Cdn Angler

To be fair he said it's a wild idea and he only heard of other people doing it and hasn't fished it himself. I mean any a-rig for Bass 20 years ago was considered ridiculous. As idiotic as it sounds I can't see why an a rig of swimbaits would work but a hard bait would not if rigged properly and in the right scenario. I won't be doing it any time soon though; just thinking of how to store a rig with 15 trebles gives me anxiety. Or a break off of a $150 rig.

No, but fishing is a bit different as there's some expectation that they at least somewhat use the baits. KVD used strike king products and Matt Stefan was fishing a Berkley money badger and prop bait last week. If Josh Jones is talking about squarebills it'd be a total farce.

I wonder what the lure manufacturers think about it? If I'm Berkley, 6th Sense or Rapala what is FFS doing for me and my products, which are mainly lures, baits and rods? As far as I'm aware they have nothing to do with Garmin. How many Rapala lures might get used in a livescoping tournament? How many Berkley baits are obsolete if FFS is 90% of tournaments? The way I see it the total range of potential lures used will go way down. The total # of lures used in one tournament by a top angler will go way down. The number of baits and rods any given angler will need should decrease. The search for a magic bait will likely be dispelled and you'll need way less colours and variety. Yes the FFS based lures will increase in sales, but how many flutter spoons, a-rigs and flatworms are needed? I'd assume topwater, shallow running cranks, spinnerbaits, pitching/flipping baits account for a huge portion of sales. How's a pro going to sell those if they no longer use them? How's Josh Jones going to sell 101 colours of a squarebill? Or 100 iterations of a flutter spoon or 1oz jig? It's like basketball and baseball nowadays where analytics says that only home runs and 3 pointers have value.

They specifically restrict how long a driver can be as the ball goes further than is deemed desirable. I think the size of the head is also restricted. Formula1 and Nascar have endless restrictions. Now that I think of it basically every sport has restrictions, including tournament angling. You can't net fish, troll, get out of your boat, some restrict a-rigs etc.

The only benefit I can see is that small fish may rarely be caught and will be able to spawn and do their thing without being caught and released. If you don't have to catch 50 total Bass to keep 5 big ones and strictly fish for the big ones you see, theoretically there's less total fishing pressure on all Bass. But big Bass will be getting absolutely hammered. Eventually you'd assume the big Bass would evolve to bite less often, or diminish in terms of total numbers of big fish.

Exactly. You can't use artificial bait, chum the waters, net fish, use an Alabama rig or even troll in tournaments. Why? Either because a) it's boring or b) it's too easy. The same arguments apply to FFS, the only difference being that live shiners aren't created by a giant corporation. Bass tournaments have been placing restrictions on what you can do to catch fish for 40+ years. There'd be nothing categorically different about a restriction on technology. So really the argument should just be about the pros/cons of FFS and unrestricted technology. I'm curious to see what lure manufacturers think of FFS if it completely takes over. They'll always be shallow fishermen, but if deep livescoping is dominant you are looking at huge swaths of lure categories that become obsolete. Yes other techniques will take their place, but the amount of tackle you use will probably go down by like 70%. And the top pros try to sell lures they use. If they all are using arigs and a flutter spoon there's only so much of those you can sell. If you only make 50 casts/day you aren't cycling through baits, losing baits, carrying 10 rods etc.

I fish a mix of semi sparse grass and pads, and more open water and always fish a wacky worm on 12 lb. flouro on a spinning Rod.

IMO a jerkbait has more drawing power for a SMB than a LMB. A SMB is more likely to move 10-20 feet to eat a jerkbait. So I'd feel more comfortable fishing a jerkbait over deeper water when targeting SMB as opposed to LMB. In that scenario a long pause seems to draw the fish. I'd say the same thing about topwater.

