Tennessee Boy

My advice. Don't start with Internet advice. Start where YOU are. I assume you've fished before. Use your experience and current equipment and make modifications to target bass. Spend time on the water to identify and address your weaknesses and you'll be on your way.

I ordered a similar scale off amazon. It works well. I use it to organize tackle at home. I can't imagine needing to taking it on the water.

Several things on your list that I agree with however I will never buy another vehicle without Car Play and the new fangled Cruze control. The last time I bought a car, the salesman kept telling me how great all these new electronic features are. Then when agreed to buy the car, he started telling me how often they fail and how expensive they are to replace and how I needed an extended warranty to solve this problem. He told me they had a customer that ran over a raccoon and had to replace $900 worth of sensors. 😀

My guess is you are correct that the guy doesn’t know what a crappie is. Crappie will take over a pond quickly. I fished a 100 acre state owned lake that had this problem. We caught countless crappie that were too small to eat but you could not released them alive. They ended up draining the lake to kill the crappie.

Currently here we have snow flurries and the wind chill is 22 degrees with 20 mph winds gusting to 30 mph. It's too cold to fish!!! The high will be 63 on Wednesday and 75 on Friday. I can wait.😊

I don’t think I can boil the process down to a few words. It depends on so many factors. Is the spot a stump, or a 100-yard-long point? Have I caught fish on this spot before? What am I seeing on the graph? How confident am I that I can find fish on other spots I might try?

I knew everything about bass behavior 40 years ago, then slowly the bass taught me that I don't know as much as I thought. It's human nature to want to explain patterns in our life that are partially or completely random in nature. Why did I catch them on that point today? Was it the wind, the moon, the barometric pressure? Was it because I spent 90% of the time fishing that point? We want to explain it. As I get older I realize the importance of being honest with myself about what I don't know. I think the bass fishing puzzle we are trying to solve is far more complex than we want to admit. Every body of water is different. Every day is different. Every bass is different. When you say I don't know you're just showing your age and your wisdom. 😊

Swimming is always an option.🤣

When I was a kid I caught bream with my grandfather from his ponds using a 30 ft sane. We used them to bait trot lines. I was with him when he released about a dozen leftovers into a new pond on his farm. Two years later the pond was full of bream that we were catching for bait. Lesson learned - you can’t come close to affecting the bream population in a pond by catching them for bait. They multiply extremely fast.

I haven't been excited about a Super Bowl Halftime show since Bruce Springsteen in 2009. Why? because I'm old. I understand they need to appeal to a much wider audience than old white dudes like me. I definitely don't think the NFL should be telling artist what to say and what language to say it in. If you invite an artist to play, you should let them play their music their way. If you have a problem with their lyrics you can bleep it with their permission. I know in 2006 they bleeped the Rolling Stones with their permission. Now that was a half time show I could get excited about.

My 90HP Merc 4 stroke EFI was missing at higher RPMs. The spark plugs had less than 100 hours on them. I pulled them and they looked fine. I was convinced it was in the fuel delivery system. I replaced the fuel filter-didn't help. Before going down the expensive path of replacing components until I found the problem, I decided to go ahead and replace the spark plugs. That fixed the issue.

Research has shown that bass have a difficult time telling the difference between yellow and white. The green tint in chartreuse should be noticeable to a bass. I don't know if bass can tell the difference but I can and it's one of my favorite colors.

So if they decided to "completely close smallmouth fishing" on my local lake, how does the Game Warden know if I'm targeting smallmouth?

I think the majority of the people that go fishing are like me when it comes to golf. I like golf - I know how to play and I have golf clubs. If someone invites me to play with them I'll probably go. Then they will regret inviting me because I spend so much time in the woods looking for my ball. I think it's been five years since I last played but I'll play again someday. If you had to buy an annual golf license, I would buy one every four or five years.

I fish all winter. If it's time to change the lower unit oil I do it in the late fall. When I'm pulling out I lower the motor all the way down while I'm still on the incline of the ramp. I drain the live well. Other than that, I don't do anything. It all depends on the climate you're in.

Comparing MEGA 360 to MEGA Live MEGA 360 is much higher resolution and the beam Is 86 degrees wide. MEGA Live in prospective mode is very low resolution. The beam is 20 degrees wide and the image is stretched to look like 360. It is live but there is no comparison in image quality.

The equation is mass times radius squared. Because the radius is squared it matters much more than the mass. It’s the same principle that makes skaters spin really fast. 🤣

Some scientifically minded person needs to build a Bifilar Pendulum to measure the moment of inertia of an empty spool and a spool filled with different lines so we can get a definitive answer to the question. I wonder if you could even measure the difference. Here's how to do it. You would need a much lighter platform than what's shown in the video to be accurate enough to use on a spool.

The term area moment of inertia is used in structural mechanics which is what you are referring to but mass moment of inertia is used in rotation dynamics. Type in rotational inertia in wikipedia and it will redirect you to moment of inertia for rotational dynamics.

Moment of inertia and rotational inertia describe the same physical concept—the resistance of a rotating object to changes in its angular motion. You could measure the moment of inertia of a bare spool and then again with line on it; the added line would increases the moment of inertia because it adds mass farther from the axis of rotation. As a result, more torque (or torque applied for a longer time) would be required to reach the same rotational velocity. In practice, the difference would be small but could slightly affect how easily the spool starts spinning, especially with light lures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_of_inertia

Here how my AI (ChatGPT 5) answers the same question. I'm showing the initial response and the final summary and leaving out several pages of physics equations and "Quantitative comparison": That’s an excellent and surprisingly deep question — and yes, the rotational weight (moment of inertia) of the line on the spool does play a role in casting performance, especially with light lures. But the effect is subtle and depends on several interrelated factors. Let’s break it down technically and practically: {deleted details} ✅ Yes — braid improves casting of light lures primarily because it reduces the spool’s rotational inertia, making it easier to start and stop the spool. But: The advantage is most pronounced with finesse weights (< 1/8 oz) and small spools (e.g., BFS reels or ultralight spinning setups). With normal bass tackle (¼–½ oz), the difference becomes minor compared to aerodynamics and spool tuning.

My first question would be are you really terrible or are you just not living up to unrealistic expectations. If you are really are terrible you are probably fishing in the wrong places. I think too many people focus on lures and equipment. The first step is finding the fish. The second step is figuring out how to catch them. No amount of improvement in step two will overcome failure in step 1.

The top 3 were Alabama boys and two of the three were locals. I'm guessing there was no significant off limits period which would give them a big advantage.

I've never used one. I've done the math in the past out of curiosity and it doesn't seem cost effective. I think a better battery would make more sense. I'm running a 15in and a 9in with FFS and 360 on a single LifePo4 battery and have never run out of power. What size/type of battery do you have?