RSM789

Tell that to Lynn Swan or John Stallworth. Great players make great athletic plays in big games.

The lack of humility in that comment for a game that was given to the Patriots is interesting. EVERY Patriot fan literally crapped their pants after that bobbled reception at the 5 yard. You all had reruns of 2007 running through your head, a nightmare that wouldn't go away. The entire New England area had the same look that was on Brady's face. That ugly, sinking feeling in your gut was quickly turning into an ulcer until one of the dumbest play calls ever snatched defeat from the jaws of victory for Seattle. Any Patriots fan with an ounce of conscience & common sense would take the win & not offer any comments that could even be construed as trash talking or bragging. Too bad the win will be vacated when the results of the most recent cheating scandal are brought to light...

I don't believe that is a valid comparison. A spawning fish will stay on or return to a bed even if it sees an angler on a boat casting towards it. During spawning, there is a biological urge to do something it wouldn't normally do (stay in a location even though it has identified a potential threat) the rest of the year. Cruising, breaking or boiling fish will not react the same way. If cruising fish spot you, they scatter and will not automatically return the same area minutes later. Get to close to boiling fish, the school will sound and maybe even disperse. I'm not saying this to discourage anyone from bed fishing, but at the same time, don't deceive yourself that bass during the spawn aren't more vulnerable.

I thought about this a bit and I believe it is the sum of the parts that attracts me (& many others) to bass fishing over other types. By sum of the parts, I mean the following attributes: It is active, not passive - Even if the catching is slow, you can enjoy the activity of trying different areas, making targeted casts, etc. Success is achievable multiple ways - It is often seen in tournaments how multiple, different patterns will catch fish under the same conditions. Artificial lures can be the most effective tool - The cleanliness, flexibility & non wastefulness of artificial lures is attractive to many when compared to using bait. Availability - Nearly any creek, pond, river or lake offer you the opportunity to catch a bass. Fish size - Average sized bass can be caught without specialized equipment with larger fish always a possibility. Fish spirit - Bass will pull, jump & splash when caught. Other species may do one of these, but not the others. For example, many trout species will jump, but other than that, they just kind of wiggle when caught. Catfish will pull like a truck, too bad they wont jump a foot out of the water. Landing the fish - Is there anything more cool than grabbing a bass by its open mouth & puling him aboard? No net, no gaff, just grab him by the lip & then let him go. There may be certain types of fish or certain types of fishing that are better than bass fishing in one or two aspects, but when you take the entire package, it becomes obvious why it is the most popular fish in the U.S.

For me it is a tossup between Carl Spackler & Al Czervik. "Cinderella story, about to win the Masters..." versus "Hey Whitey, where's your hat?"

We had a thread about this back in December. Myself & a few others who keep fish catch logs all had a catch rate in winter of about 20%-25% of other months. However, it doesn't take much of a water temp increase to get the fish moving. At the beginning of the month, my lake was at its coldest, 54 degrees. The fish were sluggish, most that I caught were deep on a dropshot and when they were hooked, they fought kind of halfhearted. Now I know 54 degrees isn't cold for many of you, but these So Cal bass are as thin skinned as the anglers fishing for them. Today, the water temp was 61 when I started, 62 by the end of the day. Most of the bass were on the first break line from their deep haunts and a few moved all the way up under docks to feed as the day wore on. These fish wanted nothing to do with a dropshot, they were chasing down Roboworms on a Texas rig on the break line and Senko's skipped under the docks. Best of all, they were in a fighting mood. Nearly every fish fought as if they were 50% larger than they actually were, I even had a chubby 2 lb. female strip some drag on my 10lb test setup. Nearly all were acrobats and about half did a little "FU" jump after being released. I sure love when winter is over...

Every dam of every decent sized resevoir in the U.S. has that same story. I first heard it from my Uncle back inthe early 70's about Lake Mead. Since then, I have heard it about dozens of other lakes. Not saying it isn't true, just odd that every lake has the same story but no one is catching 175 lb catfish at any of these lakes.

