losing a fish to an alligator, but there's no way I want to lose a new $16 lure! It was close. I'm reeling, the fish is fighting, the gators are closing, and my 11 year old son is panicking. I've got one eye on my catch and one eye on the gators. "Daddy - look out!" Matt is shrieking, as if I needed the added pressure. Fifteen feet to land the bass. The gators are picking up speed. Ten feet. Matt has the net but he's no where near the landing zone. Five feet. There's no way I'm reaching down for this fish. Lift the rod, bring the fish up onto the pad - and TWO gators crash into the pad. Suddenly I'm thinking that this pad seems a lot smaller and not quite high enough to stop a gator from climbing up. I hear a noise off to my left and see another gator doing a death roll with something just of the slab. OK, Matt's still behind me. That's good. I'm trying to work the treble hooks out of my 2 pound catch while the first two gators are right up near the slab eyeballing either me or my fish. At this point I can't be sure. I'm really hoping beyond hope they can't climb up. At that moment I'm reminded of the Magnum P.I. episodes when Higgins' dobermans are chasing him while he's trying to get inside, "Work the lock. Don't look at the dogs! Argh! You looked at the dogs!" Work the hook. Work the hook. Please don't climb up here Mr. Gator. Finally, I get the hooks free and release the catch quietly away from the gators. But it's not over quite yet. That catch flipped a switch with the gators and they started getting aggressive. Really aggressive. They were no longer meandering around us, they were on the move surrounding us. Every time I made a cast they went full speed at my Whopper Plopper. They didn't stay their customary 5-10 feet away either. They came right in and nudged the slab every time. Thankfully it's a stable, anchored, concrete slab. And they kept eyeballing me, almost daring me to make another cast. I decided it wasn't worth it and we packed it in for the morning. We deal with gators all of the time and some try and go after your catch and hang out a bit, but it's usually solo gators or a couple of juveniles. This was a pack of adult gators all working the same area. My guess is that since this is a public park there are idiots that have tossed their catch to the gators, so once we landed a fish they instinctively thought it was dinner time. That's too bad because there are probably some decent sized fish in there. But for me it's just not worth the aggravation. The next time we try a new spot I need to find someone who lives in Hilton Head Plantation so I can fish in there. I've seen pictures and video of people catching 9 - 14 pound bass in there. Here's one of our "friends" in Jarvis Park today:

I don't know why Bass Resource has their photo policies, but I can tell you why we limit image sizes on our servers: 1. Bandwidth - we don't want huge uploads slowing down the page browsing on the rest of the website 2. Storage - You'd be surprised how quickly hard drives fill up with tens of thousands of photos with unrestricted file sizes. 3. Backup - Some hosting / server companies charge more if you exceed their standard nightly backup storage limits. 4. Google crawling - Google likes pages that load fast and frowns on sites that have slow to load pages As for the server slowdown lately my best guess is that there is a configuration issue with their https (secure) setup.

You can utilize these free websites to reduce the image file size and change picture formats: http://image.online-convert.com/convert-to-jpg https://www.convertmyimage.com/ http://jpeg-optimizer.com/ I've had no problems uploading photos in the past week or so as long as they are under the file size limit. The server response problems are a separate issue from photo upload problems UNLESS your issue is that the server times out during picture uploads.

I've always said that a good plague will solve most of the world's immediate problems... Seriously - the world population has more than tripled in my lifetime. More people means demand for more resources and that means a lot more trash and waste. Modern medicine has had a lot of unintended consequences. When I take my son fishing we always do a walk around and cleanup before we leave, even if that means picking up the trash that ignorant people left behind.

A Texas rigged Senko is my universal go to bait for bass fishing no matter where I fish. A crawfish or jig and craw has landed me some 3+ pounders as well. In the last week I bought a Whopper Plopper 130 and a Whopper Plopper 90 (both Bone) and the bass LOVE those as well. I'd start with the Senko,

I recently read a book where they had tagged large bass and tracked them for nearly a year. What they found is that the big, big bass rarely stray more than a few hundred yards in any direction. I suppose that changes if there are serious changes to the food supply, but if there is ample food they seem to stick to a general area.

I love the way you kept encouraging him to keep reeling in on his own and not give up and turn the rod over to you. Also impressed that a 3 year old stayed centered in the canoe WHILE reeling in a big catch.

It's not the gators you see that are the problem - it's the ones you don't see We bank fish on an abandoned golf course and the thicket around each lagoon grows deeper every day. You can see some of that in the photo below. It's the ambush gator that hides parallel to the shore in the thicket that worries me the most. Luckily we've spotted those before getting too close. Lately it seems that the best fishing spots are the least accessible.

Last week I bought a couple of Whopper Plopper 90's (Bone and Munky Butt) and caught a few bass right away so a few days ago I took advantage of Dick's by one, get one half off and picked up a couple of 130's (Bone and Loon). We went out late yesterday and no sooner had we biked to the lagoon and a thunderstorm started rolling in. I got in a few casts but nothing hit on the 130's. But my sand landed a 2.2 pounder on a Zoom Watermelon Trick Worm. We went out mid-morning and it was already hot - 90 degrees with the humidity just under a billion. I fished a bank on one of our favorite lagoons that is a pain to fish. Thick weeds 4 feet tall with very little break and the thicket is 4-6 feet across. It's a pain to cast and even more of a pain to land something. Not to beat a dead horse here, but there is one big gator and two juvenile gators on this lagoon so it's not like we can wade into the thicket. Anyway, tossed the WP Bone 130 and within 3 casts landed a 2.9 pounder after finally getting him up through the weeds. Of course, my son sees that and comes running to fish where I was fishing (I don't really mind, just telling the story) and he landed one just under 2 pounds on another Zoom. We left that lagoon to make our way to another lagoon that offers some shade, but along the way stopped at a smaller lagoon that we had fished only once before. Tossed the 130 again and - BAM - landed a 1.5 pounder. By then it was blazing hot and we decided to head home, at least for a while. I need to buy a bike trailer so we can haul our gear and a cooler full of water. It was brutal out there. I do like the Whopper Ploppers but there are a few drawbacks. The 130's land hard and probably scare fish at times. Not a big deal on a boat where you can cast past your taget zone, but not great when fishing bank to bank. Also, all it takes is a little bit of weeds and you lose the cavitation of the tail. The 90's land light in the target zone but the cavitation does not always engage right away even with a tug. Sometimes you have to tug and go tip up for a few cranks. That being said - I'm getting consistent action on these. Pictures are attached. Yes, I usually wear a glove when putting my thumb into bigger fish. I have soft computer programmer fingers and my thumb tends to get shredded from all of the fishing that we do. What I worry about are open cuts and getting bacteria or parasites in the bloodstream from these smaller, semi stagnant lagoons. Yes, it's a bit paranoid. But every summer I hear about some poor soul in the south being exposed flesh eating bacteria through a cut, scrape, or nasal passage. And yes, my son was lectured about handling the fish body with the glove.

By no means am I an expert like a lot of folks on this board, but it seems like a good feeding spot for bass - especially if they lost their cover - to ambush prey. They can lurk in the deeper, cooler water down the slope and the seawall in the shallower water acts as a barrier that they can use to trap their prey then head back down the slope.

I caught a few more on my WP 90 last night. There were many times when the fish tried to hit it and missed. But it does generate a lot of action. I also spent 30 minutes last night fishing for one of my Ploppers. My son is learning to tie his own knots and last night the results were mixed Luckily my trusty Rapala Husky Jerk trailing a bunch of weeds came to the rescue. Saved my son from extra chores this week.