casts_by_fly

On the BASS tournaments where they are weighing their own, the on screen weight is what the angler tells BASS the bass weighed. He's definitely not worried about a few ounces here or there for scale accuracy like the MLF officials do. At the same time, he might not want to tell the 'leaderboard' that a fish was 5lb and instead call it a 3.5#. There are incentives for the most accurate person but no disincentives for putting in an inacurate weight. Combining these two quotes into one as my response is the same for both. While B.A.S.S. has made a pretty good living on showing tournaments on TV, the anglers are not there to teach us anything. They have no responsibility or mandate that everything they do is televised to an at home audience. Their goal is to win, their JOB is to win. Competitive advantage exists at times and the more of it you have and the longer you have it, the more you will win. B.A.S.S. could mandate that everything is viewable and that the winner has to tell everyone what he was throwing, at what depth, and how they were working it if B.A.S.S. wanted its mission to be to educate people on how to win tournaments. They try to do that when they interview the winners and top scorers. And for the anglers there might be some incentive to say they were using this lure or that if they used a sponsored lure that they are supposed to be promoting. At the end of the day though, there is no requirement to do that and I certainly wouldn't either if I thought I had something up my sleeve. Same, per above. And, even if I didn't mind sharing what I was doing, I wouldn't put it onto B.A.S.S. video, I'd save it for my own youtube channel.

so the next question is which one of them in that basin is the hidden gem that produces almost like Fork or Toledo Bend but doesn't have the name and popularity.

a quick wikipedia check says not quite. Same river system, just not the river. That would still fit in my logic above though about river systems having very similar characteristics though. The dam is 12,410 feet (3,780 m) in length and impounds Lake Fork Creek, a tributary of the Sabine River, and other major creeks are Big Caney and Little Caney.

yeah, but that rain is all 'gone' now. If it was snowpack it would have melted off slowly over the next two months and buffered any delays in rain events. Now you're going to be chasing storms all summer for any moisture.

Once, for steelhead, I did it to prove a point. When fish are ganged up in clear, shallow water with an obstruction above like a waterfall (there's a particular spot in Erie known for it) they are basically stuck. They sit in the current with their mouths sometimes open, sometimes closed. Guys will throw single eggs and egg flies at them and at the time people would claim catching dozens in a morning on fish that really aren't interested in eating or hitting anything due to the pressure. 'Flossing' was theorized which is where you drift the line at just the right depth and it catches the fish's mouth. The current then pulls the line and the hook into the fish's mouth. Guys said there's no way that's possible so I set out to prove it wrong. Its very clearly possible, especially when you have clear water. I cut the hook bend off a bright pink bead fly (a popular choice there) and started casting. A bead is almost neutrally buoyant so a little current is enough to keep it up off the bottom a couple inches. A small split shot will roll in the current also. So 2' of line between the two gives a lot of leeway to put it in a fish's mouth. In 15 minutes or so I could do it pretty much on command and watch the pink egg go right into the fish's mouth. Some times they would grab it out of reflex, sometimes they would bolt. Either way if there was a hook on there it would be a 'caught fish'. After seeing that, I never fished that spot again.

Dallas is going to hit 90 this week. You're almost certainly going to have drought conditions this summer. At a minimum, the snowpack and icemelt contribute to groundwater which you're not going to get.

Here’s the monster with a 5” yum swimmer next to a 6” Magdraft. Not much difference. A 4.8 or 5.8 Keitech will be similar and I plan to try that also since I have some downstairs.

well, you MN/WI/MI guys have been saying it but this will make it almost official. Looks like the warmest winter on record for you northern tier guys. (source: CNN article)

horses for courses. I’m pretty sure the wobble head was designed to run through hard bottom rock areas and bounce off rocks, producing the wobble. The swivel connection allows the bait to move more freely than a football head jig fished the same way. With a Tokyo rig, you lose the wobble head action, keep the free swinging bait, and put a little gap between your bait and the bottom. The weight isn’t imparting any action into the bait like a wobble head so that’s up to you. if I have a clean bottom I like a wobble head. If there is junk on the bottom (silt, leaves, algae, etc) then a Tokyo or Texas rig will come through it cleaner.

This is my other consideration. It might go on my frog rod instead which has 50# braid instead of the amistad which is 20# big game. Both should work, but we'll see how it goes.

did you accidentally put something like a boat cover or a trolling motor footpad on one of the tilt/trim switches in either the console or the bow and its stuck 'on'?

5'9" here and also standing in a kayak. I'm throwing them on a 6'8" or a 6'10" with no problems. Like dwight said, the rod doesn't have to be vertical, just close to the water. Same for walking baits.

I got my monster jig today. I'm glad I got one, but I'm glad I got only one. It will be a situational lure for sure, not something I keep tied on all of the time. I'll try to drop in some pictures later, but its as big in person as it seems on the net. From line tie to end of skirt its a solid 5" long and from the barb of the hook to the back of the skirt (hanging vertically) its a touch over 2".That's the size of a decent bluegill as a starting point. As Tom said, the hook is huge. The gap is 1 1/2" which is the same as the LENGTH of a 1/0 EWG. The hook wire gauge is 1/8" thick. Its truly a saltwater hook made from freshwater hook material. Its sharp and you could probably fish it right out of the pack, but I'm going to touch it up a bit. Driving home that heavy of a wire I want it to be razor sharp. I picked up the white/grey shimmery color. There are a couple places here where we have big shad and I wanted this as a cross between a big swim jig and a soft swimbait. I threw on a 5" zoom swimmer (I don't think these are made anymore) in light hitch. All in, it measures 6" from line tie to paddle tail. That's not big at all. When the skirt isn't flared out laying down on a table, its basically the same size as a 6" magdraft. To me, that won't put off anything over 12" from hitting it. Getting the hook in their mouth might be a different story. I think it will take a 15" fish to actually get the hook in its mouth. Only testing will tell on this one, but I suspect there will be fish that hit it, grab it, etc and don't get the hook. The weedguard is light and just barely comes to the top of the hook when compressed so no worries about that, just the overall size of the hook. This is going to take a stout rod to throw it. I'm going to put it on my amistad (1/2-1 1/2, 7'3", heavy) and it will handle it but if you have a smaller swimbait rod (1-4 oz) then that's probably a better choice.

