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I would just go straight braid, if I were you. I often use leaders, though if I'm being honest, it's mostly just to save money on buying new braid from all of the reties. I have a bunch of half spools of stuff sitting around that I tried and didn't life for whatever reason, and now use what's left as leader line. Though, I would suggest switching knots as well. Fluoro, more than any other line, is bad about knots coming loose. It stretches some, and then won't contract back. So it can work itself loose a lot easier than mono. Also its very slick and abrasion resistant, so it doesn't dig into itself well. I typically use a palomar for fluoro, and leave about a 3/16" tag end. Fluoro seems to respond better, in my experience, to knots that don't involve a lot of twisting around itself, like the uni and clinch knots.

I cut the heads off trailers all of the time. But that's to cut down on size or bring the appendages further in and change the action. The fact is, fish, and most animals, can't count. Bass may care if the bait has eyes, but won't really be able to determine if it has too many or too few of eyes. That's why people wear those masks with the eyes in the backs of their heads in the jungles of India so tigers won't attack them from behind. And tigers are a lot smarter than bass.

If you haven't cleaned and relubricated it since 2015, it's past due for some maintenance. So I'd start there. It'll also give you a chance to inspect the bearings and make sure they're all still in good condition. When they go bad, they can sometimes make grinding sounds. If you DIY this, watch a few videos first and download the schematic for your reel. Also, take pictures with a digital camera of each piece before you remove it so you'll not only know where it goes when it comes time to reassemble it, but you'll know which orientation it goes in. They're not particularly hard to work on yourself, but if you've never been inside one before, it's pretty easy to get lost or put it back together wrong without knowing it. But if you take your time and pay attention, it's something most anyone can do.

I wouldn't worry about it. From what I've seen in my life, pollution, invasive species, disease, weather, and poor management is usually what kills fish populations. Overfishing often gets the blame because it's the activity everyone can see in action. But more often than not, there's a more serious problem going on below the surface that gets a free pass because it's a lot more difficult to identify and address.

About 10 years, give or take a few years. It would have been twenty, but I did get one small fishing trip squeezed in the middle there.

Outside of one specifically designed for your kayak, a DIY solution is probably the best bet. The reason being, Kayaks are all different sizes and shapes. And the shape is usually tapered at both ends, both on the sides and bottom, which makes it easy for a kart to slide out and get loose. And a general purpose kayak cart is designed to adapt to the most number of kayaks, which means they often don't do a great job of adapting to one specific one. The kinds that go through the scupper holes are better about that, but they damage your scupper holes. So a kart designed specifically for your kayak, either from the manufacturer or by yourself, has a lot higher chance of remaining connected to your kayak as you pull it over rocks, tall grass, curbs, etc. The C-Tug might be fine for you kayak. I've never used one or your kayak, so I would have no way of knowing how well they fit together. A lot depends on location of the pads and the shape of your hull. So, if you go that route, be sure to buy one from a place you can return it if it doesn't fit well. You might have to try a few different designs before you find the one that stays on well. It's less important to find the highest quality kart available than it is to find one that fits well. I use a $40 aluminum one I got on Amazon and had to make several modifications to it to get it to work right for me.

Darn near everything. Rarely do I buy some new (to me) kind of bait and have success with it for the first 10-20 times I try it. Then, one day, something changes and they finally start working for me. My last one was, surprise, surprise, the chatterbait! I had to fish them for about a year before I got my first bite. I tried fishing them like a jig, like a crankbait, like a swim jig, etc. Nothing worked until I discovered something. The presence of grass. Most lakes I fish don't have any grass, and for whatever reason, the bass won't hit a chatterbait without grass nearby (at least in my experience). But I hit up a different lake that actually had grass and suddenly the chatterbait started working.

Are you sure you saw a bass? More than likely, if you see a fish jump in ponds around here, it's a carp. They love to stock those things in our ponds, for some reason. Anyway, the trick is finding the fish in the right mood. That means finding them at the right time and place. So I'd probably throw some worms in the deeper water and just circle that area, and try to cover it all. Then I might go up near that bridge and throw some topwaters in the more shallow water. If that doesn't work, come back at a different time and try again. You never know when they'll bite. And small ponds can be hard sometimes. But the advantage to a small pond is you can try pretty much everything, in every spot, every time you go out.

