roadwarrior

Fish Chris uses spinning tackle exclusively. That should speak for itself. 8-)

For me, structure in open water has been the key. The Mattlures Baby Bass will sink to any depth. I have caught all of my fish using a slow, steady retrieve, nothing interesting and never "working" the bait. The lure provides all the action. 8-)

Welcome aboard! +1 8-)

Welcome aboard! Use snaps if you like, I know several guys who do without any issues. For me, I prefer direct tie, but will occasionally use a snap for hard baits. I see no advantage to using a snap with single hooks or single hook lures. 8-)

They are not listed on the Colorado DOW website: http://wildlife.state.co.us/Fishing/SpeciesID/ 8-)

New member, Welcome Aboard! Breaking a State Record is a big deal, I would keep the fish, especially a brown one in Tennessee! 8-)

St. Croix Avid 8-)

Soft plastics have caught more bass than all other lures combined. Some will argue that jigs attract bigger bass. Either way, these are the two top artificial baits, everthing else is just for fun. Disclaimer: Swimbaits are a relative newcomer which may change the dynamics. These are definitely big bass lures. 8-)

MegaStrike is an effective lubricant and "attractant". JJ's Magic Juice is also effective, but not user friendly. If you are married, I recommend MegaStrike. If you are single and want to stay that way, JJ's. Both of these products sponsor BassResource.com 8-)

That's all there is to it and you can store twenty threads. 8-)

Welcome aboard! 8-)

The rod is rated Moderate Action on the Lamiglas website: http://www.lamiglas.com/prod_indiv.php?id=38 All components are top shelf and the rod is stout. I think this is the ideal rod for big treble hook lures and deep divers. 8-)

Stradic 2500FI This new version of an old classic incorporates many of the features that were previously available only in the Shimano Stella. I think you will be amazed by this reel. The Stradic was awarded the 2007 ICAST "Best In Category". http://fish.shimano.com/catalog/fish/products/group_detail.jsp?FOLDER<>folder_id=2534374302053096&ASSORTMENT<>ast_id=1408474395181270&bmUID=1194453987313 8-)

Well, it seems to me the initial question was about being broken off due to line failure and that's the question I addressed. However, heavy cover presents other problems and I certainly agree that heavier equipment is the best way to "move the fish to the boat!". 8-)

