Tennessee Boy

I fell in love with the Lews Graphite Tennessee Handle in the 1980s. I still have a few of them. Lew Childre was a great innovator in our sport.

I keep trying to solve the puzzle. I don’t view fishing as a search for the right lure. It’s a search for the right location, depth, speed of retrieve, direction of retrieve, lure size, lure action, lure color, etc. Lures are tools. If I think I need to try fishing deeper, I might need a different tool so I change to a lure that lets me fish deeper. Some tweaks to the way I’m fishing require a lure change, some do not.

https://joneslakemanagement.com/aquatic-weed-id-guide

Going to a higher gear ratio will give you less power when fighting fish and more speed when retrieving lures.

@TnRiver46 is the resident expert on the Knoxville area.

I feel very strongly that it’s more important to master a few techniques over being versatile. I would say that not being focused on mastering what you do might be the most common mistake in fishing. The reason that I feel so strongly about this is because of my own experience. I spent several years trying constantly to match the conditions to what I had read in the latest issue of BassMaster magazine. This never worked for me. When I started developing and fishing my strengths, I started having much more success. I think you can judge how much experience people on this forum have based this. For example the most experienced folks will tell you in great detail exactly how they like to fish a Texas rig. The less experienced folks will list the 10 technique specific setups they have and will ask for advice on what rod they should buy for the next technique they are considering. I try different techniques for fun all the time. In a tournament I would never do anything that hadn’t produced hundreds of fish for me in the past.

I was young and single during my Huntsville years so I fished a lot all over north Alabama. It was always in a bass boat. I did float down the Flint River once with a buddy in his Bass Raider. We caught a bunch of fish but I don’t remember if any were smallmouth. If I was targeting smallmouth in a Kayak I would probably fish streams that are not accessible in a bass boat. I always look for current when fishing for smallmouth even though I’ve caught plenty while targeting largemouth in lakes. Wilson lake has always been a favorite.

I lived in Huntsville years ago and I agree with @TnRiver46. My go to spots for fall smallmouth were below Wheeler and Wilson dams when there was good current coming out of the dam. I’m not sure I would want to do that in a Kayak though.

They should implement a slot limit to prevent this. 😆

I do remember him getting his jerkbait back. I don’t remember that he immediately began following the fish after it broke off or that he followed it for a significant amount of time. It can be done and I’m sure the pros do it occasionally to some degree. I don’t think it’s a productive strategy most of the time because you invest time trying to catch one fish that probably won’t bite and might not even be a bass. On YouTube they are always bass and they always bite. Chasing an individual fish begins to make sense when you have a solid 5 fish limit in the livewell. McKinney was bringing 30lb bags to the scale. When anything under 6 lbs won’t help you then it makes more sense to go chasing a big fish when you see it. Take a look at this video from Lake Fork at about the 3 minute mark. Tyler Rivet catches a 9 pounder off a tree. He says that there are two more like it on the same tree. He says it’s the same group of fish that were “over there” earlier that he couldn’t get to bite. This is very representative of my experiences fishing with FFS ( except the fish are 1 lb instead of 9 lbs 😆). The technology makes it possible to know what’s happening down there. You know what tree to cast to. He could have cast to every one of the 100 trees around him and possibly caught the same fish. FFS made him more efficient than the guy that makes random cast at trees. It clearly gives him an advantage over that guy. In the end you have to be able to catch the fish that is on the tree whether you knew the fish was there or not. It does not take more skill to make random cast to find fish. It just takes more time and luck. I understand that for people that can’t afford FFS or people that don’t enjoy fiddling with electronics while fishing, it doesn’t seem fair. It’s not fair but it’s not so easy that anyone can do it.

I’m inviting you to come to Tennessee to help me do some work. We might be working on my house, my car, my boat, or doing some landscaping. You can only bring one tool. What tool will you choose and what color will it be?

I’ve had Target Lock for almost two years. I’ve never seen it on a pros boat. There’s a reason why. I’ve considered taking it off. It allows you to control your FFS separate from your trolling motor so you can use trolling motor features like spot lock and FFS at the same time. The problem is, you control it with buttons which is a pain. You can set it to point in the same direction as your trolling motor which is how I use it most of the time but that kind of defeats the purpose and it turns slower than the trolling motor. Also being mounted separately from the trolling motor means that the trolling motor blocks it when it’s pointed toward the TM. It does do a fairly good job of locking on to a target like a stump and that looks amazing in their videos and scary to people who don’t like technology. I don’t use it very often. There are lots of targets out there. They are not hard to find and track. Reaching down to engage target lock on something is more trouble than it’s worth most of the time. In crappie fishing I could see where it might be more useful. Concerning locking on to a fish. That sure sounds scary. I expect to see it soon and I think it will be fun. Will it change professional fishing? I can’t think of a single time where I’ve seen a pro chase a single fish for a significant amount of time. Josh Jones has popularized the idea that you just put the trolling motor down and go until you see a fish. Did you ever notice that in the “scoping” tournament you always see anglers bunched up together in an area? If they were just chasing random fish with their electronics on these enormous lakes they would never see each other. It’s still about finding the places that hold fish just like it’s always been. If they held tournaments in the dead of winter in freezing temperatures you might see more guys chasing roaming fish around.

