Tennessee Boy

I try to maximize the pressure I put on them to pull their head toward me as they come up. This is to prevent or at least disrupt the head shake. I imagine dragging them across the top of water as they jump.

Our favorite local restaurant is at a marina. The food is excellent. They don’t sell tackle. I agree with @king fisher go for the tackle and leave with food. Last time I went to Bass Pro Shops all I bought was a Goo Goo candy cluster and a Coca Cola.

It can’t hurt but the rules still favor those that take chances. If you need that 5th fish you may fish as long as possible and then drive like a crazy man to get to the weight in on time. If your boat will only do 60 mph you leave earlier to make it on time.

Many videos have been posted on this site of tournament angler’s going too fast and having accidents. They always make me mad. The rules make it so the person who takes the biggest risk gets there first. He was going way too fast for those conditions. BASS tournaments were a lot safer when boats were limited to 150 HP. They were just as interesting and just as competitive. The waters I fished back then were also a lot safer because all of the bass fishermen with strong professional ambitions and weak driving skill were moved a lot slower. {stepping down from my soapbox now}

I don’t usually find weight-ins very interesting but this one will be good. Do you think anyone outside of the top 3 could be sandbagging and be in contention?

I can’t wait to get a warp drive on my boat. I’ve heard Yamaha is working on it. 😆

I would watch them do that. 😆

@1984isNOW I respect your opinion. I think you have some misconceptions about how the technology works that are not that important but your opinion that you should have to fish to find fish in a tournament is logical. I would just point out that pros have been using Fish Finders to find fish for decades and before that they were using flashers. There were stories of pros spending their entire practice time graphing without making a cast long before FFS existed. In real life you don’t care if I choose to use the technology and I don’t care if you choose not to. That’s cool. The tournament organizations have to choose their rules. They will not be able to please everyone. I’ll still enjoy watching them if they put some limits on the technology but I would prefer to watch them fish the way I do.

What skills does FFS eliminate? and for that matter what skills does an Alabama rig eliminate? Personally, yes. It requires special skills and I admire anyone who is good at it. I don’t think it is used much by non tournament bass fishermen so I doubt you would see it much in tournaments if it was allowed. I would love to watch a trolling master catch fish on a live stream. I don’t know the reason trolling was banned back in the day. To me trolling didn’t make sense when competitors were paired together but that’s no longer a problem.

Technically, you broke the law by catching the fish with your hands. We won’t tell and I don’t think you’re in danger of prosecution. 😆 I actually did the exact same thing in front of a game warden once to rescue a smallmouth from a pool like you described. I knew the guy and he joked that he was going to write me up but he understood I was saving the fish.

This falls in the category of can’t hurt and might help. I do it but not religiously. One thing I’ve looked into is alcohol based markers. They are preferred by artists and come in a wide variety of colors. You can buy a pack of nature tone colors that have a variety of greens and browns that would be perfect for adding a camo pattern to the line. I haven’t tried them because I’m afraid the alcohol in the marker could damage the line. I’ve thought about buying some and doing some testing but haven’t gotten around to it. Any chemists out there have an opinion on this?

Very interesting post. The nerd in me would love to do a deep dive on this subject but this is probably not the thread for it. One of my interest is the study of randomness and the tendency that people have to see patterns in randomness that do not exist. I’ve always believed that this is rampant in fishing and results in poor decisions driven by bad intuition or bad logic. There’s no denying that intuition often prevails over logic. One of the most interesting stories in this area is in basketball. Basketball players have always believed in the idea that shooters get hot and cold. Feeding the ball to the hot shooters has long been a strategy. Mathematicians looked at the data in countless studies and for years said there was no basis for this belief. Making a shot did not improve your odds of making the next shot. Most players refused to believe the math geeks. Eventually, someone discovered that the math geeks in all of the studies had made the same error in their calculations and when it was corrected the data showed that the players were correct.

If you’re familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality assessment you know that one of the four dichotomies is Thinking vs Feeling. Where you land on this spectrum probably determines how much you rely on intuition when fishing. Everyone thinks and everyone feels but we all vary in how much we rely on each. I scored very high on the thinking side. I’m logical to a fault. I tend to reject intuition and examine the facts as I know them. Another of the Myers-Briggs dichotomies is Sensing vs Intuition. Sensing means you focus on the known facts when making decisions. Intuition means you focus more on the big picture. I scored slightly on the intuition since on this one. That said, if intuition is important to you check out the YouTube channel Intuitively Angling with Randy Blaukat. 😆

I think Iaconelli broke my computer speakers with his yelling. He’s 2-10 back.

I was the first person in my bass club to get a GPS. After that I didn’t need markers buoys. But moving someone else’s buoys? Who would do that?

Tell me about it. The greatest fishing spot I have ever known required a precise cast with a few inches. A limb pointed at the exact spot. The tree was between two docks and was easy to find. I caught about a dozen fish off that spot over time. The fish always hit on the initial drop. They were all over 4 pounds. A tornado took out the tree, the docks, and all the houses in the area. I couldn’t tell you within a half mile where that spot was. I have no idea what was down there that held the fish.

Sometimes I miss the good ol days when you had to use your high school trigonometry to find fish.

