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That's the truth. Although another advantage to a kayak is you don't need a boat ramp to launch. So I'll often study the lake before hand, find out where I want to fish, and then find a place to park near that spot where I can launch from. I tend to look for areas with both shallow cover and some access to deeper areas, so if there not biting in one, I can try the other. I fish finder is almost a must unless you know the lake well, or it's small enough to try a bit of everything. On a larger lake, a trolling motor or pedals come in really handy to help you cover more ground. Also, keep the wind in mind when choosing where to launch and fish. I always try to launch so that when I return to the car, I'll have the wind to my back because I'm usually pretty worn out by that time.

I've got a feeling we will soon be seeing all kinds of things "made in the USA" that didn't used to be. The reason... Robots and computers cost the same to run no matter what country they're in. Even service sector jobs are going fully automated. I haven't had but probably ten checkout experiences with a human cashier in last 6 months. It's all been online or self checkout.

That's the way I was raised. And while I don't always fish like that, I do wish more rods had that grip in the front so that I could. There are some advantages to holding the rod that way and there's no real disadvantage (that I can see) to having an unused front grip on a rod.

Moderate action rods bend further down, distributing the load across a larger area. So in my experience, they tend to break less easily than stiffer action rods.

I replaced the spool bushings with Hawgtech bearings in my old Shimano B-100 Mag. It didn't make a noticeable difference versus when I cleaned and properly lubed the reel. Now, with bearings you don't have to be exacting with the oil, as when bushing start to run a bit dry, their performance suffers greatly, whereas bearings can go a good bit longer and still perform pretty well. The only reason I replaced them is that the bushings were plastic and old and getting rather worn out from use. The bushings were almost 30 years old! But even then, they worked fine with the proper amount and weight of oil. They just needed to be cleaned and oiled rather frequently. Think of it this way, a poorly operating bushing or bearing is basically doing the same job as some of the tension created by the spool tension knob or cast control. So any performance you gain, you're gonna want to immediately take away so you don't instantly backlash on every cast. You're going to be able to make up for most poor bearings or bushings by simply backing off the spool tension knob. Either way, you're still working with the same friction coefficient. However, there's a point to where if they're bad enough, even backing fully off the spool tension knob won't be enough. At that point, an upgrade will serve you some good. So my advice is to upgrade bearings when something is wrong with your old ones. Otherwise, just keep up with the cleaning and lubrication, and you'll be fine. There's no point in upgrading to "something better" if you can't really take advantage of what is supposed to make it better.

Such is the circle of life. Feeling bad is a good thing. It means you're not a sociopath. But don't let it bog you down for too long. Everything dies at some point. And fish aren't smart enough to comprehend things like death, dying, or what they leave behind. They don't fear death so much as they instinctually try to avoid it. And if it did die, it's body will serve it's role in the circle of life of the pond, just like it was meant to. Part of playing our part in being good stewards of the environment is to ensure the survival of the species as a whole, not necessarily ever single member of it.

None of my Zebco 33's have ever let me down. They don't cast well, but they're cheap enough you can often buy them on a whim. Last year I got a 33 with a rod and line for $10 at Wally World. Half my lures cost more than that! And guess what? It catches fish. The rod isn't sensitive by any stretch of the imagination, but if you hold your finger on the line as you reel it in, it tells you everything you need to know. The drag sucks to use, but it works. Like I said, they don't cast well, but they don't backlash if you mess up either. They're definitely not as refined as any other rod and reel listed, but if you can't catch a fish on one, then you're a pretty terrible angler. And best of all, if I go fishing with someone who hasn't fished much, we can take out my 33's and I can teach them about fishing instead of how to use a reel. They have fun instead of messing with difficult gear, and I have fun reliving my childhood instead of watching them like a hawk so they don't break something expensive.

It happens. It could be that from a bank you're trying to cast further or harder. Or it could be the surrounding vegetation is bothering you mentally. Or it could be that you're used to doing it lower to the water (sitting down). Bring a lawn chair next time and see if that helps.