Hollow body frogs are loved by many, I'll still try them most likely, but I hate fishing them. The hook up ratio compared to a jig or texas rig is just too horrible/annoying. And a rod with 50 lb braid has fewer alternative applications to carry in my kayak where 5 rods is about my max. Carolina rig I have had little success on. May still give it a go, but it's a pain to rig, not fun and haven't caught much on it.

https://www.tacklewarehouse.com/Gamakatsu_Superline_Swimbait_Head_3pk/descpage-GSSH.html I find these make Keitechs last the longest and they 100% won't slip down the hook shank.

My vote goes to TackleJunkie the Youtuber. Dude seems to regularly have thousand dollar orders coming in of everything imaginable in every size/colour. May be a legitimate hoarder. I think he said he doesn't even get to fish that often. Even when he unboxes something and comments I'm thinking that there's zero chance he could ever use 80% of the stuff he buys.

OK...everyone has seen and probably done the old crankbait test. Pick up the bait and shake it back and forth like crazy. Whatever sound it makes is the sound of the crank. Nearly every lure review or whatever they do this. Here's my question/comment. Almost none of these lures shake back and forth violently while being reeled. They might shake a bit side to side or with the occasional stop/start, but not front to back as fast as a person can shake them. If you actually take a crankbait and put it through the air like it would go through the water the sound is 100% different. Some loud baits are still loud, but some baits are basically silent like this. I can't imagine it'd be any different underwater. Anyways this has always bothered/annoyed me and today I got out about 20 crankbaits and worked them through air like they are underwater and maybe 5 of them sounded similar to just shaking the hell out of them. The rest were totally different. So all of these lure reviews based on sound and shaking a bait, IMO, seem like a bunch of hooey.

Nice fish there!! I tried it last year and caught some nice ones before casting it into a tree lol. I liked that you could burn it and it wouldn't blow out.

Annual TW order. Most of this tackle is intended for SMB up here in Canada.

I have to agree with Tom and the other poster concerning the impact of so much pressure on lakes. It makes the fishing far worse for everyone the more pressure there is. In order of harm you have the meat eaters, bed-fishing/livewells, then C&R. But the sheer volume of people fishing will make fish less likely to bite, increase mortality, reduce the size of the biggest fish, reduce aggressive fish etc. It's all well and good that you can still catch fish, usually with $20,000+ of gear, but it becomes increasingly impossible for the kid with one rod, the old guy in a jon boat etc. I also don't know how it is more enjoyable to grind harder to catch fewer and smaller fish on fewer possible lures. I've fished a few lakes up here that took time and effort to access, but barely see a lure all year. It's fantastic and enjoyable fishing. Personally I think the number of tournaments should be restricted, for this reason and also just for public enjoyment of the lake. It's like trying to enjoy a nature walk when there's a trail running marathon with 2,000 people on the same trail. Once and awhile is fine, but it shouldn't be every day. The more I look at it fishing is better off as a pastime than a sport/competition.

6.2 which is my pb. Spinning rod 12 lb flouro.

I've thrown large lures on spinning gear pre baitcaster. The heaviest spinning rod you can find spooled on a 4000 series reel with 30 lb braid was always my go to. It's not at all optimal, but it's doable. I've thrown 130 whopper poppers, 1oz + swimbaits for pike and muskie etc. Catching and landing isn't a problem, but it's a pain to cast and reel in. A 110 whopper plopper on that setup isn't bad at all aside from being forced to fish a topwater on braid (which isn't that bad in the grand scheme of things).

I didn't get out as much this year and nothing close to 5, but still managed some decent fish, for me. The baits that caught me the biggest fish of the year (some weighed, some guessed - I don't weigh pike) were: - 4 lb LMB and a 3.5 SMB - Castaic Jerky J (Fluke-Style Bait) - 4 lb SMB - Ned Rig with a Savage Gear Salamander - 4 lb SMB - Yamamoto D-Shad (Green) - 3.9 LMB and 4 lb LMB - Both on Keitech Crazy Flapper, 4.3 Size. - 3.8 SMB - Evil 4x4 Spinnerbait (4 Bladed Spinnerbait) - Many LMB and two 32 Inch Pike - Evergreen Flat Force (Flat Sided Crankbait) - 12 lb Pike - Jackall Rerange (Ghost Minnow) For numbers it was the D-Shad and a Duo Realis Skimmer (Skinny walking bait) in a silver/ghost colour. In terms of new baits (to me) I was impressed most with the Evergreen crankbait.