News: of Saudi-Sized Reserves Make Farmers Drillers 2008-06-03 02:26 (New York) By Anthony Effinger June 3 (Bloomberg) -- John Bartelson, who smokes Marlboro Lights through fingers blackened with tractor grease, may look like an average wheat farmer. He isn't. He's one of North Dakota's new oil barons. Every month, he gets a check for tens of thousands of dollars from a company in Houston called EOG Resources Inc., which drilled two oil wells on his land last year. He says the day his first royalty check arrived was one to remember. ''I smiled to beat hell, and I went to town and had a beer,'' Bartelson, 65, says. His new wealth springs from the Bakken formation, a sprawling deposit of high-quality crude beneath the durum wheat fields of North Dakota, Montana and southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The Bakken may give the U.S. -- the world's biggest importer of oil -- a new domestic energy source at a time when demand from China and India is ratcheting up the global competition for supplies and propelling average U.S. gasoline prices to almost $4 a gallon. And unlike the tar from Canada's oil sands, Bakken crude needs little refining. Swirl some of it in a Mason jar and it leaves a thin, honey-colored film along the sides. It's light - -almost like gasoline -- and sweet, meaning it's low in sulfur. Best of all, the Bakken could be huge. The U.S. Geological Survey's Leigh Price, a Denver geochemist who died of a heart attack in 2000, estimated that the Bakken might hold a whopping 413 billion barrels. If so, it would dwarf Saudi Arabia's Ghawar, the world's biggest field, which has produced about 55 billion barrels. Thin Deposit The challenge is getting the oil out. Bakken crude is locked 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) underground in a layer of dolomite, a dense mineral that doesn't surrender oil the way more-porous limestone does. The dolomite band is narrow, too, averaging just 22 feet (7 meters) in North Dakota. The USGS said in April that the Bakken holds as much as 4.3 billion barrels that can be recovered using today's engineering techniques. That's a fraction of the oil that Price said should be there, but it's still the largest accumulation of crude in the 48 contiguous U.S. states. North Dakota, where Bakken exploration is most intense now, won't become Saudi Arabia unless technology improves. ''The Bakken is the biggest thing in oil in the lower 48 right now,'' says Jim Jarrell, president of Ross Smith Energy Group Ltd., a research firm in Calgary. ''And among the least understood.'' Delaying the Peak Some oil, like the 10.4 billion barrels estimated to be recoverable in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, remains off limits -- as a nature conservation measure -- even as President George W. Bush renews his calls for drilling there. North Dakota, already crisscrossed by farm roads, is open for business. As traditional oil fields become scarce, exploration companies must tackle trickier ones to stay in business. Their success will determine when the world reaches peak oil -- the high point in production after which new supply will no longer be there to slake new demand. It's a gloomy concept. Peak oil theorists predict the mother of all oil shocks, complete with famine and wars for energy. These days, big new oil deposits often come with caveats. Brazil's Petroleo Brasileiro SA says its offshore Tupi field contains as much as 8 billion barrels of oil, which the company hopes to start pumping next year. But the field is under more than four miles of water and rock, where pressure can crush drilling equipment. Hedge Bus The Bakken dolomite is hardly an obstacle, by comparison. And even if Price was too optimistic, the Bakken is big enough to make investors rich. Some have made fortunes already. In April, a busload of hedge fund managers drove by Bartelson's land, ogling the metronomic pump jacks and the devilish orange flares of excess natural gas that are making parts of North Dakota look more like west Texas. ''There's nothing that can stop this play,'' says Mike Reger, chief executive officer of Northern Oil & Gas Inc., a five-person company near Minneapolis that has leased the mineral rights under 32,000 acres (13,000 hectares) in the North Dakota Bakken. Reger, 32, brought the hedge fund managers up to see the oil field. Some, like Ryan Zorn of Houston-based investment management firm Saracen Energy Advisors LP, are investors in Northern already. Northern shares have risen 61 percent since being listed on the American Stock Exchange on March 26. Fool's Gold For decades, the Bakken was the fool's gold of the oil industry. The name describes a geological formation that looks like an Oreo cookie: two layers of black shale that bleed oil into the middle layer of dolomite. It's named after Henry O. Bakken, the North Dakota farmer who owned the land where the first drilling rig revealed the shale layers in the 1950s. All of the layers are thin -- about 150 feet altogether -- and none of them give up oil easily. In older, vertical wells, oil would often flow for a month and then fizzle. Now, companies like Austin, Texas-based Brigham Exploration Co.; Denver-based Whiting Petroleum Corp.; and EOG are drilling horizontally. They go straight down 10,000 feet and then put a slight angle in the mud motor, a 30-foot piece of tubing that drives the bit, so they hit the Bakken sideways, making a horizontal tunnel 