slowworm

I said it in a different thread, and I'll repeat it here. If it's not a birch bark canoe, a hand carved paddle and a cane pole with a hook made from bone, it's not fair chase!

Well, for all the talk of corporate greed, I've never met an employee who said they were paid too much for the work that they did. This is not about greed. It's about what the market will bear. If the market supports $15 crankbaits, that's what the market will charge. Here's another way of looking at the same question. If someone offers you 50% more than your base salary today, would you say, nah, I'm not worth that, the labor market average is where I'm at now, so it's all good. But I really like your company, so I'll take the same job offer as my current salary. Does anyone every say that? No, they don't.

Depends how I'm travelling. By car? - Yes. By plane? No.

This is true, but after 5 years of dragging my yak over rocks and into skinny water the silicone kind of just blends in with the rest of the dirt. I don't set out to abuse my yak, but I don't baby it either.

^^^ This. Every year something in my kayak setup changes as both my approach to fishing changes and as I get ideas from other anglers. I'm also coming up on 5 years. It's a very personal thing. This year I moved a couple of drilled items around after a couple of years where they were. The holes are easily filled with silicone caulk, so I wouldn't say don't drill holes. What I would say is don't drill them until you are reasonably sure they need to be there.

This is true of every professional sport. The bulk of NFL team revenue comes from TV deals, not ticket sales. TV sells advertising slots during the game. Replace NFL with sport of your choice and it's the same story. Except maybe curling.....

Maybe not new, but certainly new to a significant chunk of his audience. Unless you are doing research and development and presenting at conferences and getting patents, then you aren't introducing anything new to any field of study. Instead, you're just putting old knowledge into practice. That would be the vast majority of us BTW. But if you are writing books, or doing social media posts, to introduce those concepts to a wider audience than you are certainly doing a good thing. They used to call that democratization of knowledge. That should be good thing we can get behind. There was a thread here recently about AI/ML, a subject that I have more than a passing familiarity with. Between flat out wrong understanding interspersed with some other decent posts, that thread was all old stuff 101 level stuff to me. But I was not the audience. I really don't get the hate, real of implied, for Millken's post, just because we have a bunch of people here who already knew. Whoop-de-do for them. The world is full of people who know way more about some stuff and way less about other stuff on any topic you could possibly choose. Just cos they know less on a given subject doesn't make them stupid.

Joking aside, there is a lot of truth in this statement. At what point do you draw the line? Heck, you want to allow motors? If it's not a birchbark canoe, a hand carved paddle, along with a cane pole and a hook carved from bone it's not real fishing! Flashers replaced plumbs and made mapping the lake much quicker. Good paper depth charts eliminated chunks of water. GPS made returning to spots easy, eliminating navigation skills. 2D sonar made mapping quicker again than flashers. Spotlock took all the skill out of running a trolling motor in the wind. Heck the Garmin Force can drive you to your GPS marked spots. I'm sure other trolling motors can too. Sidescan speeded up the mapping of cover and structure again over 2D sonar. Each one of these steps allowed more casts/hour and put more pressure on the fish. FFS just continues this trend. If you want to ban FFS, then at the least side-scan needs to go as well as it can find decent structure hundreds of feet away from the boat. And Spotlock has done more to open up offshore structure fishing than anything else. I know I can't effectively fish offshore structure in anything but calm weather without it. And it's rarely calm where I fish.

Wearing a PDF in a sinking truck can seriously hamper movement and ability to escape. When in the truck launching or retrieving it's PFD off and windows down and seatbelt off. I don't intend to test the amphibious capabilities of my truck, but if I do, I'm not staying with it a moment longer than necessary.

Check your state laws on towing. I used to tow a 17 foot bass tracker with a 2014 Ford Escape with the same towing capacity as your Cherokee. It has a package weight of around 2200 lbs. To be legal to tow that in NH, I needed brakes on the trailer as the package weight exceeded some percentage of the axle weight of the escape. I forget the exact number but is was like 60%. There is more to this than just towing capacity.

I looked at the regs Scott F posted and it isn't immediately clear to me what the interstate waters are, but that may be lack of familiarity with the local geography. If I was visiting for a week for fishing I would be unsure what it actually says. Here in NH it is very clearly spelled out. Interstate Waters - New Hampshire Freshwater Fishing | eRegulations

It's been useful for me too! I've been looking at going the same route with my SS127.

