MGF

That would be wonderful! It's been many years since I've had a decent tackle store close to home.

Sounds easier to just wait until after Thanksgiving. Been busy here too.

My dad and I used to have a little creek that we would wade. We caught large numbers of giant carp throwing a piece of a night crawler on a little hook with just enough of a split shot to be able to make a short cast on light spinning tackle. It was a wild time.

I just fish my little river out of my flat bottom or the canoe depending on water level. Up here I don't see the ARMY of bass boats that are flying around at mach 2 down on the reservoir. I have a Lowrance Hook 5 that I bought several years ago but I never put it in the boat this year. I have a trolling motor that never heard of spot lock and I have to have oars or a push pole on hand because I get in water that's too shallow for the motor. This is about as high tech as my fishing is ever going to get. If I lived someplace else and my favorite fishery was something else I might have different tastes.

To each their own but I don't think that's what I want fishing to be.

I think we should state the type of fishing we're doing. All of my fishing so far this year has been in our river which is shallow and for most of the summer it's very clear. I don't think I've made a single cast into water deeper than about 5'. Braid on spinning tackle has just about been the best thing since sliced bread for me. I'll bet I have reels that have carried the same line for 3 or 4 years now...and they've been used a lot. I use about a 12' flouro leader partly because of the water clarity (might not be needed) and because of the buoyancy characteristics and the type of baits that I'm throwing. Over a lot of fishing and many hundreds of fish I haven't had any trouble with knot failure or getting the knot through guides. Some of those fish really had that line screaming too. On casting outfits I've mixed it up. Mono for top water, jigs, cranks or bladed jigs in the river. The same would go for fishing docks on the reservoir down river. The buoyancy doesn't bother me because of the shallow water and the mono is forgiving and inexpensive which is nice when you do a lot of skipping. For slower bottom baits in clean water or shallow jerk baits I'll go braid to leader. Here again the leader is either because of clarity or buoyancy. There are times I'll go straight braid but I haven't been there this year. The one thing I have NEVER done and have no plans of doing anytime soon is straight flouro...not for the type of fishing I do and not at what it costs. If I were fishing certain baits in deeper water I'd have to think about using straight flouro but I don't know when or if that will ever happen.

As I said there's different ways to make it work. Using a roll cast with a little bit of line out lets you get the bait close to the water without needing to get the rod tip close to the water.

Me too...had lots of fish pick up my bait when I was busy with something else. Many years ago a buddy and I used to fish a small private lake where they had a few row boats and a couple of paddleboats for rent. If the row boats were out then we'd fish from one of the paddleboats. Needless to say space was limited. He had a rod laying down with his spinner bait dangling in the water. I repeatedly warned him that he was going to lose his rod and he laughed it off....until this monster bass grabbed that spinnerbait and took off with his rod. It was really something to see. That rod took off like it had a ski-boat hooked or something.

I guess there's lots of ways to do it but I use the same reel settings I do for anything else. When fishing the river I might skip way under overhangs on one case and bomb the next one out over open water...same reel settings. I think an important thing to remember is that backlashes are caused when the bait suddenly slows down...and the spool keeps going. A really good skip just slides across the surface with very little resistance. Sometimes it's like the thing has a motor. You don't backlash on casts like that. The backlashes come when the bait is hitting the water too hard. So the best way to avoid the backlash is to do a good job of launching the bait. Not to be argumentative but I'm always reading/hearing guys recommend standing on a bucket to practice casting...as if everybody is fishing from a "bass boat" or some other boat with a deck. When I stand in my boat my feet are blow the surface of the water. I can still skip. I skip while sitting in my canoe and I skip while wading in chest deep water. It comes in real handy when bank fishing a wooded bank. Skipping is sometimes about the only way your going to launch a lure and you won't be using any large animated loop/roll cast either. It's all hunched over with limited room to move in any direction. You want a low trajectory. Being close to the water doesn't make it harder. Not to say that awkward positions don't add some challenge but that's fishing especially when you're not on big water in a bass boat. LOL

We have trouble keeping bats out of the house. On several occasions we've had one flying around the living room.

Interesting because I've had the opposite experience. Just this year I started fishing barbless hooks because I was injuring too many fish with so many of them hooked very deep. These fish really are trying to eat the bait.