Q - What is a blizzard on the East Coast called in Minnesota? A - A slight dusting.

I had recorded & just watched the most recent Major League Fishing episode, they are in Maine & it was the first of the sudden death elimination rounds (where the first 3 to hit a designated weight advance). In this episode, Brent Ehler smoked the field and Kelly Jordan was in last, never really in contention after the first period. However, when I was looking at the statistics & having paid attention to the weights of some of the fish caught, it appears Jordan's problem was he was fishing the wrong format. The last 3 fish Jordan caught weighed over 7 lbs. combined and earlier he had caught two that went just over 3 lbs. and just under 4 lbs. So in a traditional format, Jordan would have been over 14 lbs. for his best five. For all of the other anglers, their biggest fish were just a little over 2 lbs., so I would estimate the best totals any of them had was maybe 11 lbs. for their best five (more likely 10 something). Now I know if it had been a different format, then the techniques would have been different & drop shotting for 13" fish wouldn't have been the go to method. Nonetheless, it is interesting how looking like you are heads & tails above the field or way behind depends quite a bit on the format.

It doesn't, but what it does do is make the situation ambiguous. With fencing & signs, you eliminate the chance of people not knowing they are on private property. Anyone who bypasses those measures to fish an area knows they are breaking the law and should be dealt with appropriately. However, no signs or fencing means there is no differentiation between private or public property. In that situation, well intentioned & law abiding folks can make an understandable error and end up someplace they should not be.

Thank you. For a brief moment, it was easy to think the solution would be to grab a baseball bat & meet the intruder as he was exiting the neighbors home. In the next moment, I knew that I didn't know what was in his waistband, how desperate he was or if a direct confrontation would lead to attempted retribution in the future. After the fact, I am glad we just made sure to provide the police with the up to the moment information they needed. No lives were in danger as this unfolded and a direct confrontation by an untrained person like myself may have just changed that. As vengeful as it would have felt to take a whack at his knee as if he was a piñata, I did gain satisfaction in imagining the look on his face as he made it to the bottom of the hill, thinking he had gotten away with it when suddenly the police swarm his vehicle. I bet it left skidmarks in his shorts...

I have a tale that kind of qualifies as a fish story only because I skipped going fishing this morning and was around when it happened. I normally fish on Saturday mornings, but the forecast was for high Santa Ana winds today, so I decided to go out on Sunday and get some honeydo's done around the house today instead. A quick background, we live in a nice housing subdivision in South Orange County. Not the million dollar homes you see on those housewife reality shows, rather a typical middle class neighborhood that is been well kept for its 25 years of existence. Our city is relatively quiet & crime free and most of the neighbors in our area know each other & look out for each other. A little bit of a throwback to the 1950's, in as much as you can in today's society. I am upstairs around 10:30 in the morning when I hear my wife & one of my son's talking about some guy parked out in the street. I'm not really paying attention to what they are saying until I realize my other son is now in on the conversation. Out of curiosity, I go downstairs and the 3 of them are watching (through our front bay window) this guy walk up the driveway of one of our neighbors. He is kind of sketchy looking, mid to late 20's with a Mohawk, someone that none of us recognized as a neighbor. My wife says he had put something in the back of his pants when he got out of the car & had crossed the street a couple of times, from one house back to another. He went up to the front door of a house 3 doors down & across the street, out of our view. 30 seconds later, he came back around to the front of the house, just kind of hanging out at the garage door looking towards the front door. After another 30 seconds or so, he turned the other way & hopped the side yard fence of the same house. I told my wife to call the police & I went out to get the license number off of his car (he was parked in such a way that you couldn't see the plate from our vantage point). I returned to the house, my wife is explaining what she is seeing and then reads them the license plate number I just got off the car. The police dispatcher yells to someone else on his end "We got him" and then keeps asking my wife questions about what is going on. About 2 minutes later, the guy hops back over the gate, walks to his car carrying something, and as he gets in, removes from the back of his pants whatever he had put there earlier. He then drives off as my wife relays what is happening to the police. I took off out the front door down the street (we live at the top of a hill) in the direction to see if I can see where he is going. I hear sirens, but they sound a bit off in the distance. After running a couple of blocks (barefoot), my son pulls up next to me in his truck & I get in. We get to the bottom of our hill (about a 1/2 mile away) and there are 6 or 7 police cars surrounding this guys car at a stoplight. 10 cops have there weapons drawn, a few with shotguns. We keep our distance as they have the guy get out of his car, walk backwards to them and end up cuffing them. After they clear his car, making sure no one else is with him, I walk towards the cops, motioning to one of them. He meets me halfway, I identify myself as the people who called it in & that we will be back up at our house if they need us. At that time, one of my other neighbors who is a sheriff for an adjoining city, pulls up. I tell him we were going to call him personally and he says it was better that we called the police, they had been looking for this guy for the past 2 days, he was responsible for a few "kick-in" break-in's. Turns out the guy is a druggie and had stolen some jewelry from our neighbors. He was targeting homes that had no cars in the driveway & no dogs barking. He had hit another house earlier in the morning & the homeowners walked in on him. He fled there and those folks had gotten part of his license plate, which matched the complete one I gave them. The cops told us he appeared high as a kite when they were questioning him. Looks like he will have some time to sober up over the next few months or years as he serves his time for breaking & entering multiple homes. Normally, I am coming home & telling my wife something unusual that happened when I was out fishing that day & that it was too bad she missed it. The one time she could have turned the tables on me, I just so happen to change my schedule and be home to witness it myself...