4,500 feet long through the dolomite. That exposes more of the oil-bearing rock. Then they pump pressurized water and sand into the hole to fracture the dolomite, making cracks for oil to seep through. It eventually winds up in a pipeline that runs east to Clearbrook, Minnesota, and then south to Chicago. Where Billionaires Roam Several billionaires are at work in the Bakken. Harold Hamm's Enid, Oklahoma-based Continental Resources Inc. has leases on 487,000 acres in Montana and North Dakota. Hamm, who started out driving a truck, owns 73 percent of Continental, worth $7.9 billion. Philip Anschutz, 68, founder of Qwest Communications International Inc. and Regal Entertainment Group, is there, too. So are two sons of billionaire H.L. Hunt, the 1930s wildcatter. Petro-Hunt LLC is owned by the trust estate of William Herbert Hunt, who was convicted in a civil trial with his brothers Lamar and Nelson Bunker of trying to corner the silver market in 1979. Hunt Oil Co., another Bakken operator, is owned by their half brother, Ray L. Hunt. The big winner so far has been EOG, formerly a subsidiary of bankrupt energy trader Enron Corp. It drilled a horizontal well in western North Dakota just north of Parshall -- population 1,028 -- in April 2006. The well came online a month later and kicked out 1,883 barrels in the first seven days. Unlike the older vertical wells, it's still going. In March, it produced 2,305 barrels, according to the North Dakota Industrial Commission. No Slam Dunk EOG has eight rigs running on 320,000 acres of mineral leases in the North Dakota Bakken. The company said in its 2007 annual report that the area has the highest return of all the places in which it operates -- including Texas's Barnett Shale, the Gulf of Mexico coast and the Permian Basin of New Mexico. The Bakken isn't foolproof. Far from it. Drilling there is expensive -- about $5 million a well, according to EOG -- and takes experience. Dallas-based Petro-Hunt's first well in the North Dakota Bakken didn't make money, company geologist Steve Bressler says. Brigham's Bergstrom Family Trust well came online at 277 barrels a day -- viable at today's high oil prices but not a gusher. ''There will be variances,'' says John Gerdes, an oil and gas analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey Inc. in Houston. ''The rock matters. The people matter.'' Oil Rush The success of EOG's Parshall well set off a land grab in North Dakota's Mountrail County. Land men -- the experts who move from boom to boom leasing mineral rights -- swarmed, paying ever higher prices for ground that for decades grew crops and concealed Cold War missile silos. On private acreage, land men negotiate with mineral owners like Bartelson. They offer a bonus upfront to hold the mineral rights for three to five years, and they agree to pay a fraction of the revenue from any oil produced each month -- often from 1/8 to 3/16. On land with a producing well, the mineral lease lasts as long as the well does. On government land, the bonus is set at auction. Bartelson in 2004 granted a five-year lease on 1,400 acres, under which he owns half the mineral rights. He got a bonus of $25 per mineral acre, or $17,500, plus one-sixth of any oil revenue. Times have changed since then. In November, Sinclair Oil Corp. of Salt Lake City paid $16,500 an acre at auction for half the mineral rights on 320 acres of government- owned land in the Parshall Field, according to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. 'No Acreage' ''That's a record for Montana and North Dakota,'' BLM spokesman Greg Albright says. Among the biggest companies punching holes in the North Dakota Bakken are Houston-based Marathon Oil Corp., the fourth- largest U.S. oil company, and Hess Corp. of New York, which is No. 5. No. 1 Exxon Mobil Corp. isn't active in the Bakken. John Freeman, an analyst at investment bank Raymond James & Associates Inc. in Houston, says Exxon is looking for bigger deposits overseas. ''Now, there's no acreage left,'' he says. The truest believer in the Bakken might be Reger, the CEO of Northern Oil. He's certainly the loudest promoter. Reger is a fourth-generation oilman. His great-grandfather managed operations for Mobil Oil, now part of Exxon Mobil, in the Williston Basin, the 110,000-square-mile (285,000-square- kilometer) geological formation in the northern plains that holds the Bakken and other deposits. Reger's grandfather leased land atop all of them. His father, uncle and brother are in the business, too. ''It's our basin,'' Reger says.

Welcome aboard! I don't think they have pike in Colorado. 8-)

She should sue the automaker! :

Paper tournament, length only, pictures not required. I would tweak it by only counting fish 12" or longer in the totals. 8-)

** UPDATE ** June 3, 2008 4:00 CDT NYM WTI -$3.58 @ $124.18

;D ;D Now that ther's quite a statement! :

Man, if you will search the site, we have volumes of discussion and two threads in the last week or so. This is the bottomline as I see it: Banjo Minnows will produce a few fish when anything else would have worked better. A very comparable bait that is easier to use and much less expensive is the Slug-Go (fluke). :

http://www.bassresource.com/bass_fishing_forums/YaBB.pl?num=1128002349/22#22 8-)

Hmm... I suspect it will be an issue and that's some very good advice! 8-)

Have you tried Bobby's Cavitrons yet?

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