All of the above. When I was younger it was fishing with my dad and cousins and a few weekend trips with dad and neighbors for musky, white bass runs or walleye runs. Later it was my kids and I. Now it's mostly fishing with my wife, sometimes my son and once in a while the grandkids. When my wife and I go out for the day it's almost always on the river chasing brown bass. I've done the solo thing all along. Recently I took a kid (30 year old kid) from work out wading the river. He only caught one bass but he had a blast. He's lived his whole life within a few hundred yards of the river and has never fished it. While we were out there he asked me if I did that sort of thing when I was a kid. I couldn't help but think how lucky I was when I answered "yes".

Not to make excuses but my lungs don't work so good anymore. I'm still doing everything I need to but I'm not anything like what I was just a few years ago.

I'm 62 and I have some retirement savings but I'll have to work at least until I can get medicare. I sure don't have enough saved to buy insurance for very long. Anyway I'm not sure retirement will be all that good for me. I'll miss the sense of urgency. There's no hurry to go fishing if I can go whenever I want and it doesn't really matter that much anyway. LOL What changes if you don't catch much one day? When I'm working performance counts and what I do matters...at least to me. Also I would have had a lot of fun if I were retired much younger...say under 55. I would have done a lot of things that I've simply lost the urge to do. I didn't have the time to do them back then and I don't have the strength or desire to do it now. Unfortunately as retirement savings grow better our health and stamina often goes the other way...the getting old thing.

Yes...I think it's about setting and achieving a goal. Rarely does somebody start at the top.

Works for me.

I don't think it makes sense to compare people who fish for fun to those who fish tournaments for a living. It's apples and oranges. The question I would ask is how many could be competitive after spending some amount of time working at it. I think that anybody who has set out to learn a profession or trade and made a success of it would have a good chance. So how many of us could learn/develop into it? Lots of us could.

But you have to enjoy doing that or somehow be driven to do it. I do 98% or my fishing on my local river because that's where my wife and I enjoy fishing. I would have to do things completely different if I were going to make a career out of it. Heck, I'd have to ditch the wife and my river. I hate to travel.

This (above) and a splitshot rig is what's been working for me through the late summer.

Talking river fishing here but last week in the raging heat I caught a bunch of big (for this river). By "big" I mean 18" or so. That was last Sat. and Sun. I fished the same area Wednesday evening and caught only smaller fish...15 inchers. Last Sat and Sun were almost identical weather but they were very different fishing days. I caught many more fish on Sat and they were far more aggressive. I did manage to catch a couple nice ones Sun but the mood was completely different. I have no idea why. I suppose there was less bait in the area but I don't know why or where it would have gone.

I lost two nice ones Sunday and one was really really nice. Note that I had just posted that I haven't been losing fish on my barbless hooks. I was using a #1 gama ewg and a zoom finesse worm. On the first I just got caught behind. By the time I realized it was a fish I had tightened up on him but never really set the hook. That little ewg isn't hard to set but it doesn't always happen on it's own. The second and even larger fish...I thought he was mine. Then I felt him come towards me and really shake his head. And...he was gone.

Barbs are made to go only one way and can do damage even when the fish isn't hooked deep. Since I release the great majority of what I catch I smash down all my barbs now. I just smash them down with my needle nose plyers. I lose very few where I blame the lack of a barb but I'm releasing them all anyway. It really is a lot easier to unhook fish and I feel better about their condition. A barbless hook is also easier to remove from me so I don't need to carry wire cutters. LOL

Yesterday I waded the river and only carried the tackle I could fit in my pants pockets. I carried 3 extra #1 ewg hooks, a few nail weights, a few split shots, 3 TRD, 4 zoom finesse worms, 4 strike king finesse worms and 4 yum dingers. That was in plastic bags in my front pockets. In my back pocket I carried a small pair of scissors and a pair of long nose plyers. I pack and carry that way because I know it's all going to get wet. I did have more tackle in the truck that I could get if I wanted to trek back for it...not likely. I lost track of how many brown bass I caught and I caught a bunch that went 17"+. LOL I told my wife that it was time to quit because my arm was too tired to handle another big bass...they really fight this time of year. When I fish from the bank I either do the same pocket carry thing or wear a small back pack. The places I've been bank fishing are pretty rough country so I travel light.

The only thing I really like about elaztech is the buoyancy which I think is important when fishing a ned in the river. However, my current favorite ned type presentation is the so called "tiny child" and I'm not sure the buoyancy is doing anything for me...hook in one end and a weight in the other. also getting a nail weight or a screw-in weight into elaztech is a real pita. I finally started saving worn out plastics that might make a good "tiny child" but I haven't really started using them yet. We'll see.

Maybe the fish around here have just seen too many paddle tails but I've been trying to become friends with them for a couple years now without being impressed. I just have a bunch of other stuff that works so much better. I've had good results using them as a jig trailer though.