Daniel Lin

Stopped by Walmart on the way home from work today. For context, they just did their annual spring clearance and restocked the shelves for presumably the next year. I just managed to get a new with tags (and an anti-theft tag from wherever they got it from lol) Quantum Tour KVD 7'10" MH from a local tackle shop for $35, so I dropped in to try to figure out what line to spool it up with and see if they had any more deep cranks on clearance. Ended up finding 30lb PowerPro Slick 8 for $9 and a bunch of 5XDs for $2! I'm stoked because I recently got a kayak (Eagle Talon 12) and got it outfitted with a Garmin Striker 5DV and I'm now equipped to do some proper deep cranking. Still need to figure out a reel to put on the new rod though. The thing that caught my eye at Walmart was a reel I'd never seen before. I should have taken a photo, but it was made by Abu Garcia, and I'm pretty sure it was called the "Max Winch" with a 5ish:1 gear ratio for about the same price as the Silver Max. I can't find ANYTHING online about it, but all my Google results are clouded up by Orra and Revo Winch results too. Anyone know anything about the reel? Can I assume that it'll probably hold up as well as my Black Max (first BC reel and seemingly indestructible), or should I save some money and take a chance on an alternative made-in-China reel from Kastking or something (that White Max looks attractive). Or, should I for once in my life spend more than $50-60 on a reel due to the increased abuse on reels from deep cranking?

All of the stillwater's been frozen over lately, even down here in VA, but Mossy Creek is just 20 minutes down the road, 42-45 degree spring creek year-round. Some monster brown trout in there, and fly fishing only. Oh wait, this is BASS Resource. I'll just scoot along now....

If I remember correctly, the Duckett reels have the same centrifugal braking system (and that same glorious "Made in China" font) as my BPS Prolite Specials (now the new Extreme reel?). Once you realize that, it's painfully apparent that the Duckett reels are literally nothing special and doubly overpriced. My personal policy right now is to flat-out not purchase anything that's carrying the "made in China" font unless it's got a d**n good price on it. It's hard to describe but if you know what font I'm talking about you know exactly what I mean. To me, the presence of the font is a dead indicator for "we were really too lazy to do more than select a product out of the catalog and tell the factory we wanted it in this color".

Went out this morning to take a break from packing to move back to Virginia and wet a line for a while. 50 degrees or so, total overcast, and lots of rain the past week has completely clouded up the normally remarkably clear (for this region) pond I usually fish. I figured I could take advantage of these conditions to really narrow down optimal lure selections and went with one rod and a handful of my loudest chartreuse/black themed lipless crankbaits. After getting one early at the end of a long cast toward an opposite bank, I picked up another just as my lure was leaving the water for another cast. Wow, what a heartstopping strike! I just happened to be looking for the lure to come into sight in the foot or less of visibility so I could do an early check for weeds and instead of seeing a chartreuse/black back Cotten Cordell Super Spot, I saw what could only be described as a black hole open up and absolutely smash it! I've actually come to generally not enjoy on-the-bank strikes as I enjoy the fight as much as the next guy, but tomorrow morning looks like literally my last opportunity to enjoy perpetual (Virginia) fall-conditions fishing in the Deep South before I move and at this point, a fish is a fish. After that fish, I started throwing in my best rendition of musky figure-8s before taking the lure out of the water whenever the water at the bank was deep enough to incorporate it. Out of 8 hookups and 5 fish landed, doing this accounted for no less than 3 of my fish. After those first two fish, I got the feeling that numerable fish were holding in pockets found wherever water was 2-3 feet deep about 6-8 feet off the bank, a fairly unusual pattern for this body of water, in my experience. Having such a shore accessible pattern (or at least theory) gave me my most productive outing to this pond ever, as I was pretty much able to work my 2-legpower trolling motor in a lap around the pond. Does anybody else purposely keep their lures in the water for a few more moments before pulling it out? I imagine it looks to a bass like whatever baitfish they were chasing suddenly ran out of room, driving them to strike at it while it's confused.

I took advantage of pre-Black Friday deals to avoid having to go out these last couple of days. I got a new 4wt fly rod/reel setup, line, etc., assorted fly fishing stuff, a few replacement lures that I've lost in the past couple of months, some blowout-priced soft plastics, and a $10 1pc 7ft M fiberglass rod from Academy for the lulz as a super-budget cranking stick. So far, so good!

Heads up, the Extreme combo is so cheap because it's getting phased out with a "new" Extreme reel. So far as I can tell, it's actually the 7-bearing variant of the Prolite Special with the carbon drag stack (and main gear) of the 10-bearing variant. I own both Prolite Special variants so I'm pretty sure about this. It's in the Christmas II catalog under "Online Catalogs" on the website but last time I checked there was no page on the site for it just yet.

