Fishes in trees

I don't know I just looked in my 2014 BPS Master catalog ( conveniently located right next to my computer) and I couldn't find a Plano box model 3771. I suppose that its footprint is roughly the same as all the other 3700 size boxes, but I don't know how tall it is, and that is the dimension you need to know. I just looked at those hydro-flo boxes and that struck me as a bad idea. Just what I need, a lure box with lots of holes already in it. Allegedly it lets any water drain out of it easier. I don't think that those are one way holes, so they probably let moisture in pretty easy also. Anyway, let me help you on your crank storage issues. The key to successful crank bait storage is to buy several more plano boxes than you think you will need. Trust me, you will fill them up soon enough. How I do it is get a couple of boxes and these get various sizes of cranks that are in the "most likely to get used" category. Then I've got another 30 or so, I'm not sure, of assorted cranks, differentiated by brand, diving depth, whatever seems appropriate. here are in the " less likely to get used category." Only 7 or 8 of these boxes actually make it into the boat bin, the rest get stacked on shelves in my fishing shed.

I still don't understand why my reels cast different when I am lawn fishing, outside of my fishing shed, than they do when I am on the water, throwing at real targets. My best explanation so far is that when I am practicing on the lawn, the reels like to show off a little bit, and then when I get on the water they get a little case of performance anxiety. I understand that this assumes that my reels have feelings & emotions similar to what people have.

I think that is enough visibility. The advantage to going to a heavier weight would be that it would get down quicker and not be affected by current as much. I fish in lakes, so current really isn't a consideration for me. Fishing in a river, it might or might not be. If you go with a heavier weight and stay with a light line, you will be popping off weights all the time.

No hard questions. Seriously, if there is a soft plastic company out there that has any distribution in the Midwest area, I've probably bought some of their product.

I'm not a big fan of those parabolic action crank bait rods. The rod I use for cranking most of the time is more of a compromise. I like the BPS Extreme ETR 74MT. It is a 7'4" rod that is on the heavy side of medium. BPS originally marketed the rod as a Woo Davis special, a pitching rod. I don't like it for pitching at all, but it is a decent square bill/crank rod. I've got 3 of them. Occasionally, I will try a different rod for cranks, but so far all those have gotten traded away and I go back to the BPS Extreme.

I use a Falcon Bucco 6'10 MH bait casting rod, a Chronarch 50 reel and 15 lb fluorocarbon ( brand varies) to throw wacky senkos with. Tx rig senkos, well I generally throw some senko imitation when I am going tx rig, and I generally throw them on spinning gear with 14 lb Firelinej and a 15 or 20 lb fluorocarbon leader.

To stay well within your budget, I'd say look at the Fenwick HMG or the slightly more expensive AETOS line. Two words - lifetime warranty. I know other rod companies offer similar warranties, but I've never had any issues with them, even when I've done some stupid stuff to break the rods. The HMG will run you $100 more or less. The Aetos is around $50 more.

Step A - get a job. To paraphrase an old 70's hippie saying, "Money will get you through times of no motocross better than motocross will get you through times of no money." You say your fishing reel is a Quantum Accurist? To me, a used Quantum of that grade might be worth $35, more or less. You might get more from a different buyer, a pawn shop would for sure give you less. Unless you are absolutely down & out, or you need money to make bail or something like that, save the gear.

You will never get an impressive collection of old lures unless you do this several times per year for the next decade or so. Don't ever let retiring old gear restrain you from purchasing new gear. Just because you don't need the particular piece of gear right now doesn't mean that some time in the future you won't. The same goes for older soft plastic baits. Just because they didn't work as well as you had hoped over the past year doesn't mean that they won't ever work. Put the old baits in storage - they won't ever wear out. How do you do this - it is very simple. Several times per year, Walmart puts the plastic shoe boxes with the attached lids on sale for around a buck each. Every time you see this sale, drop a 10 spot on plastic shoe boxes. In several years, you will accumulate over a hundred of these plastic boxes and your old soft plastic collection will be VERY organized.