Do you even need the empty water bottles on the sides? It seems like they'd produce more drag than anything else. I wouldn't be surprised if the hull itself displaced enough water on it's own to keep you afloat. It's a clever idea. I'm not going to knock it. But you're still spending a good chunk of change on something that's probably not going to last long, as the plastic on the hull is fairly thin compared to what you'd find on an actual boat of some kind. Plus, paddling that thing for any distance would be real pain. And speaking as a person who owns a kayak you can stand up in, I would gladly trade the ability to stand up for the ability to paddle efficiently. Anyway, I load my kayak onto the roof of my coupe by myself. It's not hard. What you do, is you get a kayak dolly, which you'll want anyway so you can roll your kayak to the bank from your parking spot, and you flip it upside down and strap it to the trunk. The wheels act like rollers. So now you just lift the front up to the wheels, go around the back and lift the back up, and wheel it onto the roof. I use pool noodles to protect the roof, but it would be better if you had a roof rack. I take it down the same way, but in reverse. In any case, I'd be sure to wear a PFD in any small watercraft. Doubly so for something like that where durability and poor tracking come into play. Storms, especially in the summer, can pop up out of no where and be pretty intense. It'd be really easy to get blown out to the middle of a lake and sink as the hull cracked under waves, and then be forced to swim to shore in strong current AFTER you've worn yourself out trying to paddle against the waves for a while.

I think each brand has good and bad models. I have no loyalty or preference to brand. I just define what I'm looking for in a reel, set a budget, and then look to see what my options are. From there, I do a lot of research and go for the one that best meets my requirements. I've owned pretty much everything but a Lew's. I haven't had a bad reel yet. And I haven't avoided Lew's. I just keep finding reels that better fit my needs in other brands. Like last month when I was heavily considering a Lew's Tournament MP, when I got my hands on a BPS Pro Qualifier 2. They're basically the same reel, but the PQ2 was significantly cheaper, especially with the cost of a new rod thrown in. It has less drag, but I figured I wouldn't really need 20 lbs. of drag, and if I did, I could upgrade the drag later on down the road, and still come out ahead, money-wise.

The Endura Max has a PWM circuit, if I understand that correctly. So it controls the speed by pulsing the voltage to the battery. At slower speeds, it rapidly switches between full on and full off. It does this at a high enough speed (frequency) so that the motor still runs smoothly and doesn't stutter. What that means is it will be more efficient, battery wise, on lower speed settings. The C2 doesn't. It uses a series of resistors to lower the voltage to the motor. This means it supplies the full voltage of the battery any time it's running, but due to the bleed off from the resistors, only part of it reaches the motor. The rest is expelled at heat (though probably not enough to notice). So at full speed, they should eat up the battery about the same. But at half speed, the C2 will eat the battery about the same as it does at full speed, but the Max should only eat the battery about half as fast. So, if you're using the trolling motor at around half speed most of the time, you'll get a lot more life with the Max. If you're using the trolling motor at full speed most of the time, there shouldn't be a noticeable difference. Also, the PWM circuit does create more electrical noise. So it could interfere with your transducer on your fish finder more easily than the regular C2 would. However, if you set the system up properly, and have the trolling motor grounded efficiently, it shouldn't be a problem. You just have to be a little bit more careful with the wiring, that's all.