I can't seem to keep a buzzbait with a plastic toad anywhere near the surface. Sank like a rock every time I tried to rig one up.....

In no particular order, just recalling the setups on my rack at home. Rods: BPS, Shimano, Abu Garcia, Quantum, Shakespeare, Berkley, Daiwa, Redington. Reels: Lews, BPS, Abu Garcia, Pflueger, Redington. Note that this is for 7 setups and a fly rod. Brand loyalty? What's that?

That's real deep, man. Real deep. That sounds like the opening to a nature film or something. But is that not the paradox that is the very essence of human nature? What differentiates us from every other organism on this planet is our drive (and eventual ability) to exert such a degree of control over nature. This, of course, doesn't come without consequences (i.e: pollution, driving species into extinction, depletion of natural resources), However as much as I would enjoy an educated discourse on the topic, this board is dedicated to bass fishing, and we should keep the topic to that lest we risk a thread lock due to derailment haha.

As much as I try to take the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach to life, I'm just one of those guys that's constantly tinkering and modifying everything in my life to squeeze just a little more performance out of it. Getting into bass fishing has been great (or awful, depending on how you look at it) in terms of feeding this need to optimize everything.

I'd like to start a discussion on rod position theories when fighting a fish to the bank/boat. The reason I ask this is that I've been thinking about getting a cranking-specific rod lately, and I've been doing a lot of observations comparing videos of both pros and Youtube amateurs with my own technique to try to see how I might benefit from one. I honestly don't remember where I learned this, but I was taught to keep the rod low to attempt to discourage jumping (even sticking the tip in the water if necessary) and to keep it perpendicular to the direction of the fish as to keep maintain an amount of tension on the line. Yet, I never see this done by other folks when they have a fish on. Either I'm an undiscovered genius or there's something very wrong with my technique. One that that I have noticed is that often I will barely have any load in my rod, although I'm not sure if this is more attributable to the size of the fish I'm generally catching (usually in the 14-18 inch range, my cheapo scale reading up to about 3 pounds on a very good day) or if MH tackle is a little heavier than I need for the waters around here. I'm pretty sure this relative lack of load has resulted more than once in losing a fish on a jump once it unloads the rod and is then effectively shaking on a slack line. Watching folks running cranking rods, it seems that perhaps abandoning my current technique on lures liable to be shaken free and going with a rod-tip high and straight toward the fish approach might sacrifice jump discouragement for a significantly greater load on the rod, giving me some "working room", persay, when a fish jumps. It would appear that on a cranking rod with a slower action, the longer time it would take for a rod to unload gives the fish time to get back into the water and resume the fight without a slack line situation occurring. I should also mention that I'm pretty much throwing straight braid these days, but I'm open to putting a spare mono spool into my primary baitcaster if the day calls for a lot of cranking. If you're wondering how I acquired a spare baitcast spool so readily, I bought a BPS Prolite Special combo from the pawn shop for like $35, and the rod was in great shape but the reel felt like the geartrain was full of gravel. No amount of non-labor intensive maintenance has been able to resolve this issue. The good news though, is that I already had a Prolite Special reel that I use as my primary baitcast reel and the spools swap from one to the other with no issues whatsoever. Right now, one's spooled with 30lb braid and other other has 15lb Big Game mono. Am I just reading into this too far and overanalyzing the crap out of a relatively simple matter? I'm interested to hear what everyone else has to say as to rod position during the fight. I'm not too concerned with details regarding the actual landing or chasing it around the boat, etc, that's a whole other can of worms.

I'll do a similar thing when I'm pond hopping in my "4-wheeled bass boat, equipped with a 2-legged trolling motor". I might have up to 7 rods (including an ultralight, hehe) in the trunk, but usually at most one casting and one spinning rod comes out to play at a time.

What are the practical differences between the President and its upgraded brethren? From what I can determine, it's pretty much looks, a smidgen of weight, and carbon drag?

So what you're saying is, monster casts halfway across the pond in attempt to cover as much water as possible before the sun goes down with a lipless crankbait might not be the best use for mono?