I would probably agree with that having watched videos of garmin and lowrance live imaging and having used mega live myself. Mega live is a generation behind, maybe 2 depending how you count them. While Humminbird invested in 360, the others were on live imaging. The new LVS34 imaging that I've seen is incredible for sure. There is no way I can get that on mega live. That said, its still quite good and eminently useful. If you're already in the Humminbird ecosystem then I would stay there. The side and down imaging on humminbird is better than the others by about as much as the live imaging on the others is better. And, HBird offers 360 if you want it in the future. In Koz's specific case, you could make the argument that if you're buying a new head unit to go with live imaging that you might as well buy whichever since you're not locked into a legacy brand. That's true. I was in his same position exactly 1 year ago. If live imaging was the priority, then I would have gone with an LVS34. For me, I prioritized side imaging, my existing mapping (from a zero lines card), my familiarity with HBird, and the slightly more boat friendliness in the autopilot (there are some issues with other brands that don't seem to be there with HBird). To do it again would I do the same? Maybe?

The football head shape is better for harder bottoms. On a soft bottom it will pick up algae and other stringy crap on the bottom if there is any. And weeds. A wobble head still gives the benefit of a free swinging plastic, I just wouldn’t use a football shaped head. The other similar rig you might want to try for that situation is a Tokyo rig. The weight stays down in the muck while the lure rides a bit above it. And with a skinny weight you won’t hang much junk on the bottom.

i agree with this. They aren't bad, and especially not for the price. I mean mine has kept for 20 years of light use. Just know that your'e going to have to sharpen is every other fish when you're filleting anything tougher than a bluegill. That's a good rule generally but definitely so here.

4 stroke sharp and 4 cuts back to dull. The harder the metal, the harder it is to sharpen but also the harder it is to dull it and the better of an edge it will take. if you're talking about the rapala fillet knife with the wooden handle, that's a soft metal in the blade. I have one and have used it for 20 years. Like you said, a couple strokes on a kitchen sharpener (I use a lansky pull through on cheap knives) and it will sharpen up. BUT, you're not really sharpening the cutting edge itself. With cheaper pull through type sharpeners all you are doing is taking the burrs off. That's good, but you're also adding small serrations along the blade. That makes it feel sharp quickly, but then those serrations roll over and it dulls quickly. What you need is a proper sharpener that puts a clean edge across the full cutting edge. I do that for my better knives. When you have a single cutting edge with no burrs and no micro serrations then you have a clean cutting edge that will cut for a long time without dulling.

Same here. Its tricky on the really small ones that like to jump right off your nail when you try to put the hook eye in them though (gamakatsu magic eyes are great in that case). Also, if you have to deal with saltwater hooks and split rings they are a lot harder and stiffer I find. If I'm using a saltwater lure in freshwater I'll just cut the split ring off with side cutters and replace with my own.

oh well. Maybe if something ever happens to the zodias I'll get that one. I haven't carried a spinning rod in the past at all, so having more than one isn't happening any time soon.

This one is just for PA, but it jives pretty well with here in NJ also. Not a great upload, but you can see the variance from light to dark and various shades between.

I'm not far off of you. The next 3 days should finish melting all of this snow (sunny afternoons have just been killing it!) and a warm front next week. Monday might be alright if the wind forecast holds. Then again I said that about today a week ago. The forecast was sunny and 45/30 but its significantly colder than that. The local lakes iced over a week or two ago again (saw a report of wardens writing citations) so even if the sun comes out now I couldn't put the boat on. Next week looks better and is more in line with the usual start of march start.

Its a good thing you didn't post this 2 months ago when I was considering models. I ended up with the Zodias 6'9" ML (1/8-7/16) and I'm very happy with it. But man, with that blurb above I'd have bought the PA for the extra money. That's exactly what I want to do with it.

cost and manufacturing tollerances. You're removing a couple parts for the assembly, taking out a failure point, and sealing the housing where the switch would be. All good things to me. Yeah, I'll have to change the way I do things a little but I'll deal.

I need to paint the white head on that last one to something darker (for me, not the fish). And the chartreuse was just a FS&G throw some rainbow flashabou on there to see what it looks like. I'm pretty confident the three olivey ones will be on the money with the bluegills though and the orange /yellow head (its a copper flashabou) is going to be not far off a perch if you move it fast enough. I might have to pull a couple chatterbaits out of the box now. I have some red flashabou that's screaming for a green pumpkin CB.

my boss thanks you for my abundant productivity today. I played a bit with some spinnerbaits that I didn’t fish much for one reason or another. Two just got new skirts, one a direct replacement, and two got dolled up. I’ve always loved root beer and dark colored flashabou so that’s where I went. I also pulled pictures of our local panfish for comparison. These might just be fine.