The way I see it, the increased revenue and exposure from having more anglers will get more funding for them, and perhaps they'll get a little bit more care from the government as a result. The more people that appreciate the amenities, the more people who will back politicians who want to increase the funding for those amenities. My home state of Oklahoma has been cutting back funding for lakes for a long, long time now, and outside of a few of the bigger ones which receive most of the attention and money, most are largely left abandoned by the state. The restrooms are boarded up. The boat ramps are washing away. The roads are almost impossible to drive on. The banks are overgrown. The water and fish aren't being managed. If anyone takes care of them, it's usually the city. And if the city doesn't have the means, or it doesn't belong to a city, then it's left to die a slow death. Years of demands for lower taxes and less government haven't been kind to parks, forestry, water, and wildlife conservation departments. And that's truly sad, especially coming from a state that loves the outdoors so much. The lake closest to me is getting renovated by the city of OKC (started a few years before the pandemic). It used to be a dangerous place where dead bodies were routinely dumped. It was dirty, unkept, with terrible roads, and very few visitors outside of drug dealers wanting to meet in secret. Now, it's a much nicer, safer, and cleaner place where families and friends frequent. The difference was night and day. Sure there are more anglers and other people on the lake. But that's a small price to pay for not being afraid to be there. It went from a crime haven to a safe haven. And the only reason that happened was because OKC has much more liberal tendencies than the state as a whole, and they actually managed to pass a sales tax increase to pay for that, and other infrastructure improvements. Most of the smaller lakes in my state haven't been so lucky. My point being, you can complain about the increased number of people on the lake if you want to. There's definitely a downside to it. But I've seen both ends of the extremes. And trust me when I tell you that too many people on a lake is a million times better than too few. And as a bonus, I do often come home with more lures that I left with, which is a nice change of pace for me!

It's hard to say. But brushes would be a good place to start, especially if the motor has a lot of miles on it. And clean out any junk on the commutator. Sometimes they can pick up shavings from the worn brushes and cause arcing, or dirt and grease that just causes intermittent contact. Also, are the cables for the transducer and trolling motor running right next to each other? That can cause them to pick up interference from one another. The trolling motor won't mind, but the fish finder might. If possible, you might separate them a bit. I don't know if they use coaxial wire for these things, but if they don't, I imagine interference is possible. Sometimes there's a ground connection on the trolling motor. You might look for that and see if you can ground the motor to the skeg, or check it to make sure it has good contact with the ground. If that connection has become corroded or disconnected, it might not work as it's supposed to. I'll admit that I'm not that familiar with boat electronics. I've never really had issues on a boat that I've had to deal with. But I've done a lot of electronics work, and eliminating line noise can be extremely frustrating. Though in this case, I think you know where the noise is coming from (the trolling motor). So it's just an issue of where it's being picked up.

I can't tell the difference between a 7.1 or 8.1, unless I just immediately switched from one to the other. Basically, if you spin a 8.1 reel's handle around 7 times, you get the eighth turn for free. So it only saves you one rotation out of every 8 rotations versus using a 7.1 ratio reel. If you're reeling so much or so fast that it makes you uncomfortable, then that extra turn might make a difference at the end of the day. But for me, they're more or less the same. You almost have to double the ratio before I start thinking in terms of "this reel is better for this and that reel is better for that" based on ratio alone.

I have two identical reels, except one is loaded with 15# braid, and the other 30#. I can't really tell you which is which unless I hold them right next to each other and carefully examine them, and even then, I'm never 100% sure. They both act pretty much the same on my rod. My point being, I don't think there's a huge difference between the thinner braids. If you compare 10# to 30#, you'll probably notice a difference. But between 10# and 15#, I doubt there will be enough of a difference to tell them apart, unless you closely scrutinize them for the tiniest differences. It's not like mono or fluoro where the difference between two pounds can be pretty obvious sometimes. To me, the bigger difference in those thin braids lies between brands.

That's it right there. You're just starting off. You're not to the point yet where you need specialized equipment. You'll be ready for that stuff once you get to the point where you can say "this rod isn't working for me because..." or "this reel doesn't do what I need it to which is...". Because truth be told, no everyone does everything the same way with the same gear. I, for instance, generally prefer a medium/fast rod in most instances where other people would recommend a MH/F rod. I'm also a lot less picky about gear ratios than a lot of people. Just get yourself a couple of rods and reels that are different from one another, and use that to figure out what you like and don't like. Then, when you're ready to upgrade, you'll know why you're upgrading, and have a clearer understanding of what you're trying to upgrade into.

