Tennessee Boy

Today a federal appeals court ruled that many of the new tariffs imposed this year are illegal but the ruling won't take effect until mid-October to allow for appeals. So now we have more uncertainty about what prices will be in the future. I feel for anyone trying to run a business in this environment.

Eventually, someone is going to remind us that research has shown that bass have a difficult time distinguishing between yellow and white. 😆

Are any of you in a bass club that limits FFS use?

That is a beautiful fish. Smallmouth are special. Congratulations.

I noticed you were gone and I was a little worried. Welcome back.

It's closer to 67.2% 😆

Well said. There's also a big problem with using AI for fishing advice. The world of bass fishing is about 20% science and the rest is a combination of pseudoscience, superstition and ideology. None of the AI systems have spent time on the water so they must learn everything from what people have written. Look at almost any thread on this forum and you'll see that we humans can't agree on anything when it comes to fishing. All of these opinions go into the training of the AIs. What comes out can be helpful but shouldn't be completely trusted. The great thing about AI is you can discuss things with it. If you don't agree with something it says you can debate with it. For example, I ask ChatGPT what is the best type of fishing line. It listed the characteristics of each type of line and what they are good for. It said that mono floats. I've read that on this forum many times. My next question was "What is the specific gravity of mono line?" It responded 1.10-1.15 and immediately realized that mono doesn't float so it corrected itself and explain how surface tension can cause mono to stay on top of the water. So it repeated what it had learned about mono on the Internet but when challenged it looked a little deeper into the science.

In the early 90s I started fishing jigs with a pork trailer. One of my mentors who was dominating the bass club I was in was using Zoom Chunks and recommended them to me. I switched and have never looked back. It seemed like I caught more with plastic but without doing a side by side comparison it's impossible to say with any certainty.

I view lures as tools. Just like the tools in my toolbox I use them when the situation requires it. If I need to remove a screw I reach for a screw driver. When I need a fast top water lure I reach for a buzzbait. It’s the only fast top water bait I use.

No lure is essential to making it as a pro. Sponsorships are essential to making it as a pro.

This is also how I approach fishing most of the time. If you look at underwater video of the lures we fish with, most of them do not look like anything in nature. Crankbaits looks nothing like a fish but they catch fish. This study found that largemouth foraging success in a tank was 95% in sunlight and the same in moon light. It dropped to 62% in starlight and near 0% in total darkness. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229574086_Foraging_success_of_largemouth_bass_at_different_light_intensities_implications_for_time_and_depth_of_feeding

Limiting its use to one period seemed to work very well for the BPT this year. I think it made the tournaments more interesting. Three tournaments were won by anglers who didn’t use FFS at all on the final day. Overall, the BPT had a very strong year in 2025, with three tournaments decided in the final minutes. The Nickajack tournament, won in the final seconds, was especially exciting. Sports leagues always generate more interest when they have a Tiger Woods– or Caitlin Clark–type superstar, and Jacob Wheeler is currently fishing at that superstar level on the BPT.

This is a very interesting thread. I've been following it but have not had time to respond in detail until now. I’m not a neuroscientist but I’m fascinated by the way the brain works and I’ve read a number of book on the topic that were written for novices like me. We often project our own thoughts, emotions, and reasoning abilities onto animals. It’s a natural tendency — we try to make sense of the world by using our own minds as the reference point. This is a mistake when trying to understand how fish “think”. To understand how a fish brain works you need to understand the differences and similarities between our brain and theirs. At the center of human consciousness is the neocortex. This is where conscious thought occurs. The neocortex enables reasoning, abstract thinking, complex planning, language, and a sense of self-awareness. When you decide where to go fishing and where to cast, that’s your neocortex at work. Fish, by contrast, do not have a neocortex. Their brains are dominated by structures similar to the more primitive regions of the human brain, such as the brainstem and limbic system — areas that control instinct, reflexes, and basic survival behaviors. These structures are highly effective for responding quickly to stimuli, but they do not produce anything close to the layered, reflective cognition humans experience. Fish brains operate in a world of immediate responses: reacting to sudden movements, adjusting to changes in light or current, or striking at prey that enters their strike zone. This is not thought in the way humans think of thought; it is stimulus and response. If you want to understand how fish “think,” you need to stop imagining human-like thought in them and instead look inward — at the primitive, automatic parts of your own brain. Consider what happens when you pull your hand away from a hot surface. You don’t stop to reason through the pain; your body reacts reflexively. That reaction — fast, unconscious, and automatic — is closer to how a fish processes its environment. This does not mean fish are mindless. They have forms of memory, they can learn to associate signals with food, and are capable of surprisingly complex behaviors. But these behaviors are built on instinctive and adaptive programming rather than conscious analysis. A bass does not “decide” in the human sense — it is responding to hard wired signals triggered by shape, movement, vibration, context and who knows what else. A book I recently read told of a scientific experiment that demonstrates a fishes cognitive ability. They put a fish (didn't say what species) in a tank with a clear divider that had a hole in it. The fish quickly found the hole and used to hole to move from one side of the tank to the other. Then they dropped food on the opposite side of the tank from the fish. The fish tried to swim directly toward the food and hit the divider. It could not get to the food. It was able to map out it's environment and use the hole to navigate in that environment but could not cognitively understand that to get to the food on the other side of the tank it needed to go through the hole. The fish was able to react to the food being in the tank but was not able to do the analysis needed to solve the problem posed by the divider.