As mentioned in prior posts, any bait can be rigged on a shaky head. I haven't fished flukes on shaky heads, but I don't fish flukes that often. If I were to fish a fluke on a shaky head, I would probably rig it sideways, so that there would be less plastic to set the hook through. If the hook on the jig head lined up with the slot of the fluke, then I would probably rig it straight.

That is a great idea - in theory. In my experiences, stuff that is free doesn't get respected/taken care of like some equipment that was paid for does. It has to do with a persons emotional commitment , a realization that "X" piece of equipment stands for X amount of money. If the gear was free, the base cost of that gear is 0 so how well some gear is maintained or not doesn't enter into the equation. Should you decide to give away some of your stuff, I hope I'm wrong in your case. If I didn't know who I was giving the free gear to, I probably wouldn't give it away. Too many prior experiences in the arena of giving away free stuff.

to add to my previous post, research what happened to the Merrimac river in Missouri after the MDC introduced otters into the environment. A big case of OOPS. They don't do that no more.

Given just a little bit of time otters will decimate a fish population. That's what happened to a couple of lakes close to me.

I use an older Calcutta for my A-rig & Frog fishing. A 7 ball bearing model, 200 GTB I think, and 65 lb braid.

The reason I have different rods & reels is to save time which switching up how I fish a spot. Now, if I'm gonna fish the same spot with different baits, it stands to reason that I would have each rig be suited (in my own mind, anyway) for the bait I'm throwing. That is why I have different rigs. For instance, last year I got bit the most using a 1/4 Brewer Spider slider head and a 5" paddle tail worm, fished in 10 lb seagaur Abrazx line. I had more keepers (15" & up) on a home made 5/87 oz jika rig/ brush hog bait and 15 lb Abrazx. Just one example, there are lots of others.

All I know is that is what In-fisherman magazine called that particular drop shot set-up, i.e. the flipping/pitching stick/bait casting reel & heavier mono or fluorocarbon line. I use the same term just to stay consistent and to differentiate from my more finesse oriented drop shot rigs which consist of spinning gear.

I prefer sports that I can participate in compared to sports that you watch. I don't play softball or volleyball anymore. Never did golf. One of the charms of fishing is that it isn't age dependent, you can pursue fishing success, to varying degrees, no matter how old you are, within whatever income restrictions you might have. That being said, I read the sports page every day because sports are a frequent topic at work and you might as well have an opinion. I am the proud owner of a 3 acre (more or less) all terrain day/night bocce court and I am currently considering alterations/improvements for next year bocce cup events.

It is toys like this that remind me why god gave us a cell phone and a master card. I just got one.

Allow me to come at this from a different perspective. I'm a geezer now, and my dad has been dead for 30 years now. I got spankings/whippings/beatings (call it what you will or whatever you want to ) from time to time. I remember the first time I lost some respect for my dad was a time when I took some corporal punishment for some alleged misdeed and he didn't bother to get my side of what happened first. I remember that I was a cub scout at the time, I knew my way around the library, and I did some research on how to get back at someone who was bigger/ stronger/ older/ richer than you were. Believe me, I had options in the early 60's, but my dad sobered up for a while and didn't beat me for that particular offense again. I'm not a judge of your parenting style, I'd just point out that throughout history, ruling through fear has never had long term positive outcomes. It does solve short term problems and if you are ok with that, then ok. You are an adult - allegedly - with X many years of life experience. That child has fewer years of life experience. If you can't figure out a way to bring out desired behavior outcomes from a child without pounding, spanking, whipping, beating, call it what you will, on them, what does that say about you? By the way, that is a totally fair question. One of the first rules of politics, (and all family relationships can be considered politics) is that you can catch more flies with honey. Just something for you to consider before you bust out with a knee-jerk "I ought to bust that Kid" and then realize that you can't/shouldn't and then the resentment over what you can't/shouldn't do festers.

In-fisherman magazine covered this years ago. They called it a "bubba" drop shot. It works great and gives you confidence to put a drop shot bait in places you wouldn't consider with a lighter tackle/ more finesse rig. My bubba drop shot rig consists of a 7'5" pitching stick, on the heavy side of med/heavy and a curado 50 with 20 lb Seaguar Abrazx. I generally use a half ounce drop shot weight, when I ever get around to placing an order for drop shot weights from Tackle Warehouse or somewhere like that I will probably try 3/4 oz. This rig doesn't solve all your angling problems, but for me it has turned a bad day into a decent day several times. My first bait choice is a power bait jerk shad. I start with the Arkansas Shiner color and then shade it in with chartreuse, orange & blue spike it markers. Secondary bait choice is a power bait crazy legs chigger craw.