I made the switch to braid main lines on everything the day I bought my first baitcaster earlier this year a few months after seriously getting into bass fishing. In my after-work fishing jaunts this past week, in which I've pretty much been throwing exclusively lipless crankbaits (with a few senkos on cleanup duty) I've lost a full 30% of my fish due to the lure being shaken free on a jump or whatnot. I figured this might have been because they weren't quite hooked that well, which, according to the textbooks, would be understandable, considering I'd been throwing them on some fairly stiff MH fast-action rods and 50lb braid. On a whim, I strung up a spare reel I bought for a song with some 15lb Trilene Big Game and put it on the rod of my Black Max combo (I rarely use this rod anymore), a 6'6" "Medium Fast" (it's the slowest "fast" I've ever seen) in an attempt to make a "textbook" cranking setup out of whatever I had laying around. I figured that if anything, if I was getting a mix of decent and downright terrible hooksets with my preferred setups, I should practically be gut hooking every fish I land on this setup. Boy, was I in for a shock. I have to admit, I've never fished a baitcaster on mono before. I made the jump to braid with my first baitcaster and never looked back. I felt like I had absolutely no feel of the lure, which was especially concerning because I was already throwing lipless crankbaits that d**n near rattled my arm off on braid. The only way I could tell that I had picked up some grass was that the lure seemed to be dragging just the tiniest bit more than before. Any ability I had to confidently rip out of grass was gone (although I'm sure some of that was attributable to the rod). I landed a couple of fish today but honestly it felt like I was trying to bring them in with surgical tubing. It was both more fun due to losing some of the ability to really direct the fish, giving me the perception that the fish was actually getting a chance to fight back some, but also massively frustrating since all of my inputs felt extremely dampened, from hookset to landing. I'm also pretty sure that there's a fairly significant tradeoff between hookset delay and hookset power. I think that one can train themselves to hesitate before setting the hook, or learn to sweep-set (since I've been using braid from the beginning, I pretty much only sweep-set, if sometimes still pretty fast and hard), but there's just no way to compensate for loss of power, especially when setting the hook way out at the end of a cast. Call me spoiled, but after today's experiments with fishing with mono, I don't think I'm ever going to leave braid as mainline. Good thing I got this spool of Big Game for only a dollar. I'm going to give this floppy Black Max combo rod another try tomorrow and see if using braid on a floppy rod gives me the best of both worlds solution I'm looking for.

First ever fish on the fly. It's a start, right?

I have no idea who thought the grip design on the spinning Lightning Rod is a good idea. To me, it feels completely awful, no matter how I try to hold it. Your mileage may vary. My Lightning Rod Shock though, feels pretty darn good in the hand.

Just flip it "closed", such that it's angled down. Bam! Just like any factory speced Texas rig hook keeper.

I have one on every rod I own. It's nice to have for open hook lures. Most of my rods have Texas-Rig keepers that work great for plastics but are generally pretty awful for open hook and treble hooks.

In terms of actually buying a rod separate from a combo, from what I've seen it's the Ugly Stik and its variants (Lite, etc.). It's got that Bud Light familiarity to it, and it's supposed to be "unbreakable", good for replacing the combo rod you broke when you closed the tailgate into it on your truck last week. Gotta remember that the vast majority of bass fishermen aren't anywhere near as crazy as we BR folks can be. Personally? I've never had any regard for the Ugly Stik. Just feels wrong in my hands.

I think I've got my parts list/schematic laying around somewhere. I'll try to remember to upload it this evening when I get off work.

I've seen this before, and honestly, while it kinda sucks for us (particularly the BR crowd), without it, everybody and their uncle would descend on it like vultures to fresh roadkill every single day, with the expected fallout. Many people around here literally fish to put dinner on the table, and that sort of motivation will deplete a public body of water in no time flat as C&R, creel limits and min/max sizes are almost never followed, it seems. I've just come to accept it as an area for parents to teach kids how to fish (note: not fish in any seriousness themselves) and for old farts to enjoy retirement without having to travel too far. Most of the ones I've seen also allow for handicapped fishing there too. As my dad said to me once after he asked if I had been keeping any bass to eat lately and I told him i'm 100% C&R (for a variety of reasons), "You are very lucky to be able to enjoy fishing as a sportsman and not have to fish to survive."

I once cast a spinnerbait on a baitcaster out with my right hand and was going to let it helicopter a little bit to running depth before beginning the retrieve. It just so happened that instead of my usual transition to left hand before splashdown for a long cast, I was trying to scratch a bug bite with my left hand and a fish struck moments after the lure hit the water. Felt like a boss when I set the hook one-handed, thumbing the reel on an open clutch. Although I'm sure anyone who's done any fair amount of flippin' and pitchin' has done more than their fair share of that too.

I'll be home in Virginia from Mississippi for a week this December. I'm looking particularly at December 10 for a target date, and I'm planning on commandeering my friend's boat (along with my friend) at Smith Mountain Lake for a day of fishing whatever. I've never fished smallmouth before (not intentionally, at least), and I haven't got the slightest clue where to start for stripers. Might be interested in pike/walleye/musky/whatever else worth a shot too if conditions allow for it, we don't have any of those where I'm living now. I'm anticipating that the conditions will either be rather pleasant for December, or blustery, cold, and debatably not worth going out. Anyone got some surefire tactics or at least general strategies to land some fish in both pleasant and cold conditions?

I was mostly kidding..... the shop I had in mind is back home.... 12 hours away. I have some basic car tools here in Mississippi but that's it, unfortunately.