I'll be honest. I've been getting a little behind on my mowing this year. 😆

Yes it is month to month at $29.99 or $119.99 for a year. @TnRiver46 For years now I've used an antenna in the attic to get free broadcast TV. It more than serves my needs except during football season and even then many of the big games are broadcast on network TV.

In the 80s and 90s frogs were called Rats. Did the bass decided they’re frogs not rats or did we? 😆 My personal theory is that bass don’t identify their prey before they eat it. Certain things trigger them to strike. A bass that has never seen a crawfish would still eat one even if it didn’t know what to call it.

Today ESPN launched ESPN Direct-To-Consumer. I hate cable TV but every fall for years I've subscribed to some sort of online TV streaming package just so I could watch college football. I've subscribed to Hulu or Sling TV to get the login to use on the ESPN app which I used to watch the games. I had access to lots of other channels but I almost never watched. Last year I used SlingTV and never even installed the SlingTV app on my Apple TV. As of today, I can subscribe to everything ESPN provides for $30 a month. I pay ESPN directly to watch ESPN. I no longer have to pay for the Hallmark Channel!! It's a good day.

I regret not casting in that place right before the blowup.

and George Perry - World record largemouth bass

@Kayak Koz I would encourage you to dig deeper in conversation with it. Ask what spot you should fish first. Then ask it why it likes that spot. Just keep digging and you'll start to sense the limits of what it knows and how it made it's recommendations.

I'm a retired computer geek and I've spent a lot of time playing around with it and using it for helpful task. A while back I uploaded an image from a topo map and ask it where I should fish. It made some good suggestions. It understood what the contour lines meant and read the text that noted the location of vegetation. It was impressive but I certainly wouldn't call it superhuman insight. It's reasonable to think that AI can save you time doing map study like it can save you time doing so many other things. It will only get better. I’m convinced that AI will bring about unimaginable change. That scares people—it scares me a little, too. I think it will be even bigger than the invention of the automobile. Automobiles drastically changed the way we live. They’ve probably killed more people than any other invention in history, yet you don’t hear many people say cars should be banned. I believe AI will improve our lives in ways we can’t yet imagine. The scary part, for me, is what people with bad intentions might do with it. I’m an optimist, so I’m looking forward to seeing where it takes us.

Who would you nominate to be in your states Bass Fishing Hall of Fame and why. Doesn't necessarily have to be an angler. Industry leaders are allowed. Be sure to include the state. I'll go first 😊 Tennessee Bill Dance - No explaination necessary. Billy Westmorland - Professional angler, Smallmouth guru and host of his own fishing show. Charlie Brewer - Creator of Slider fishing and the father of finesse fishing (I'm sure everyone will agree with that 😆). Charles Spence - Founder of Strike King Lures. Fished in Ray Scott's first tournament. Earl Bentz - Founder of several bass boat companies. (Stratos, Triton, Cayman) Also served as President of OMC after they purchased Stratos from him. Paul Allison - Founder of Allison Boats. He never built bass boats although Allison makes them now. He was famous for making very fast boats. He belongs in the hall of fame for the many innovations he made that are standard equipment on all bass boats today. He invented the cupped propeller, was the first to sell a power trim and a foot throttle.

I fished small creeks when I was a teenager. I went to my local TWRA office, walked up to the front desk, and ask if they had any information on the creeks in the area. The receptionist call one of the biologist, he invited me back to his office and started pulling stuff out of his filing cabinets and making copies of it. I left with a stack of papers on creeks in middle Tennessee and what fish were in them. In 1994 a professor at the University of Tennessee published an almost 700 page book called the Fishes of Tennessee. It has range maps for each species that show what bodies of water in the state they are found in. None of that helps you in Kentucky but you get the idea. There's good information to be found if you just look for it.

You might want to find out what prey species are in the waters you fish and study them. I know the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife do not like shad in some small lakes.