Fishes in trees

Shopping the BPS soft plastic section is easy. Just bring your VISA and plan on a couple of hours wandering and looking. As soon as you gravitate to the soft plastic section, grab a basket. Walk up & down every aisle and throw stuff in your basket.

Cameron city reservoirs are open. Pony Express is open. Buffalo Bill lake is open Grindstone is open Indian Creek NW of Chillicothe is open. My guess would be that all of them are mostly open. Call the MO conservation office and find out. If you are going to Indian Creek, be aware that right now it is FULL, it is a restricted horsepower lake and that there are MANY stumps 6" to 12" below the water line and you won't see them all. There are fish in that lake though, and if you don't mind smacking your boat into trees and stumps, pretty constantly until you learn the lake, it is a fun lake to fish. Often there are 3 or 4 or 5 different patterns that will work on any given day.

To address the issue of how it is running in the water, I think that you want the lure as close to vertical as possible. I don't think that running it sideways is necessarily bad, but I don't think that it is great either. I think that if it is rotating sideways on you, you might want a heavier bait, given the speed you are retrieving. You might try slowing down the retrieve, but if you go too slow it will sink and at that point you might as well be throwing a spinnerbait. So, back to the drawing board, practice different retrieves and back to the tackle store, to get several different weights of buzz baits. This problem, like many problems, can be solved by throwing money at it.

Just to your research and make your decisions. Are you gonna Bubba Shot or go more toward finesse? My current favorite Bubba Shot set up is a 7'4" MH pitching stick and a Curado 50E reel. 20 lb Abrazx line. I change my opinion on my finesse set up quite a bit. Currently I'm using a spinning rod that is Labeled Medium, but it is on the heavy side of medium and a Shimano Spirex 200 size reel. I like the Spirex because of the one hand bail. For line, I'm currently using 14 lb Fireline Crystal and a 6' or so fluorocarbon leader. I'm a big fan of nose hooking the baits, rather than tx rigging them. My current favorite hooks are the Gamakatsu Wicked Wacky hooks - they come in a variety of sizes that work for both finesse and bubba style. Everyone has their own ideas about weights. Lots of folks say to use the lightest weight that you can get away with. My opinion is that the point of the drop shot is to fish right off the bottom, or a given distance off the bottom, therefore, I want a weight that gets me to the bottom asap. I use 1/4 or 3/8 on my finesse set up and 1/2 or 3/4 on the bubba rig, mostly 1/2. The preference for the heavier weight than most guys use on the finesse set up explains the use of the stouter spinning rod. A 3/8 oz weight would overpower lots of rods labeled drop shot rods. My recommendation would be to start with what you got, whatever that is, fish it for a while and then make corrections based on your experiences and conditions. That's what I did.

You choose your rain suit based on the ambient temperature. Early spring, late fall, 45 degree temps & below, long boat rides where wind chill gets involved - Guide Wear is the way to go. (Or the BPS 100 MPH suit that is similar, and I am sure that there are other suits that are of similar quality) In more moderate temperatures, you can go with a lighter weight gore tex suit. For summer showers, I don't think you can beat Frog Toggs, just because they're so lightweight that they don't get uncomfortable. Frog Toggs do work in colder weather as long as you've got appropriate layers underneath. I've got a 300 weight polar fleece jogging suit and with long underwear and that suit and the Frog Togg outer layer, I've been out in some pretty chilly weather and been fine. If I wore those same layers underneath my Guide Wear, I'd be so sweaty I couldn't stand it.

I caught a keeper bass dead sticking a buzz bait. . . once . . . the rest of the story . . . .back when I was learning to fish a bait caster, I got backlashes every so often. Anyway, I was fishing a buzz bait, not having any luck, but proud of myself that I had thrown over a dozen times with no backlash, when I over powered a cast and backlash happened big time. Took 5 minutes or so to pick it out, backlash fixed, start to retrieve the bait and lo and behold a fish was attached. Never was able to replicate that feat.

I heard Rick Clunn talk at the KC Sportshow once, several years ago. He was talking about how he advised using one rod for all his fishing, but he really only talked about square bills & spinnerbaits. I don't know, maybe if I was a zen master angler, that approach would work for me, but I'm not and it doesn't. Overall, I wasn't really impressed by his presentation and I left thinking, "Thanks Rick, but I'll make my own decisions about rods & reels."