Daiwa doesn't sell blanks 🙂 A while ago I decided to replace all the rods I wanted to upgrade with rods I built. Not because I couldn't buy what I wanted, but because it's fun and rewarding. The replaced rods go into the kayak so I always have that ready to go when I want an evening fishing. I have a smaller set of tackle just for the kayak as well for the same reason. Thanks for all the feedback on the rods. I will be getting a 73. I'll try to remember to post build pictures.

Given the warm winter weather and early ice out (locally at least, Squam is probably a week or two out) I expect the temps to be a couple of weeks ahead of the last few years average. I pull the boat out of storage next weekend. I've already been out in the kayak locally, but the waters still cold and I got skunked. Beats sitting on the couch though!

I'm looking to build a new spinnerbait rod and I'm having trouble settling on a blank. Usually, I have a good idea of what I want, but for some reason I'm really not sure about this one, because I don't fish spinnerbaits a huge amount because I feel my MH/F Daiwa Aird-x is a bit too soft in the tip, and my other MH is an XF worm rod. I'm looking at MHX blanks mainly as I have really liked the ones I have built so far. I want to throw spinnerbaits 3/8-1/2 oz. I'm torn between the MB873 and the MB874. I'm leaning towards the MB874 because a 3/8 spinnerbait is more like 1/2 oz with the wire & blades, then add a trailer that can run from 1/4 to 1/2 oz and you end up knocking on the 1oz door. Links to the blanks. MHX 7'3" Heavy Mag Taper Rod Blank - MB874 (mudhole.com) MHX 7'3" Med-Heavy Mag Taper Rod Blank - MB873 (mudhole.com) I'd appreciate feedback on my thinking of an H rather than an MH. I'm stuck in analysis paralysis. J.

I wonder if anyone will ever post a question that @Glenn can't answer with a relevant video!

Personally, I rarely even change the stock hooks unless they get rusty or bent. But when there's a few tens of thousands of $$$ on the line, a lost fish may be the difference between not making the cut and cashing the check. So, the stakes are high, and things get obsessed over. When as a younger man doing Alpine Mountaineering, I obsessed over the small stuff for the same reason. The stakes were a bit higher than $$$ though. My guess is you obsessed over details on the boat in your career for the same reason. When the stakes are high, details matter. As a complete aside, I recently watched a documentary on Alpine Mountaineering and instead of missing doing it, my thought was "What the hell was I thinking! My poor Mother worrying!" I must get getting old!

"These flashers are taking the skill out of plumbing the lakebed! It'll ruin bass fishing!" "These topo maps have taken the skill out of flashing the lakebed! It'll ruin bass fishing!" "GPS has taken the skill out of reading the top maps and finding my spots! It'll ruin bass fishing!" "Spotlock has taken the skill out of boat positioning! It'll ruin bass fishing! "Sidescan has taken the skill out of finding hidden brush piles! It'll ruin bass fishing!" And now the grand finale! "FFS has taken the skill out of finding fish! It'll ruin bass fishing!"

THIS! I'm about 20 years behind you. I've d**n near gone over the side a few times in the chop or just plain losing my footing. I'm at that age when things can "Just Happen (tm)". I fish alone 90% of the time. The coast guard have the motto "You have to go out, you don't have to come back." Thanks to @A-Jay for his service. Well, that's not me. I have a family. Sure, I have life insurance, but I need to go home. And, God forbid, I have a heart attack or something and go into the drink, I don't want my recovery to risk anyone else's life. That may be morbid, but that's how I think.

So, if they had been using a BFS rod and reel that would make it OK? All righty then....

The potential for abuse of pretty much any technology is concerning. George Orwell wrote in 1984 about propaganda constantly fed to the proles through the telescreens which were always spying on them. Big Brother was always watching them. Today we pretty much all carry a portable tracker with us 24/7 in the form of a cell phone. Is Big Brother always watching us? Misuse of technology for evil ends is nothing new.

Entropy is a harsh mistress. AKA The 2nd law of thermodynamics is a *****.

If I caught a state record bass in my home state of New Hampshire I would weigh it on my rapala scale, take a picture, release it and keep my mouth mostly shut. Maybe describe it as close but under the record. I’m not one to go chasing accolades….

Not knots again. It's a very knotty topic and people get all tied up in knots over it, arguing that knot is not better than this knot. This is not the best way to address the knotty problem of which knot not to use when. Of course, I have my own opinions on when to use this knot and not that knot, but because of these knotty discussions I'm not going to share knots, whether you like it or not.