casts_by_fly

if you’re trailering, I’d leave the batteries in the boat get a strap and find a way to strap it in so there’s less in and out. Then you’re not lifting lead batteries twice a day. if you want to cut weight though, you can get the small 8 Ah lead acid for cheap. They are about 5 lb each. I used one to start on my helix 7 and could get a decent run out of it. If you’re fishing longer than one battery then just get a second for another $22. Two would give you more than a full day of coverage on your unit. You’ll still need another battery for the trolling motor as noted above. i don’t know if it’s in your budget, but lithium battery prices are coming down and are almost inline with quality AGM batteries. An 80 Ah should be plenty for you and should come in around $400-$450.

If the batteries stay in the boat, then keep the group 24 for the striker. It’s overkill, but you own it and it would be a good backup if the main battery dies. for the motor, a group 31 lead acid should get you through a day with no problems. Again, if the batteries stay in the boat then the weight of the 31 doesn’t matter much. 100 Ah is a good target for a lead acid. always charge your batteries as soon as you get home. Never store them uncharged. Also try to not run down a lead acid below 25% if you can help it and definitely never run it that low and leave it uncharged that low. if you have to lift batteries in and out all the time, then weight considerations come into play. There are compromises you can make but we’ll need more info.

big winter brown beers and summer is a combination I don’t pick often. More than happy to have a pils in winter though.

Preferred by season? I can’t predict what I’ll prefer tonight let alone by season. Probably easier to count what I DON’T prefer for a given season….. yeah, there’s not much of that either.

if you like a weim but don’t want another, Slovaks are great. Limited breeders in the US but not hard to import if you can’t find a domestic dog. guarding the snackhole at our friends house.

Missile baby d-bomb on a finesse jig is perfectly sized for me.

we have a lot of these on the lakes that aren’t holiday home lakes. Often they don’t need have the side boards on them and the deck to water distance is a foot or more. You don’t even have to skip them, you can pitch right up under them. we don’t have a lot of poles type floating docks. So it’s either the floating docks right above or permanent piling. We have a lot of holiday home lakes with 75 year old houses/lots/slips. Some are boat garages as big as a small apartment. Some are concrete piling. The best are old wood with pillars like telephone poles. Those ones I’ll fish a moving bait on the outside edges first before slowing down and pitching to every piling. I’ll do similar with the floaters, but probably faster since there is less underneath for them to relate to.

That may be so and I'm sure there is some element of that as well as shared interests between the two companies. Nevertheless, if you or I were so fortunate to be in a position to buy Rapala VMC, we would not be getting Bagley along with it.

That's what Bagley's site reads as. Rapala VMC didn't buy bagley. The former execs and team joined bagley to revamp it.

not sure which hook you were using, but a couple things to consider. If it was just a plan EWG style hook with no screw lock, then the pegs you put there can help keep the head up at the eye or the tail near the barb. Texposing the hook will keep the tail end in place and keep you weedless. Getting the hook position right so that the bait is straight will also help. Swimbait hooks with a screw lock at the eye will help keep the head in place and with a keitech will help them last longer. Keitechs are super salty and will break the more they move around on the hook. Same rules above apply for the tail end. A 3/0 should be close enough for a 4" keitech.

I'm roughly the inverse on this. I only put braid on spinning reels now (aside from ultralight trout spinning reels) and add a leader. Braid is my main crankbait rod, especially for lipless cranks. Spinnerbaits, most of my jigs, and most of my pitching is mono. I have a braid rig for heavier cover pitching on my 'big boy rod' but the rest is all mono. At least we agree on Frogs.