I prefer a butt seat to a chair on the front deck. An exception to this rule would be if I was somewhere like Taneycomo, where you are doing a lot of drifting and drifting backwards at that. I got the seat where you turn it one way and it is something to lean against, turn it the other way and it is more amenable to sitting on. Should you get a butt seat, I strongly recommend getting the pneumatic pedestal, so that you can change the angle of how you sit/lean from time to time. On a side note, I don't flip very much at all, but I pitch quite a bit. Anyway, I first learned to pitch sitting down, in a 2 man Water Buster. You can learn how to pitch sitting down, just takes practice. Strongly recommend a 6 1/2 or 6' rod, as opposed to a 7' or longer rod for this application. If you are going to fish co-angler very much, knowing how to make a 60' pitch sitting down is a good skill to have.

You gotta decide what might be a good idea. A dedicated spinnerbait/chatterbait rod might be a good idea. I find that I use my dedicated wacky senko rig quite a bit. If you fish medium to heavy cover, you might want to experiment with a bubba drop shot rig. Do you fish very often with people who don't fish very much? A couple of borrowers rigs might be in order. I don't know. Establish some fishing priorities & goals and go from there.

Right now I'm using a 7 ball bearing Calcutta to throw swim baits with and it works ok. For the areas I throw swim baits in, an ounce and a half is heavy. In my neighborhood, I don't have much confidence in the really big swim baits.

If your reel spool is small and won't hold much backing, a few dabs of super glue, works as well as backing, better actually. I've made all the mistakes mentioned here, and then some. Once upon a time, I lost my glasses while on a fishing trip at Truman. Looked all over, not to be found. I am real particular about where I put my glasses, so I figured that they were going, fell out of the boat while I was running or something. Anyway, couldn't fish no more, packed up all my stuff, drove home, then drove to KC to buy more glasses. Got some new glasses. I had several more days off, didn't want to drive back down to Truman, so I thought I'd fish more locally. Anyway, while going through my truck, deciding what goes & what stays, happened to look in a bag of soft plastics and at the bottom of the tackle bag, amongst 6 or 7 gallon zip lock bags of soft plastics, there were my glasses, in the case, which was the same color as the bottom of the bag. If I hadn't felt them, I never would have seen them. I keep my glasses in a colored case that stands out now. $350 lesson learned.

I think that just being out, in your boat, during a rain storm, in the right gear, is kind of cool. Sometimes I catch fish and sometimes I don't. It isn't an environment that I hang out in a lot, so when I get to I appreciate it. I don't appreciate getting caught in the rain without appropriate gear. That is the kind of behavior that gets you sick and you miss work - that ain't cool. There is always that moment, 10 minutes into the rain storm, right before I turn on my bilge pump where I think to myself, "I hope the bilge pump isn't broke."

I find that I get the same amount of bites with a lightly weighted hook compared to an unweighted hook. I use the Falcon K-wacky hooks with a /16 oz weight molded on the hook shank. I think that the slightly faster drop adds up to a few more casts at the end of the day. Also, it drops "straighter" if that makes any sense and makes bite detection easier for me.

When I'm dealing with spinning reel line twist, I let the whole spool out, dragging the line behind the boat for a couple of minutes, then wind it back in . As mentioned earlier, bank fishing is a different deal. I've never tried the swivel trick so I don't know if it works or not, sounds like it should. I think just be mindful of how you put the line on, always close your bail by hand and don't crank against the drag and line twist should be minimal.

Long Branch Lake is in Missouri - just outside of Macon, MO. It's ok, IMO there are better lakes in Missouri.

I like jika rigs. I make my own. I find that I get bit more consistently on the jika rig than I do a T-rig. I started fishing them last summer, primarily on deep weed line edges and points the were 12 or more feet deep. Most of my home made rigs are around a half ounce weight, + or - a few grams.