I would suggest starting out on 30lb braid. That's a good middle weight. If you throw into heavy vegetation often and either have to winch up a bunch of branches and muck, or drag a big fish through it, you might up it 60lb. But 30lb is a good all-purpose strength. Maybe look at Suffix 832, for a brand. They're one of the most highly regarded, if a bit expensive. I've used it and have to say I think it handles better than most of the other stuff I've tried. As for the leader, it depends. I'd start off with just using the straight braid for a while, and then once you get used to braid, decide if you actually need a leader. From there, you'll know why you're using a leader, and that will help you to determine how long and what lb test of a leader you need. If you're looking for shock absorption, then you'll need a longer leader. If you're looking for stealthy presentations, then you won't need as long of a leader. If you're okay with tying leaders often while on the water, then you can probably get by with a short leader. If you'd rather tie you leader at home and still be able to switch out a bunch of baits on the water, then you'll want a longer leader. The leader serves a purpose. You have to figure out what that purpose is first, and then you can figure out how to make it serve that purpose.

Maybe try shorter, pistol grip rods. I find that when I fish with them, I tend to use a lot more wrist in my cast, and hold the handle lower on the retrieve (angling the rod up more with my wrists than elbow). Oddly enough, I can cast them almost as far as my longer, split grip rods. I find that while the spit grip rods allow me to use two hands, I tend to use less wrist and get less snap on the rod. And since bass rods aren't all that heavy to begin with, I don't usually need two hands. Plus, the longer rod seems to create more air resistance and the increased weight both slow down my casting speed. The added leverage from the length more than makes up for that, but the summed total effect is that the actual distance between the two isn't as big as the comfort difference. You might want to go with a slower action rod as well, to make up for the decreased length, depending on the lure. Now, I don't have elbow issues, so I can't say how much it would effect your elbow. But my guess is that it would probably provide some relief, as I do tend to use my arms less with those shorter, pistol grip rods, and my wrists more.

If you want to keep it short, then by all means, keep it short. The fish aren't really smart enough to look in front of the lure to see if there's a line running in front of it. I'd say a foot is probably about all you need. Maybe not even that. It all depends on why you are using the leader. For instance, with saltwater fishing, the leader becomes more important because some of those fish have sharp teeth. And the purpose of the leader isn't so much to hide the fishing line, but to keep the fish from biting through it. So they'll often use thicker line for the leader, or even metal cable. The same is true for certain freshwater species. But for bass and other similar game fish, the purpose is usually to hide the line from the fish or something like that. Though sometimes people put a long leader of something like mono (on the order of several feet) on the end of their braid to give the line some more stretch. In that case, the longer the leader, the more the stretch. There's really no wrong answer. It all just depends on what you're trying to do with it. For me, it's mostly about saving money and preserving my line, as the braid costs quite a bit more than the mono. And it lasts a lot longer than fluoro, so if I want to "use fluoro", I can just tie a fluoro leader to the end of my braid and get more or less the same thing. Plus, I can constantly tie on new lures and cut off long tags, without taking much off my spool. Visibility isn't an issue for me because none of the lakes I fish have either stained water or worse.

There might be a slight decrease in casting distance. But I typically use 30lb braid, and with the FG knot, it slides through them really easily. The FG is also a really long knot that's kind of stiff and is tapered a bit at the leading end. It makes more resistance coming in than going out. With a bigger, blunter knot, it might not slide as easily. You'll have to try it for yourself to see if the loss in casting distance is enough to concern you. For me, it's probably no more than a yard or two. Not enough that I really notice. But if it does bother you, it's really easy to just cut it short, or even cut it off, while you're on the water. So the experiment isn't a big risk.