You are using several different lines on several different bait casting rigs for several different techniques. This is more complicated than it needs to be? To agree with the previous two posters, I think that while you can use 1 line for everything, the question becomes - why would you? People over think fishing gear issues all the time.. This is one instance where you are trying to under think and IMO isn't the best approach to the issue. I go back to shop class where the instructor was all the time insisting - "use the right tool for the job."

In olden times ( late 70's to early 80's) the old spoon bill stick baits were the tool used to get deeper. Rebel & Smithwick both made spoon bill models. Weighting them and getting them to stay down was a challenge and varied quite a bit, mostly due to water temps. Before the Storm suspend- dots were marketed, guys wrapped solder or various gauges of thin wire around the shanks of the treble hooks. Weighted sticky tape was known to golfers before it became common in bass fishing circles. You had to cut it to fit and figure out where sticking it on the lure worked best. Trial & error. I remember quite a bit of discussion as to which was better - sticky tape cut to fit stuck on the body of the lure or wire wrapped around the hook shanks. Another school of thought was that if you are fishing jerk baits in clear, cold water, depth didn't matter that much. The thinking there was that if you happened to get bit with a deep diving jerk bait, you were just a likely to get bit on a jerk bait 3 feet down. The idea being that the suspended jerk bait, with its tiny quivers was the attractor and the depth wasn't that much of a factor, and a fish would move upwards 5 or 6 feet if it was attracted at all. I just listened to these discussions, I didn't have that many rods & reels then and I for sure didn't have money to purchase spoon bill jerk baits. During that time, my best clear & cold water bait was a Brewer slider worm fished on 6 lb line. Close to the same time, or maybe a little later in the 80's, Rick Clunn partnered with Norman Lures to produce a suspending jerk bait. It was a hollow jerk bait with a little plug in it and it came with a little injector and the idea was that you squirted water into the bait and then put in the plug, hopefully getting it to suspend at the depth you wanted it to. Decent idea - didn't work all that well and I only remember the bait being on the shelves for a season, maybe two seasons at most. Around the same time, In-fisherman magazine was writing about how to doctor floating Rapala and Rapala husky jerks to get them to suspend at different depths. It seemed more trouble than it was worth to me, and them admitted that you would probably ruin several baits drilling into them before you learned how to drill and weight them correctly. So, there is a anecdotal history of suspending jerk baits. These days, if I feel I've got to suspend a jerk bait, I use Lucky Craft Pointers (78's and 100 sized, both suspenders and DD style) and Stay-sees and mess around with the sticky dots. Currently that seems to be the easiest fix to the problem.

When you are throwing jerk baits on braid, there will often be a slight twitch or movement of the line, long before you feel anything. It is a subtle thing. That is the way most of my jerk bait bites happen. The braid works kind of like a strike indicator does when you are trout fishing, or dragging a smaller buggy looking fly when you are bluegill fishing with your fly rod.

I don't know about you, but my approach to solving problems that I'm not extremely knowledgeable about is to throw money at them. I don't know how to work on boats and my time to learn how to work on boats is probably come and gone. I am not that limber and some of the positions that you have to contort yourself into to get to different sections of the boat underneath the deck, console and rear deck hurt. So if it was me, I would just bite the bullet and pay some one. Just as an aside, I try to be very timely about the boat maintenance that I can do, so any problems get noticed sooner rather than later. Last spring, when I brought my boat to the dealer to get tuned and ready for spring, he pointed out that my bilge pump was bad. Not a very expensive fix, but, what caused it to go bad was that I had failed to drain the bilge properly prior to winter storage and water in the bilge pump froze and broke the plastic. That is probably what happened to yours - it only takes once for that to happen.

If I lived where you live, I 'd throw jigs and then more jigs and after that I'd throw more jigs. If you feel like you've got to change it up, I'd go to a drop shot or a jika rig.