Tennessee Boy

French fries are my favorite vegetable.

Google monitors everything you do through your android phone, gmail, google maps, Chrome browser and your search history. It knows you better than your family knows you. It gives you the search results it knows you want to receive. If you don’t like the results it’s your own fault. 😆

There are many controlled experiments that confirm bass do learn to avoid lures. In his book Knowing Bass, Dr Keith Jones shared some research he did at Berkeley. Groups of six bass were allowed to freely strike at a minnow bait for five minutes. During their first exposure to the lure they hit the bait on average a combined 24 times. They were then separated into two groups. The first group was retested 2 weeks later and they hit the lure on average a little over 2 times. The second group was tested 3 months later and hit the lure more than the first group (about 4 times) but still far less than when originally tested. These bass were not hooked but still learned and remembered that the minnow bait was not food.

I service them myself. I keep all of the parts I have left over after I reassemble them. I hope to make a new reel from these parts someday. 😆

I thought this was a very interesting discussion on how MLF anglers might adjust to the new rules.

Ask yourself this question. In the B.A.S.S. tournament on Toledo Bend this year why were so many anglers bunched up in one creek? During the tournament @Catt was on here talking about how much he liked that creek. Did they scope out all 186,000 acres of the lake and all find the same fish in the same creek? or did they get local knowledge from locals like @Catt? 8 of the top 10 on the final day.

If I caught 4 bass in 10 cast I would not be looking to change anything after a 5 minute lull. I would make sure I had hit every ell grass clumps in the area. I might make a few cast with a slower presentation like a Texas rig but if something is working I keep working it. Maybe after an hour lull I might look for a similar spot as @gulfcaptain suggested.

You should change insurance companies. 😆 The stuff that matters from a fans prospective for the BPT IMHO. Limit of two FFS transducer and 360 counts as FFS. You can only use them in one of the three periods during the day. You must declare that you will be using it before the period begins. I didn’t read the stuff for the other MLF trails.

Everyone uses technology differently so these restrictions will affect each angler differently. The MLF restrictions would have the greatest impact on the way I fish compared to NPFL. I would much rather fish all day with only 360 than 1/3 of the day with 360 and FFS.

It depends on how much I’m worried about spooking the fish. That’s a judgement call based on depth and how quiet the water is. If there are jet skis run everywhere I’m not to worried. I would say I typically troll the last 50 yards or so.

I’m looking forward to watching this play out even if it is a little hokey. If it works out maybe MLB should consider allowing aluminum bats in the 2nd and 5th innings. 😆

It definitely looks like a more diverse schedule. They said that Toledo Bend and Fork were their most watched tournaments this year so I was wondering if they would be willing to skip Texas in the winter. They did. I’m not very familiar with some of the lakes. Looks like a good schedule to me.

The question I have is what makes a fish an FFS fish? I’ve got a spot that I’ve been catching fish on by making the same cast with the same lures for 30+ years. I don’t need FFS to catch fish there. Now when I fish there I can see the fish before I cast and watch them hit the lure. Does that make it a fish caught with FFS? FFS just makes it more interesting, it doesn’t change the way I fish that spot one bit. At Toledo Bend the scopers out fished the old timers by catching fish that would be extremely hard to catch without FFS. It was more complicated with 90% of the fish caught in other tournaments. If an angler uses GPS to get close to a brush pile and then uses FFS to make a pinpoint cast, how important is FFS in that process?

Amen. I don’t find it that interesting to watch them catch fish. I would be willing to pay a good bit to watch them actually fish. By that I mean see what they see on the screen, know where they are on the lake, see what baits they are using so that I can see how they are making the decisions they make. That would be fantastic.

This article goes into detail on the reasons why the committee made the decisions they made. It’s a good read. It shoots down a lot of this misinformation thats been floating around. They address the common concerns and what the data they collected actually shows. Concerning the number of fish caught with FFS. Next, we surveyed the Top 10 finishers of every Elite Series event. We asked these anglers the percentage of time they utilized their live units and how many of the fish they weighed in were caught while using live tech. This survey, alongside watching these anglers compete on Bassmaster LIVE, gave us a solid understanding of how live sonar was impacting the leaderboard. What’s interesting, if you listened to the chatter on social media and a couple of knuckleheads out there who have been using this debate as clickbait for personal benefit, you’d think every fish coming across the Elite Series stage was caught using live sonar. This is not even close to true. For three events, Harris Chain, St. Johns River and Wheeler Lake, less than 15% of the fish caught by the Top 10 anglers were landed using live sonar (that’s less than one fish per day). Murray finished at 42%. Champlain ended about 50-50. Concerning fans not wanting to watch anglers watching screens. At the start of the 2024 season, many Elite Series pros were saying the use of live sonar was making the coverage of our sport unwatchable. So, we kept a keen eye on the numbers this season. If the fans hated it, our recommendation would be simple. However, that was not the case. In fact, the opposite was true, which shocked me. The top two viewership events of the year, by a long shot, were Toledo Bend and Lake Fork, which were dominated by live sonar techniques. The production of the coverage, including showing the screens during live sonar catches, actually enhanced the viewership experience. https://www.bassmaster.com/2025-electronics-rules/news/digging-deep-into-live-sonar-changes-for-2025/