I’ve watched the video that @Team9nine posted 4 times. It might be the best fishing video on YouTube. Very well done and hilarious. I encourage everyone that does not have FFS to watch it and pay close attention to how the guy is fishing the walleye tournament. He starts out targeting suspended fish with his LiveScope. Immediately we see his screen with a fish about 30 feet out. He makes a perfect cast and we see his lure fall down to the fish. We see the fish take the bait and he sets the hook on the fish and starts reeling it in. It’s amazing to watch. It looks easy. It looks like cheating. The fish get’s off but how can someone without the technology compete with this. He catches another but it’s a pike. Then he finds a bunch of fish but we only see him reel in one and it’s a dink. Then he gives up on scoping suspended fish and he heads for the bank with no scoreable fish. He then catches his first keeper near the bank by targeting it with LiveScope. He uses LiveScope to see breaks in the grass and starts catching fish very close to the bank. Then he seems to get dialed into a pattern and gets his limit without looking at his screen very much. Then he heads back out to open water to target big fish with LiveScope. He quickly give up on that again and heads back to the bank. In the end he’s really dialed in on the bank. He’s standing up throwing behind the kayak with his back to his fish finder. He finishes second in the tournament. What role did FFS play in his success? He ended up culling the one fish he targeted with it. It gave him a lot of information that might have helped him dial in the pattern. He also wasted a lot of time offshore that he wouldn’t have wasted if he didn’t have LiveScope. It’s hard to say from watching if it helped him or hurt him. It might be hard for him to answer the question. This is the reality of using FFS every day in the real world. It’s my reality. FFS is amazing technology. I love using it. It is a game changer in many ways but in the end fishing with it presents the same challenges as fishing without it. It gives you information that you can’t get otherwise. You have to figure out how to interpret and use this information. The information can make it possible to catch fish that you would not be able to catch without it. The information can also lead you astray. You can end up spending an hour throwing at a school of fish that show no interest and may not even be bass. If you lean on it to catch fish in 20 feet of water when you should be throwing a buzzbait in 3 feet of water you will not be successful. One of the most important features on any fish finder is the off button. It’s important to know when to use it. Many people on this forum have shared their experience getting FFS for the first time. They can teach you more about real world FFS than the pros or the YouTube stars.

That's very cool. I have bookmarked their site. A few years ago I snapped this picture at the Tennessee aquarium. It was at the turtle exhibit and they were trying to make a point about turtles but I thought it said something important about bass. What the graphic shows it how many adult offspring you would have in 9 years from just one animal if ALL of it's offspring survived. Conclusion, bass are very good at making more bass.

I would be interested in hearing how seeing fish react to your bait has changed the way you fish. I got my first boat in 1990 and all it came with was a flasher and of course I had paper maps. I have personally experienced the impact that all of these technologies had on my fishing. It depends of course on how you fish. We all fish a little different so the impact that technology has will effect us all differently. I was an early adopter of GPS. I paid $460 for a GPS with a 3 inch screen and no mapping in 1996. In those days the government limited the accuracy of GPS to 100 meters. My unit was horrible compared to the GPS in any cell phone today. Still, it changed what I was able to do like no other technology before or since. Before GPS you would look at a map, see all of this nice structure and you would have to ask yourself how long it would take to find it. It was common to spend an hour or more trying to locate something offshore. The maps were less accurate and there were things that I was never able to find because they were not really there or because I just could not find them. With my first GPS I could find anything in 10 minutes. With today's GPS, I can spot lock on a waypoint and know I'm within casting distance of something. The impact of GPS for me has come in stages. My first unit went from 100 meter accuracy to 10 meter accuracy when the government turned off SSA. My next unit was integrated in my fish finder and had an outline of the lake but no contour lines. What I have today is amazing. I see my position on a map with 1 foot contours and I can drop a waypoint on the map, or from any sonar screen. I can see something on 360, put my finger on it, and tell my trolling motor to circle it. For the way I fish, no technology even comes close to GPS in it's impact on the way I fish. People who have spent their entire adult life with an accurate GPS in their pock have no idea how much of a game changer it has been to fishing. There are a large percentage of anglers that only fish the bank. For them I'm not sure any technologies matter that much.

All electronics reduce the difficulty in finding fish. GPS is the most impactful in my opinion. Where do you draw the line in tournaments?

I can see the love in his eyes. Sorry for your loss. 🙏

It’s a game changer just like paper maps, flashers, 2D graphs, down imaging, side imaging, GPS, and 360 imaging. They all give us new information and that changes the game. There is no evidence that any of these technologies harm fisheries. We all get to decide if the new information increases or decreases our enjoyment of the sport.

Like all technology FFS gives you information. Compare it to a paper map. Paper maps were game changers back in the day. They showed us where off shore structure was that was previously unknown. To take advantage of this new information you had to be able to read a map to identify structure. You had to understand how fish relate to structure. You had to know how to find the structure. You had to know how to catch fish on structure. Paper maps changed the game much more than FFS but it was not easy to take advantage of them. FFS can be used in a lot of different ways to show you in real time what’s underwater in front of you. How this information is used it up to the angler. New information can help you or it can confuse you. It can show you where the bass are and it can cause you to waste time casting at carp. The most controversial change FFS has made is in it’s use in targeting offshore suspended fish. This is truly a game changer and we’ve seen this in some high profile tournaments. Some people seem to think this technique can be effective anywhere at any time. Those with FFS know this is not true. Like all techniques, it has a place and time. Look at the results on the professional tournament trails this year and it’s obvious you have to adjust to the time and place to win a tournament.

FFS is all the rage. Sales will always reflect the latest rage just like they've done in the past and will do in the future. There are even FFS rods on the market. I haven't bought one. I'm waiting for one that's designed specifically for Humminbird MEGA Live. It could be a regional thing. We all know that FFS will dominate the remaining pro tournaments on the smallmouth waters up north. I'm sure the winning lure will be a minnow on a jig head or a drop shot. If it's like that year round up north then I could see how locals would think FFS will put an end to all traditional baits. Well, I just checked SCORETRACKER and Matt Beck is leading the MLF tournament on the St Lawrence River and has caught his 20 smallmouth on a crankbait in 0-5 feet of water... so never mind. He's from Tennessee where you can still buy crankbaits at Bass Pro Shops.