I bought a bunch of different snaps last year. I wanted figure out for myself which ones I liked. My conclusion is that different snaps work better for different style lures. None are best in all situations. I was hoping to narrow it down to just one or maybe two, but it looks like that's not gonna happen. Also, I usually leave the split rings on. Often I'll just hook the snap into it, or bypass it and hook the snap next to it. It doesn't seem to matter much, and I often skip the snap and just tie directly on. If you want to fully commit to the snaps, then taking the split rings off would be a good idea, as they can get in the way.

Yeah, that's been this year for me as well. Since November, there have been a total of 6 days with winds below 25mph that fell on weekends for me. I've managed to go fishing all 6, and every time but one (in late February), the calmer winds were due to a cold front passing through the day before. That one day in February had water temperatures in the 40's, so getting bass to bite was none easier. C'est la vie. Maybe all of this bad weather will relieve some of the fishing pressure and lead to a killer fall.

I use them all. Quite a few I don't have any confidence in, but once I've been out on the water for a couple of hours without even a nibble, I get bored and just start tying on stuff that I never ordinarily use. Sometimes I even get creative (crazy), like doing a dropshot, with a jig as the weight.

Good advice on the keep moving. I know a lot of people start off with live bait, fishing at the pier or dock. That can be a good place to find them, as fish do tend to congregate there as there's protection from the sun, often sunken cover down below, and riprap along the banks. Plus, it's the only way to get access to deep water from the bank. So it's easy to get into the habit of staying in one place, because it works then. Then, they might move on to catfishing, where they'll throw some stink bait out from the bank, set up some lawn chairs, and sit there and wait for the fish to come find it. Again, it works, because the stink bait has such a strong smell that the fish will come in from a long distance to find it. Most people don't start off bass fishing because they're more difficult to catch, and not as tasty to eat. So they pick up these bad habits of just posting up somewhere, dropping something in the water, and waiting for it to get bit. I know when I've taken several friends out to teach them bass fishing, it's almost impossible to convince them to keep moving. They think they've found a good spot, with shade and room to cast, and they want to stay there for fear of someone else coming in and taking it over if they leave. They just want to tie on a plastic worm to a bobber, cast it out, and sit in the lawn chair and wait for the fish to come to them. Of course, it doesn't help much that my local lakes are over grown and most of it is inaccessible from the bank, so you'll have to walk a good quarter mile from spot to spot, and fight your rods getting snagged on trees and brushes in dense forest. But that's what you do to catch bass.

If it's a city thing, go to a town hall meeting. Or set up a meeting with the mayor or whatever. Explain to them that they can charge a usage fee or a fishing license fee, and it's costing them more money to not allow fishing. Then remind them that more people fishing on the lake will reduce the amount of crime on the lake, as criminals tend to like to congregate in places where no one visits. Instead of presenting it as an issue where you're asking them to do you a favor by letting you fish there, present it as an issue where they can improve their city, generate local business, increase revenue, and win votes. Give them what they want. If they balk that the costs are too high or whatever, remind them that many cities just put a little lock box on the ramps or parking lots, so you could do it with as small of an investment as a metal box, a pole, a bag of concrete, a pad lock, and someone to go empty it once a day. Remind them that fishing is exploding in popularity and this is their chance to cash in on it.

Fluorocarbon is bad about line memory. So if you were using older fluorocarbon line that's been sitting on the reel for a while, it's likely developed a lot of memory that will make it more likely to backlash. KVD L&L conditioner can help. But if you're comparing old fluorocarbon to new fluorocarbon, the new stuff is almost always going to cast better. I got rid of fluorocarbon because I couldn't replace it often enough to keep the memory from being an issue, so I switched to Yo-Zuri Hybrid. It's not perfect, but it presents a manageable middle ground that I can work with. I am thinking about going back to fluorocarbon for my pitching stick, as backlashes won't be as big of a problem and I would like the slackline sensitivity.

High quality. Whether that comes in EVA or cork, I do not care. But if the quality between the two is the same, then I'll lean towards EVA due to the easier maintenance.

Baitcasting for control, and spinning for distance. That's my view. And since distance is really only a concern with really light lures, that means I typically just use my spinning setups for crappie jigs, small balsa cranks, and finesse style presentations. Everything else, I really like having the ability to stop the bait, mid-flight, with my thumb. Also, I like not having to worry about line twist as much as possible. So unless I'm specifically fishing for crappie that day, I typically will only take one spinning rig with me.