I’ve been following the progress on this service as college football will be starting soon. I was disappointed to find out that a court has blocked its launch on antitrust concerns. The service was to be called Venu Sports. https://lasvegassun.com/news/2024/aug/16/judge-blocks-plans-for-sports-joint-streaming-vent/

Prayers sent. I’m setting in a hospital room with a family member right now. I know it can be a grind. Be strong.

Can someone fill me in on what the Johnson brothers are doing?

I like the comparison between Barry Bonds and those using FFS. I read a fascinating study years ago where they used physics to calculated in amazing detail how many home runs Bonds would have hit without steroids. They determined how much stronger he got based on the weight he gained when he started juicing. They looked at every home run he hit and calculated how much further it went because of his additional strength. They determined he would have about as many home runs as Willie May without juicing but would not have broken Ruth’s record. Steroids made him stronger but didn’t not make him more talented. They did not make it easier to hit a ball, they made it easier to hit a ball further. I’m certain that FFS changes the game. It allows talented anglers to catch more fish. It is not easy to master. It requires learning new skills. The primary benefit it provides is it makes you more efficient if you are able to take advantage of the information it provides. Being efficient in figuring out a pattern is critical in tournament fishing. The notion that a bunch of untalented kid are dominating the sport thanks to FFS is clearly not supported by the facts. The major difference between FFS and steroids is that steroids are illegal and FFS is not. Steroids are dangerous and those that take the risk of using them have an advantage over those that do not. Banning them is the right thing to do. I don’t think steroids hurt baseball from a fans prospective. Strong players are more fun to watch.

It was on Lanier.

The waters they were fishing in this last tournament were very different from the southern waters I fish so I’m not really qualified to say what impact not having FFS would have had on the result. My guess is they would have been fishing for smallmouth in the same areas. They would have found the fish with traditional sonar. Instead of casting at individual fish they would have used drop shots or other techniques and waited for the fish to find their lures. There would have been half as many 3+ pound fish caught. More small fish would have been caught. The weights brought to the scales would have been 20% lower. It wouldn’t have looked much different to the fans. Their heads would have been tilted up a little more.

Well we had one well publicized non FFS tournament this year and Chris won it. Maybe B.A.S.S. needs to allow it in half the tournaments and not allow it in the other half so everyone can see for themselves what impact it is having on the sport.

I don’t close my bail manually. I know I should but I’m set in my ways and can’t change. No one is perfect. That said, I’ve learned to tell when my line is getting twisted before it becomes a problem. When it twisted I just let all of the line out behind the boat and reel it back in. It takes a minute or two. Then I’m good for another few months. I’ve had people on this forum tell me this doesn’t work. It has worked well for me for decades.

I'm not a fan of the Johnston brothers but man you got to respect what Cory is doing. He's gotta work the bait, watch the screen which I'm sure is moving as much as the boat is, and detect the strike. All while not falling out of the boat or getting sea sick. I'm impressed.

Another vote for bluebird skies.

I don’t color my line with a marker. I try to break up the color of my line. Makes it look less like line. Does it help?

We just don’t have the kinds of lakes you have. Our’s are man made and usually not made with fishing in mind. They need to be properly managed by their owners and those owners typically don’t like others fishing them. I actually own two small ponds that are about 1/2 acre each. I don’t fish them and haven’t stocked them. There are of course public lakes but they tend to be very popular. Now streams are a different matter. When I was young I loved to seek out small creeks that were hard to get to.

When a fish comes out of the water it looses it’s ability to swim and pull against you. It gains the ability to shake its head more violently. When the head is out of the water I want it moving toward me. When the fishing is trying to jump straight up I want to change his launch angle to keep him as low as possible. You have to be ready to make the sweeping action with the rod and the fish still wins sometimes. I did a search on YouTube for smallmouth jumping in hopes of finding a good example. I wanted to find a jump further from the boat but was surprised to see a familiar face in this one so I went with it. You can’t see what this BR angler does when the fish jumps but the results are good. The fish launches more horizontal than vertical and the head moves toward the boat.