Most marketing campaigns are a net gain, else they wouldn't be used. Lets suppose that Company A has sales of a 10 million dollars and a net profit of 1 million dollars with no catalog sales. They begin a catalog program that costs them $200,000 to implement and it raises sales to 13 million (3 million directly attributable to the catalog sales), which increases net profit by $100,000 (10% of sales less the additional catalog program costs). In this example, the company actually has more ability to "pass savings on to the consumer" by continuing the program rather than abandoning it. If stopping the catalog sales results in lower profits (not lower sales), then there is no savings in stopping it.

Although I don't work for a paper company, I was going to post the same thing. Plus it would have to have been a very tiny tree to only produce enough paper for a single BPS catalog (with the green voices beginning the chant "if everyone just saved a little, it would make a big difference". Not per capita...)

My experience with receiving deliveries has been near perfect with UPS, fair with Fed-Ex and horrible with USPS. The shipping where Fed EX gets it close & then hands it off to USPS is the worst. I have had packages just plain lost, where BPS had to step up & resend. However, I have found that service quality is really dependent on where you live. My brother is in Colorado & their experiences with Fed Ex & UPS is a complete reversal of ours here in Southern California, Fed Ex is real good while UPS is fair to middlin'. In fact, I shipped a TV to them once via UPS and it arrived looking like it had been dragged behind the truck. Amazing to me because as I stated, our UPS service here is dependable & timely. However, we both find USPS to be the equivalent of an old rusty hook. Just useless, causing more damage than good.

Do you have a car? If so, you may want to consider a delivery position for places like Domino's. Typically the pay is above minimum wage, you get reimbursement (untaxed) for use of your vehicle and the ability to make tips. The last 2 are attractive if you hustle. Often the mileage reimbursement is a commission based on the dollar amount you deliver. Tips are usually good if you are friendly, helpful and have a sincere & warm smile on your face. I did this job in college & would always run from my car to the store or delivery site, which kept me in good shape. Plus, I had all the pizza I could eat after hours, good deal for a college budget.

Unlike most other younger guys, you have already figured out one of the keys to life. Congratulations.

For those of you who don't want to read the entire first post, here is the Cliff notes version: There is a great private lake in Florida that our author figured out has a public access area. He has a friend who lives on the lake. One day he spots an old man fishing on the lake, so he rolls right up on him & basically poaches the spot. The old man shows him a bunch of fish on a stringer & then gets irritated that with an entire lake to fish, our author has chosen to be within 15 yards of him. Eventually, the old man moves off, so our author then goes to his friends house to spy on the old man. Later, under the pretense of helping the old man, our author tries to find out exactly what the old man was using and what kind of scent he had disguised by putting it in a WD-40 bottle. Without stating it, the author then leads us to believe that he murdered the old man & stole his equipment. The author shows his knack for irony by refusing to reveal the name of the lake in order to keep irritating people off of it.