As far as I'm concerned, you can fish anything with that ratio. In fact, you can pretty much fish anything with just about any ratio. I use reels from 3.8:1 all the way to 9:1, and I find that I can speed up or slow down to most things on any of those reels, with a few exceptions. And while there's a pretty large difference between the 3.8:1 and the 9:1, the difference between most of the middle ratios isn't much to me. I find that on any given day, I may naturally find myself reeling slower than usual, or faster than usual. So I tend to regulate my speed by singing songs in my head and reeling to the rhythm. If I need to speed up, I just sing a faster song. As long as I'm within my upper and lower limits of what's comfortable, I don't feel the need to switch reels. Now, that's not saying that all reels are the same. Certain speeds are easier to achieve with certain reel ratios. And there's an upper limit to how fast you can spin a handle, and to get a bait moving faster than that, you'll need to rely on the higher ratio gears to get your there. But for the most part, I think that reel ratios are kind of overblown. I mean, the difference between a 7.1:1 reel and a 5.4:1 reel is only about 25-30%. And I can easily spin my handle 30% faster or slower and still be within my comfort zone, so long as I didn't start off near my limits to begin with. But if you're reeling something extra fast, or extra slow, then the reel ratio can matter. Especially over a long day. I'm just convinced that it's one of those things that's leans more towards marketing hype than real world practicality. So to answer your question, I'd say anything can be fished with it. But it would excel at anything that you want to fish slower than usual.

Yeah. I use the FG knot because it's extremely thin and extremely strong. It slides through micro guides (as long as the line itself is thin enough). The disadvantage to it is it's hard to tie. I won't tie it on the water. I only tie it at home. That's because it requires both hands, my teeth, and a foot to keep four ends tight at once. And even then, it takes a while. It's not conceptually difficult, in that it's basically just two easy steps, repeated over and over. But to me, it's best done when you're bored and have free time, rather than in a hurry and trying to get your line back in the water. You're better off using a knot that you feel comfortable with and can tie right, rather than messing with a knot you might mess up. A well executed blood knot would be leagues better than a poorly tied FG.

I've drilled a bunch of holes in my plastic kayak. They're fine and don't leak. What you want to do, is get some marine goop, and use some rubber washers on your bolts/pop rivets. You drill the hole, dip the bolt or rivet in some marine goop, and then quickly set it and tighten it down before the goop dries. Once you do that, it should be strong and water tight. You might have to wipe off some excess goop when you're done. The adhesive in industrial strength velcro is pretty tough. I've use it for lots of things and rarely had issues with it. But with the heat and the water, plus the fact that you're trying to stick it to plastic, I doubt it could ever be near as strong or reliable as a bolt/rivet, properly done.

I had this happen to me the other day with a fairly new reel. The factory put too much oil in the reel, and apparently in the heat, some of it dropped down onto the drag washers. No matter how tight I set the drag, I couldn't get more than a pound or two of resistance from it. After loosening and resetting the drag a couple of times, and pulling on it a bit, it finally started catching and working properly again. I just had to mechanically rub some of that oil off. After the season's over, I'll take it apart and properly relube it so that I don't have to mess with that again.

You really only need a foot or two of leader to do it's job. The problem with that is, as you cut it shorter from tying knots and changing baits, you'll have to retie a new leader more often. So I usually tie a leader so that if my bait hangs at around the appropriate casting length (in other words, the lure hangs about six inches below the rod tip), then the leader knot sits just outside my reel. I found that if I have the leader knot go all of the way into my reel, it sometimes rubs my thumb as I cast, and over time, that can make my thumb a bit tender. So with a 7' rod, I usually use about 6'6" of leader. That way the leader is long enough that I don't have to retie a new leader on the water, yet don't have to worry about the thumb issue. I use and FG knot, so it slides between the guides pretty easily. I don't think it matters if you use a foot or twenty feet of leader. Either way, you're going to be limiting the strength of your line to the strength of your leader (or the strength of the knot). Personally, I kind of appreciate that aspect of it though. That way, if I do get hung up and have to break the line, I don't lose much of my expensive braid and don't have to respool due to losing line. I don't use leaders in areas with heavy cover where I run a high risk of getting hung up and don't want to risk losing a lure, for this reason. I usually use a heavy braid for that so I can just winch up whatever I'm hooked on, or straighten the hook out. But for situations where I don't think there's a high chance of getting hung up and I'm prepared to lose a lure if I do, leaders work pretty well.