All sports have technology and all, at some point, draw a limit as to where the tech should end because it changes the essence of the sport. For me FFS is that limit, if not even Down/Side scan. I don't think the whatabout argument you make, which is that using any other fishing technology makes you a hypocrite if you criticize FFS, hold water. Just because a baseball player wears shoes doesn't mean you can't critique a hitter geeked out PEDs with an aluminum bat that hits the ball 40% further. Why? It changes the essence of the sport, where homeruns are supposed to be hard, not easy. Same with fishing. The sport is supposed to be about finding fish based on knowledge and intuition, not scanning the lake for them. You aren't supposed to even know the size of a particular fish until it bites your line. Is that anti-change? Yes it is. Why not just electrocute the water and then grab one? Are the GPS companies going to use satellites and drones to track every fish in the lake, in real time, then you go to the exact log you know has a 10.5 lb fish? Why not just fish from a robot boat and rod from your living room with a remote control? Surely there is a limit somewhere? It isn't like fishing is a free for all, there are tons of restrictions on how you can fish. FFS is just another area that requires regulation. I'm not impressed by this dude or anyone else using FFS. I'm sure they are great fishermen, but would he have caught those fish without the tech? Nope. He's an advertisement for Garmin, nothing more.

I don't much care for fish caught using FFS as I don't use it. I'm sure it requires a great deal of skill to maximize the technology, but to me it is a step beyond what fishing is supposed to be about. If one guy can figure out how to target Double Digit Bass using FFS then you can be sure others will as well. Ultimately that likely means fewer big fish or that it'll become increasingly hard to catch them without FFS. For me 95% of fishing is finding fish by working areas that might have them. Knowing that they are there and watching them react to your bait in real time takes away most of the magic of the sport. If someone went and caught DDB at a tiny stocked pound where they stuff the bass with caught bait I'd think the same way. This isn't progress IMO, it's regression. Same as baseball bats and golf clubs, there need to be limits. Even more so in fishing as it is a finite resource.

They do it 24/7 and are good at it. One thing I notice is that they are ridiculously efficient. It isn't because they have a $500 rod either. They have every technique, piece of equipment, boat, motor, cast etc. dialled in. No backlashes, line twist, errant casts, wrong type of line for what they want to do etc. I only get out so often and there's basically always a level of experimentation going on. Experimenting and winning don't go together. Sometimes experiments go poorly.

Most fish caught were on the same setup: 6'8 Shimano Sellus, Nasci reel, 12 lb flouro, fishing a fluke style bait: mainly a Yamamoto D Shad or a Castaic jerky j. The D shads were mostly green/white. I also had surprising success on bubblegum. Usually #1 would be a whopper plopper, but I had less luck with it this year. I often used an Ima Skimmer in ghost minnow instead, which is a skinny Spook essentially. I kinda hated it as it walked funny, but it got bit.

I'm in Ontario and for whatever reason docks aren't amazing. They hold fish, but not to the point where they are outstanding. I find lilypads are MUCH better. I'm assuming it is because there are other weeds surrounding the pads whereas typically docks here have no weeds beneath them. So they are my #1 option, with the caveat that there has to be some water beneath them. A lily pad in half a foot of water is no good, nor if there are too many weeds i.e. totally choked full of weeds.

The one I find perplexing are the hordes of people that catch multiple fish and save them in a livewell until the end of the day for a picture holding 4 fish at the same time. I'm talking non-tournament angling. That's gotta be worse than a fish on the ground for a few seconds. To be honest though, neither bother me that much. Fishing in general isn't good for fish. If people are keeping them to eat then they are already a step ahead. Most people are ignorant and don't mean any harm.

I used to have that happen more often (still happens), but I stopped dragging it and happens less. I hop it and or swim it if relatively sure it's near the bottom.