Your observation is correct. Momentum is what makes the splash. So the trick is to control the vertical momentum by not casting it very high above the water, so it has less distance to fall and gain speed before hitting the surface. You control the horizontal momentum with your thumb, killing the vertical momentum just before it's supposed to drop into the water. And others are correct in that sometimes you want a silent entry and sometimes a splash is good. A splash can help fish locate the bait from a distance. Baitfish break the surface of the water all of the time, so it's a natural sound that can trigger strikes. However, if you make that splash just above the bass, you can startle them and scare them off. Predators like egrets also make a splash when they enter the water. When I was a kid, we went fishing with a guide who pulled up to a sand bar and pulled out an oar and beat the water with it for like a solid minute. He said that it would scare off the fish, but by the time we got our rods rigged up, they'd be back, and they'd be curious about what made the commotion, and more likely to bite. It must have worked, because we did catch quite a few. These were white bass and hybrids, so that may have been why it worked. I've never tried it on black bass. But it if nothing else, it does prove that a splash can also be a good thing under the right circumstances.

I can usually identify the species before I see them, and with that, I'll have an idea of the size, based on what I typically catch in that lake. But even that's not real accurate.

What kind of baits are you going to be using with it? That's the big question.

For buzzbaits, I too use my spinnerbait rod, a M/F or MH/F, depending on size of the lure. I don't really use special rods for those baits, but select between what I already have. So I only need one rod for "topwaters", and that's a M/M 5'6" pistol grip. I like the extra rod flex for keeping treble hooks pinned, and don't really need stiffness to create the action I want on poppers and walking baits, nor do I care about sensitivity. I like the pistol grip because it makes snapping the rod easier on my wrist, and I like the shorter rod because I fish from a kayak, and longer rods just get in the way.

Pro Qualifiers are great reels. At one time they were considered the best reel you could buy for the money. But these days there are lots of good reels available for an affordable price, so they're no longer the obvious value leader that they once were. Hence their reputation has waned. That being said, it's not like they got any worse over time. Just other cheap reels got better. But if you already have one, there's no reason not to use it, as no reel you can buy today will be a better value than free. And there's nothing wrong with these reels. They're excellent performers. They're made by Doyo, which makes Lew's, Abu Garcia, and Pflueger baitcaster reels, so they're going to be on the same level of quality as those brands. It's just that you can spend less money today on something like a Daiwa Fuego and get their carbon fiber drag and improved braking system, or a Shimano SLX and get Shimano quality for about the same price. So they don't get recommended as often. They will still fish as good as they have in the past.

My weakness is probably not sticking to things. Before I go out, I'll have a game plan set up along with a plan B and C. An hour into it, I'll be on plan N, which was inspired from digging through my tackle box for the lure for plan M and not based on any rational thought. If I'm not getting bit, I always blame it on the lure. That, and deep water bass fishing. If they're not hitting a deep diving crank or a spoon, then I'm out of ideas.

Zoom Lizard with the head cut off. I had some and was looking for an excuse to use them up, since they weren't producing on a T-rig by themselves and wasn't about to throw them away, and wouldn't you know? They're my best producing jig trailer by far!

Power and sensitivity aren't directly related. And power doesn't really matter a whole lot for the size of fish you plan to catch (I mean it does, but any bass rod should be able to land any largemouth bass). What the rod's power really tells you is what kind of lures you can use with it, and where you can throw those lures. A heavier power rod can throw heavier lures and can help you set the hook on lures with larger hooks. Large hooks require more force and thin rods might flex too much to get a good hookset. They can also help you coax bass out of grass and stuff that might put a strain on a thinner rod. Thinner rods can cast lighter lures a lot further, but can buckle and break with heavier lures. They also won't let you horse a fish out of the muck nearly as easily. But they will flex more which can help to keep lures with small treble hooks pinned to the fish's mouth, so they don't get off while you're trying to reel them in. Of course, there's also a rod's action to consider, and that's how far down it will bend. That will also effect how it performs.

The only time I upgrade is when my old rod or reel gets lost, stolen, or broken. So far, lost is the main reason (as in dropped in the lake).