galyonj

Ought to be fine. I know you already know this, but you gotta watch your line, bro. For reasons you've already illustrated, you can't rely on feeling the bite with soft plastics. Even then it's not 100%, of course. But your odds are better.

I think I'd heard that those were gonna be offered in a manual a la the first and second generation CTS-V models, but I never followed up. I would really love to have one of those in a wagon, though. Cadillac always has to be a special snowflake, though, and it has a habit of blowing up in their faces. cough Northstar cough I'm afraid the Blackwing will be, but it looks like they've switched to supercharging (almost certainly an Eaton-type) from the twin-turbocharging that they teased early on. Which is good, because putting the turbos in the engine vee like I'd read they wanted to do is beyond stupid. Absolutely! I just wanted to provide some fun car-nerd context.

For what it's worth, I drive a stickshift because I think it's fun. But I don't have any illusions. From a pure performance standpoint, automatics are always gonna be faster. Faster off the line. Faster through the apex, faster down the straight. I believe Porsche is the only high-dollar sportscar maker that even offers a stick anymore, and that's in their halo model (the 911 GT3), but I'm too lazy to look at other current manufacturers and am prepared to be wrong. Even the new Corvette is only offered in an automatic -- a first in the entire 68-year history of the model. The reason is very simple, of course. The current generation double-clutch automatic gearboxes will always shift faster and more accurately than we can. Always. And it allows the driver can focus on all the other aspects of controlling the vehicle. Even for cheap daily drivers, it's really hard to find a new car with a stick. So few people in the US are shopping for and buying cars with a manual transmission that manufacturers just don't bother offering them anymore.

If I never set foot into an office building again, it'll be too soon.

I get the feeling that the specific rules are determined by the circuit being fished (because MLF has five professional circuits and two school circuits), but I don't have time right now to dig that far into it and do a comparison. Like this one on Harris Chain is the Bass Pro Tour. You can peruse the rules in their entirety here, but to attempt to answer your specific question, BPT competition days consist of three 2.5 hour sessions with a 15 minute break between them. As far as I can see in the rules, competitors don't have to do anything but not fish during those 15 minute break periods.

Well I reckon you figured out what you needed to be throwing. lol

No idea, but I bet the percentages aren't in the fish's favor. I guess at least this way somebody's making money off it. lol

Because it's stupid. The way I read it, you can buy a permit that allows one to keep a fish that is illegal to fish for, as long as you pinky-swear it was just bycatch. For which a permit was purchased before the fact. But we TOTALLY weren't trying to catch it on purpose. Here's our permit that says so.

That reminds me, I found an old Doug Hannon video on YouTube and watched at it while I worked yesterday. He was making short casts with a spinner bait in situations where the prevailing logic is to do something with a quiet entry, but he may as well have been shouting "cannonball." Of course it may have been the 15th take and they'd already scared all the fish off, but I thought it was interesting. I don't think it matters all that much outside of some specific situations (and I don't think punching is one of those situations).

These dogs are sitting here acting like Deebo from Friday. "What do you want? I'm about to eat lunch-" "Naw bruh, WE boutta eat lunch."

Yeah, that'd do just fine.

Hellfire is one of my absolute favorite country epithets because it has so many contextual uses, from frustration to wonderment. My girlfriend erupts into peals of laughter every time she hears it. That's pretty much how I understand it. Though with manmade lakes like are all around me, a cut can be a bit longer. However, they are, to my mind, always very narrow for their length. Honestly, if one were to go out and only look for eddies, they've got a pretty good chance of having a good day fishing.

It all depends on your budget. If you had to do it with one combo, I'd 100% go with a ML. The Pro Qualifier 2 combo that @Bankc recommended would do a pretty great job at straddling that fence. However, let me pitch you this: If you have spinning combos for bass, I bet you don't use them super often. Let her use one of those, and get her a dedicated panfish setup. A 6' Okuma Celilo is like $25 or something, and it'd be a good rod at double the price. Get her a 1000-size reel in the $50 range, spool it with 4lb YZH, and she'll wear the panfish plum out*. *Spend some of what's left out of your budget on itty bitty hair jigs and fun panfish lures, and put the rest into the boat's gas tank.

For hot weather I'd probably go with a nice pilsner or a fruity IPA, to be honest. Cold weather is stout weather.

When we were looking for a boat, I kept teasing She Who Must Be Obeyed by sending links to Bullets and telling her the old story about how "If you're coangling, and your boater's driving a Bullet, just turn around and go home, cause they'll hurt you." I'm incredibly happy with the little boat we got (especially for the price -- holy crap), but I'd be lying if I said stupid-fast boats made in East Tennessee weren't still whispering sweet nothings to me.

The authorized resellers for most carriers are still pretty much the same system as the corporate stores. FWIW, I haven't gone into a store for a new phone in probably ten or 15 years, and that's through three carrier changes. I've usually just bought from the corporate website (but the last one I bought through Amazon), had the phone shipped to my house, set it up to move my information over, then called the carrier's support line to have them provision the phone on their network. Easy-peasy if you're into that, but I understand if someone doesn't wanna go to all that effort and fiddling with settings and whatnot. You can still get your phone from wherever the best price on what you want is, take it to whatever affiliated brick-and-mortar store you want, and have them copy your data over and set the phone up for you. Corporate stores will 100% give you less BS during the process than a reseller (or, god forbid, a mall kiosk).

I would be too. Further, I suspect that the larger the company, the greater the likelihood that its products are made offshore.

Dude, that's a donkey.

Well done.

You little scamp.

I think for where we fish it really don't matter a whole lot cause we'll just fish 'em all anyway. Primary points are mostly just creek mouths that got flooded when 'lectricity come to the valley here. Secondary points will be further back in that cut where the expensive houses are with the nice docks.

Thanks! Two times out, two times back to the launch. So far so good.

They're pretty great on a wacky rig. The shorter ends means they have a little tighter and faster shimmy.