We have three dogs and all of these apply except for the litterbox and catfood, though if you make them dog related I got you covered. Two of the dogs are wirehair types (wirehaired vizsla and slovak rough haired pointer) so beards and facial hair. The vizsla LOVES putting her face in your crotch to say hi. That's her comfort place. She is also the face rubber on the couch after she gets wet. The slovak LOVES furry animals. She has an intense fur drive in the field and she does not back off in the house. Our friends have two cats and we once took the dog over their house. They hadn't locked the cats in the basement so the slovak stared at the catflap all night. The cat made an appearance and only through fleet of foot and a large chair do they still have two cats. The third dog is a lab. A food greedy, roll in everything, 2 year old lab. She's a sweetheart- until she comes in after having eaten another dog's poop and rolled in a dead toad. Then she just wants to lick you face because she's so happy with the treats you let her have. A month ago she managed to get into the Vizsla's food bin in a closed cabinet. She ate 5 lb of dry food and bloated herself so badly that the vet had to force her to throw up for an hour. Dogs. We'll never be without them.

Not if they want them to fish similarly or have the same action. Shortening an existing blank will always slow the action, doesn't matter if you shorten from the tip or butt. Extending a rod from the butt will always speed up the action. In both cases, how much affect depends on how much added or cut. The principles are well proven by custom rod builders and we don't have to go into the why on this thread. That said, I'm sure there are some instances where manufacturers (especially on cost conscious lineups) have done that to add more offerings in the lineup, albeit with different actions or feels. Within a given lineup, manufacturers will generally use the same graphite material and processing, so the variance comes with the metal mandrel (inside taper) and the cut shape of the graphite cloth (outside taper). if your goal is minimizing cost, then reusing mandrels for different rods and either wrapping a different amount of graphite or 'cutting short' the pattern is one way to do it. It might not make the optimal rod, but it makes for less cost in the process.

ooh, the big guy. What line do you throw on it? I assume its a jig and texas rig rod for you? I have the expert standard amistad and run braid. Great rod for 3/8 plus rubber and up or even better with a half ounce. I don't fish much that needs much heavier though, hence not getting the XH. I've read/heard that the XH and fluoro/mono runs close to the regular and braid for feel and power.

By definition, an extra fast has a very light tip that flexes easily in the first 10-20% of the rod but then shuts off and the rest of the rod has far less flex while casting. Flex under load with a fish depends on the rods overall power. What you describe first (firm through the tip) is usually a fast or moderate fast which has a lot of power in the tip.

Agreed. I don't hate wet long green grass and will use it if I have to, but that's once in a blue moon (i.e. need pliers and they are in a backpack). I guess what I was referring to are the constant pictures of fish laying on dry dirt next to concrete and covered in gravel...

seeing fish that are to be released which are laying on the ground bothers me. It might not kill them, but it's unnecessary. Conservation is using a resource while doing the least harm necessary. Correcting someone in a FB group about it? Not worth my time.

Limp line helps a lot here, braid is great minus the bite detection. if you're fishing weighted, then more weight will pull the line more directly and fall more vertical (as the compromise of a faster fall usually). Also when you pitch you can end with your rod tip high in the air to get another couple feet of 'slack'.

10 mg for me and then it still takes an hour or two.

Do you have the lakes with unlimited horsepower where you get the benefit of a glass boat? When we first moved back I had the grand plan that was was going to refurb my dad's old stratos. We fished out of it for years and it was a great boat. I love the stability when fishing- it was like standing on shore it was so stable. Alas, reality hit when I started looking at storage (my garage doors are only 94" and depth is only 19'6") and the lakes around (lots of restricted lakes). After a lot of thought I realized that the practical limitations outweighed benefits of a glass boat. I've come to realize that the perfect boat for these waters is a decked aluminum with a 9.9 and a strong trolling motor (or a decked aluminum with both a 9.9 and a bigger gas motor for the few lakes that are open). Glass boats are awesome for bigger lakes, good sized rivers, etc. I wish I could have one, but its not in the cards. I assume you've done this homework, but wanted to flag it if not.