I have never done that and would never advise anyone to, however I do understand the need to harvest smaller fish to keep a lake (especially a private lake) healthy. Rather than waste them by having them die on the ice, I would recommend they should take them home to feed a cat (either theirs or a neighbors).

I have a long story about this, but will cut it down to medium length so as to not bore everyone. Back in 1986, a friend told me about a lake he had come across in an area of our county that was just starting to be developed. He said it was called Oso Reservoir, that it was a small feeder lake to the (now) well known Lake Mission Viejo and that it was used to keep the Mission Viejo water level at a stable point. He told me that while Mission Viejo is a private lake, Oso was on public lands and could be fished if you had a license & were willing to make the trek to it. I bought a fishing license that day and got directions on where to park my truck & meet him there the next morning. We parked on a public street next to some Model Homes that were being built & made the nearly mile walk through the brush. A quick climb up the earthen dam revealed a triangle shaped lake, about 3/4's of a mile long. No fencing, no signs, just a secluded little watershed tucked into the foothills. We caught about 30 bass in the 4 hours we were there, the hot July sun finally getting too much to bear. We decided to come back that evening for a few hours to finish off the day. I arrived that late afternoon before my friend & headed off to the lake instead of waiting for him. I was fishing a spot about 100 yards down from the dam & the fish were just as willing to bite as they had been in the morning. I finally see my friend & another buddy of his crest the dam. I yell out & wave to him and as I do, suddenly there is the deafening roar directly behind me. Like a scene out of Apocolypse Now, a helicopter had flown low over the horizon, up over the hill behind me and was headed directly towards me. I look over to my friend & see him & his buddy running as fast as they can, now I have no idea what is going on. Scared out of my wits, I drop my pole and take a couple of steps back into a large bush to conceal myself. The helicopter buzzes over the top of me & then does a 180 so they are now facing me. I have no clue what is happening, so I just hunker down in the bush, not moving. After what seemed like an eternity, but was probably 15 seconds, the helicopter flew back over my head in the direction it had originally came from. I didn't move, instead just listened & noticed that while I could still hear the helicopter blades behind me, they were slowing down. I crept out of the bush, peered back behind me to see that the helicopter had landed on the shoreline. Just as I realized it was a police copter, I see a sheriff approaching me from the side, hand on his weapon & EXTREMELY ticked off. By this time, I am freaking out. I knew this cop was livid and I had to do something to calm him down. I put my hands in the air as he approached me and he continued to yell at me 'What the hell are you doing?" For a reason that to this day I can't explain, I tapped my hands on my ears, made some phony sign-language signs and mumbled some nonsensical sounds. The sheriff stopped, looked at me oddly and said "What?". I repeated the gestures. The sheriff asked "Are you deaf?", to which I nodded yes (I must be a superb lip reader). He immediately calmed down, took his hand off his weapon & said "Oh, Ok." He pointed at my tackle box & rod and said slowly "Pick...up...your...gear..........You...are...under...arrest". I nodded again and as I gather my stuff, he pointed for me to walk up to the dam, where I saw a sheriff's cruiser parked with another cop talking to my friend & his buddy. I found out later there was a fire access road about 2 miles to the north that led to the dam, something we never saw but that was used by the sheriff to patrol the area. Turns out this was not public land, but rather land owned by the developer of the model homes we had parked by. The cops put us all in the cruiser, took us back & around to where we had parked and ended up writing citations for trespassing. By this time, I had given up the deaf routine and the other sheriff had no idea what I had done earlier. We were able to keep our gear, but were looking at a fine in that could reach $100 (in 1986 dollars). That evening, as I told my fiancé the story, I started to get a little uppity about the situation. After all, no fencing, no signs, how were we supposed to know it was private property? After a few hours of playing Perry Mason in my mind, I made the decision to return to Oso the next day, this time armed with a camera instead of fishing gear. I was going to build a bulletproof case to get out of the trespassing fine. My fiancé went with me the following afternoon (a Sunday). I again parked next to the model homes, and told her to stay with my truck. I walked towards the dam, taking pictures along the way to show a lack of fencing or signage. As I get to the base of the dam, a security officer from the developer comes driving down the service road. I wait for him & when he pulls up, I show him the previous days citation and explain what I am doing. He says fine, but that I need to get into the truck so that he can escort me to the dam for the remaining pictures. We get to the top of the dam, he tells me I can get out to take the pictures I need & that he has to drive to the other end of the dam in order to turn around. When he comes back, I get back in his truck & he says "I went down to the other side of the dam to call the police (-this was before cell phones-). You knew you shouldn't have been here, so I had to report it. When the police get here, they will decide what to do". That was fine by me, I figured I could explain my situation & all would go well. He drove around the service road exit and then back over to where my fiancé was waiting. We all chatted, waiting for the sheriff to arrive. 10 minutes later, the sheriff shows up, pulls the security guide aside to talk with him for a few moments and then approaches me. Just as I get ready to start explaining myself, the sheriff says "Put your hands behind your back". I do as he says, but respond incredulously "You have got to be kidding!". As he handcuffs me, he says "I don't kid about this". A few minutes later, I am being taken down to Santa Ana county jail, where I was booked & then released on my own recognizance. Turns out the sheriff told the security guy that it was up to him what the sheriff would do, either warn me or arrest me. The security guard told him to arrest me, which he probably later regretted as my sweet, innocent fiancé freaked out and started dropping F Bombs at him for doing that (after the sheriff left). Without getting into anymore lengthy details, I ended up pleading my case when my hearing came up, using the pictures I had taken and the fact that I had bought a fishing license the day prior (showing that I was under the impression that it was a legal place to fish). Both the arrest & fine for me were dropped, but my buddy & his friend ended up having to pay about 35 bucks for their tickets (no fishing license). A couple of years later, the developer entered into an agreement with a private party to allow Oso to be fished as a private lake in exchange for waving of all liability and for the private party to provide security. If I am correct, lake access is now under control of the Boyscouts. Ironic thing is that where I live now is about 3 miles away from the lake and a toll road goes right over that same dam, so I see the lake on a near daily basis.