I've owned my 18' LOWE for 10 years now, but once I get in a crowd at the ramp, I turn into that ramp rookie all over again. If nobody is waiting in line, I hit my trailer right first time, nearly every time. When guys are waiting to take out, that is when I turn into a klutz as far as getting the boat back on the trailer goes. I am not a big fan of running my boat in a crowd either. The last couple of years that I've fished the Wounded Warriors tournament at Truman Lake, I requested to go last, just so that I wouldn't be worried about some guy in a much faster boat coming up on me from behind.

One of the great things about fishing is that you get to see neat animals from time to time. Early last fall I got to within 20-30 feet of an eagle that was hanging out on the top of a broken tree at the edge of the lake. The tree was broke off about 6' above the water line so we were basically eye to eye 30' from each other. It wasn't scared at all. I chose to not go any farther into that cut and I backed away. Years ago, I was fishing out of a 10' Water Buster, and bumped into what I thought was a floating log, drifting in 4 or 5 feet of water. Then a head turned around and I saw the thing I had bumped into was one of the largest snapping turtles I had ever encountered. It just looked at me, like "Who the hell are you and why did you wake me up and do you know who I am?" I wasn't in any danger, but I thought that large snapping turtle was an awesome animal. If you were bank fishing and you happened to trip over that thing in a foot of water or so it would be a different story.

I've got one of the Mustang HIT vests and I wear it nearly all the time. I have one of the bobbin type auto inflatables and it went off in my fishing truck after being stored in hyper hot & humid conditions. Only happened once. Now it is my borrowers vest, the one I give to any guy who is in the boat with me.

Good for you. Good job. Doing the Lord's work - doing your part to support the fishing tackle industry. Keep it up.

I thought all those rods broke - they were popular a few years ago, but they were fragile. Rogers Lures in Liberty, MO stopped carrying them, mostly because of breakage issues. I have a black Carrot Stick Wild that I haven't broken yet, I think it is just a matter of time. A couple of years ago, a fishing buddy got 3 of them and broke them all in 1 season.

I'm going to focus a little more on finesse this year. Brewer sliders & Ned rigs (research the In-fisherman web site for more info on Ned rigs) I'm going to try to hone my deductive skills this year, so that I spend more time fishing and less time searching. I've got a decent frog rig, but I didn't use it much last year. This year I am going to buy a better set of frogs and spend a little more time fishing in the slop (mid summer goal.) Fishing deeper grass beds is a weakness of mine. I'd like to get better at fishing the deeper grass beds.

I miss fishing with Shelly & Courtney. Those girls could fish. Plus they always went fishing in really cool spots, spots I would go to if I had more disposable income and plenty of PTO days from work. I distinctly remember one show, where they were trout fishing in British Columbia and their guide pointed out that there were probably trout in the shade caused by a bush hanging over the river they were fishing. Anyway, in one camera shot, she made a cast toward the bush, got within6 feet or so (on purpose) stripped 8 or 10 feet of line from her fly reel, then executed a perfect underhand roll cast, her streamer fly landing 2 feet from the bank, under the bush, totally in the shade. 1.. 2… 3…. set the hook, 16" trout. I know I would have a hard time making that cast given a dozen chances - 1 chance - with the camera rolling - that is a good cast. The other thing that I liked about that show was how, toward the end of the show they would keep a couple of fish to demonstrate another recipe on their Oklahoma Joe smoker (one of their sponsors) I don't know what happened to those girls, - they probably just ran out of funding somehow. Anyhow, they had a good show while it lasted - IMO

I think that is an old "weed sneak" jig head. You put the skirt on from the front, rather than bending it around the hook & up. Back in the day, they came with a little plastic cone, where you threaded your line through the cone prior to tying your knot to the hook. Then you slid the cone down over the knot. This protected the knot somewhat and offered a slicker profile for bringing the jig through weeds. As I recall, it never really caught on and after a year or so I never saw it marketed again. (We're talking mid 80's to late 80's here, I think). The one advantage to the jig was that it was easy to change skirt colors.

My guess would be a "Water Scamp" The moldings look very similar to mine, and I think that the clearer plastic handle is unique, i.e. I've never seen another pond boat that had a similar handle. Maybe not though, I'm not sure. Idle curiosity, or do you need to contact the manufacturer for some reason?