I'm almost always up past midnight, sometimes until 1:30. I've always been a night owl. I also don't have to get up until 8 usually so its not so much a problem. Fishing mornings I have to plan ahead better since I'm usually out the door by 330 or so.

so if you buy a bow license you get fall and winter tags(before Halloween and after New Years). In between is a permit season. If you also buy the firearms license you get a tag for the 6-day season. So all in that’s four buck tags. It’s also unlimited does. I live on a cul de sac surrounded by a wildlife management area, a nature preserve (which I get a hunting permit for) and a golf course. There are tons of yard deer that I don’t shoot because I like them being around. What happens during the rut though is that the bucks start to roam and because of the layout of the neighborhood and all of the houses with backyard fences, the deer are forced to go through front yards to get from the front of the hill to the back. We are the end house so they get funneled right through our property. All of that put together and I’m heading back for that four point next. There seems to be something genetic in the bucks in this neighborhood that they lack brow tines. Even if they get them they are less than a stub. I have another 4/6 point that was here the last two years that was on my list. The 7 I shot had small brow tines. So I’m going to make it my personal mission to take that out of the gene pool.

Hi gents, I don’t post much here but wanted to share tonight’s success. I’ve had a rough two years with the bow. We moved back to the US in the fall of 2019 and I quickly realized that bird hunting here in NJ isn’t worth setting the alarm for. So I decided to get back into archery. I got my dads bow out and got to practicing. That year I ended up taking a really nice 7 and had plenty of deer in range. But I also hit another nice 8 that I didn’t find (bad shot, low) and the one I got wasn’t a good shot and I got lucky that I hit the arteries in the liver (it ran 40 yards and died). In the off season I practiced frequently, changed my setup a bit and was in a good place going into the season. Scouting and finding deer has never been a problem, and last year was no different. In October I had a nice 8 under my stand and made a poor shot (too high, wrong pin, non lethal). Later in the season I had a great wide 6 come through the funnel I set up in. Of course I had just lowered my bow to the ground and was climbing down. I went on to shoot a spike later in the season and put a bad shot on it (low as it moved away from me before it turned broadside and I didn’t notice). Pretty rough four shot sequence on deer. For this season I wasn’t going to take any chances, no risky shots, nothing (not that any of my shots last year were Hail Marys or outside of my ability). I decided to set up for close range short shots and if I got busted so be it. Last week I had a wide 4 within 25 yards of my stand for 45 minutes and was at 8 yards for a good long while. We have earn a buck here and I hadn’t shot a doe yet. the weather today was conducive to an evening sit. It was really windy all day but calming around 5. I figured the deer would get up eating and I was right. I scouted a funnel back in February that I had never hunted so decided to try it out. I had just sat down into my saddle and hadn’t nocked an arrow yet when I saw a doe sliding through the thicket. I had just hit the opening she was in with a rangefinder and knew she was in range already. I wasn’t ready. The adrenaline hit me quick and I wasn’t taking a 30 yard shot with that heart rate. I thought she’d come down a closer trail and give me a 20 yard shot. Turns out she wanted the next trail over which gave me a 10 yard shot. This was the same shot as I made on the nice 8 last year and screwed up. Just a week ago I practiced that shot from my home stand to make sure it shot how I thought from my saddle (same as from a stand). I had run through my head the right aiming point and got it right this time. She ran about 20 yards in 7 seconds and fell over. The shot went down through the edge of the shoulder blade and near lung into the top of the heart (maybe clipping the bottom of the offside lung) before lodging in the base of the offside shoulder blade. It didn’t pass through and the entry was high but there was still plenty of blood, not that I needed it since I saw her crash. it’s good to get back on the train. I’ve got plenty of tags and now flexibility in where and what hunt so I can take the best opportunity available. Here’s to hoping for a few more.

i assume you’ve seen it but the zillion comes in a 5.5 if that’s close enough for you.

The downside to shiny new toys is that the old toys quickly seem old. Suddenly perfectly fine isn't perfectly fine. Been there, got the card (aka the box from digitaka). On the upside, you can justify that you're exploiting a temporary foreign exchange imbalance in the market. Just remember they are temporary, so you might as well get two in the next order. After all they are practically half the US MSRP. (says the guy who bought the zillion and the Met).