You can pull larger bass out from under a dock with lighter line, but as I mentioned before it depends on the dock. I caught a 7-6 last October after skipping a wacky rigged senko back under a dock & was using 10# Berkley Nanofil with a fluorocarbon leader on a medium spinning rod. The reason I could get away with that setup was the dock had no pilings - it was attached to the shore & jutted out over the water, about 6" off the water for the entire length of the dock. Now the fish did end up going under a boat on an adjoining dock & I had to move quickly to keep the line away from that boats propeller, but it was nothing that any experienced angler wouldn't have trouble doing. With some of the docks I read about that some of you fish around, it sounds like a nightmare for the line. With those, my lightweight setup wouldn't stand a chance.

You know, the risk of injury actually makes that show kind of anti-sematic. If you had a show where people were jumping over priests or imams, there would be protests. Just another slap in the face to the Jewish people. Oh, wait, I thought you wrote it was a "Rabbi jumping contest". Never mind...

I have never seen it, but I have been told that the bass at Lake Mission Viejo begin circling like sharks just outside the trout plant area when trout plants are done regularly. Note that this is in an area where no fishing is allowed and a few big fish have set up home (you see them cruising in the clear water) as if they know its hands off of them there.

If they want me to wear a shirt that says "Security" on it, I might have to rethink this...

Boston Kool-aid recipe - 1 part East Coast elitism 1 part "Home of Plymouth Rock" 2 gallons of Kennedy bootleg liquor Mix together while chanting the curse of the bambino drink until you believe Belicheat is the greatest NFL coach ever