nboucher

Well, I've been fishing since I was big enough to hold a rod, and I'm also an Audubon society member and, yes, even a tree hugger. These do not have to be contradictory; they all reflect a passion for the outdoors and a love of fish, birds, trees, and all of nature. Get anglers and tree huggers fighting, and the developers win. Then everybody who loves the outdoors loses.

Another vote for Husky Jerks. The 4-inch size in gold worked VERY slowly is my go-to bait just after ice out. I have caught fish well over 6 pounds in eastern Mass with it in very cold water.

Before mounting anything on a kayak, think about how you fish and where you're arms are during flipping, casting, etc. Make sure you choose a mounting location where the holder will not interfere with any of your fishing motions. Any decent brad-point bit should drill through fiberglass and other boat composites without a problem. The important thing, though, is to use stainless steel hardware to mount the rod holder or anything else on your kayak to prevent rusting. Have fun.

I've had a lot more luck with the husky jerk, maybe because I'm always tempted to work the X-rap too fast.

Ditto.

KVD and Rick Clunn have some interesting similarities that I think are key to their success and that take them one notch higher than just about everyone else. For the sake of argument, let's say there are a couple of dozen anglers who have as much knowledge and as good technique as KVD and Clunn, so we can take that out of the equation. Let's even say that there are a handful of anglers who have the mental toughness and confidence of these two. What distinguishes these two, I think, is clear-headed concentration and self-discipline. Fishing is more like poker than it is a lot of other sports. There is an element of luck, obviously, but like poker, fishing requires you to be constantly making what seem like small, relatively inconsequential judgments: Do I play this hand or fold? Do I cast there or three feet to the left? In both sports, you prevail more often if you make more of these small decisions correctly than your competitors. KVD & Clunn don't let emotion or sentiment affect their judgment. When we make these decisions, some kind of static often gets in the way for most of us normal people: These cards are kind of nice, and I've mucked every hand I've been dealt for the past half hour. Or: I really like this bait, and the fish were here going after it every day for the past week. I think KVD and Clunn have the remarkable mental ability to block out mental static quicker than everybody else and to make just slightly more correct small decisions over the course of a tournament than their competitors. In the end, fishing isn't me against the fish; it's me against myself.

I fish a pond that with a huge area of dense lily pads as well. Believe it or not, one of the biggest fish I've pulled out of there6lbs-pluscame on a weightless Senko that I very very slowly dragged across the top of the pads. If it fell into a small break, I'd let it fall. I get bit when the Senko is just coming off the pad. In the middle of a hot summer day the dragonflies really like to hover over these pads, and the bass come up and get them, which is why this technique works, I think. You could do the same thing with a frogI havebut I suspect the shape of the soft plastic is less important than its behavior. It's the slight disturbance in the pads, I think, that triggers a strike. Of course, jigs have also worked there for me, as have weighted lizards.

Now this is likely what will happen with my wife if I had to totally guess - we can do some swimming, she can read if she wants and lay out, but pick up a pole if she is interested - again, I will not pressure her, you cannot force someone to like something anyway :-/ Having said this, If she doesnt take much to the fishing component on the boat, she probably will not want to be out for more than 4-6 hours I am guessing....we will see. Regarding people asking me to fish for easier species...I do not frankly know all that many tactics for say bluegill or crappie in my area - besides a simple worm/hook/bobber from the docks type of fishing. She has actually done some bank fishing with me once and caught 4-5 bluegill off a worm and sinker (no bobber!) - I was impressed - her first time fishing and she did better bottome fishing! I think the hardest part for her regarding bass fishing will be casting.... I think this is really wise. No one knows your wife better than you, so I'm sure you know best what'll work. I think it's good to ask what you're after. Do you want someone to fish with, or do you want to spend some time with your wife? I've spent quality time on the water with my wife, but I fish while she suns, reads, naps, etc. It's a couple hours to get away from the chaos of the house and talk. Maybe it's not serious fishing time, but it's pretty special nonetheless.

Ted's reputation as an outdoorsman was well known in the '50s and '60s. Sears had a marketing arrangement with Ted and used the "Ted Williams" logo on a lot of Sears sporting goods, including fishing reels. I've had that Ted Wiliams reel since the late '50s/early '60s and it was my only reel for about 6-7 years until I saved up enough to get a Garcia Mitchell 408 spinning reel (which I also still have and fish...). Hang onto that reel. It looks like it's still in great shape. I've seen those Williams ads from the old Sears catalogs. I'll bet he turned a lot of boys onto fishing with those adswhen they weren't sneaking a peek at the bra ads.

Goose 52, what's the story behind that Ted Williams reel? I love it. Ted Williams is in both the baseball and sport fishing halls of fame. Check out It's Only Me: The Ted Williams We Hardly Knew. In it, John Underwood, a sports reporter and longtime Williams friend and fishing companion, tells a few great Williams fishing stories. Even better, the book comes with a CD of Williams telling Underwood a bunch stories about baseball, his experiences as a military pilot crash landing in Korea, and fishing. Williams could spin a yarn like few others, and because he knew Underwood so well he really opened up to him. Williams was always was blunt, direct, and profane in his storytelling. I've listened to that CD a bunch of times and always enjoy it. They say Ted Williams was the man John Wayne tried to be in his acting. As for fishing shows, I think the Bass Pros is the best of the bunch. IMO, most fishing shows suffer from too much host personality and not enough actual demonstration of techniques, tackle, etc. I also enjoyed ESPN's A Day on the Lake a lot, because it showed anglers trying to figure out a water body the angler never fished before. But that series didn't last long, it seems.

Kris Kristofferson seems to have first brought a lot of these guys to the attention of the public and recording studios.

Catt, you are one lucky man. That's a lot of great songwriting talent there. Biker, one of my coworkers said, "Isn't someone that your generation liked?" Oh, brother . . .

I haven't listed to John Prine in a long, long time, but "Hello in There" used to be one of my favorite tunes. Then I saw him on Austin City Limits a couple of years ago while he was touring again after a bout with neck cancer, and I was impressed. Yesterday I downloaded his 2005 comeback CD Fair and Square and fell in love with his work again. When I asked people about him at work today, I was shocked to learn no one had ever heard of him! Norman

I did hear back from Dave Philipp, one of the study's authors, and he has read this thread. He says he'd love to join the discussion and clarify the study. He's in the field for the next couple of days but says he will register for BR over the weekend and add some posts then. Should be a pretty interesting discussion.

Shaner, I think you hit the nail on the head when you said you took this class cuz you thought it would be easy. Easy is often boring. I made the same mistake during my first two years of college. Science courses were required, but thinking we liberal arts students were too stupid to handle real science, the school had science-for-poets courses in big lecture halls to allow us to fulfill our science requirements. After two of these, I decided to take ornithology and botany alongside students majoring in these areas. Sure it was more work, but it was both a lot more fun and lot more challenging, and I remember a lot of what I learned there, long after I've forgotten the content of those easy courses. My daughter, who's in high school, has the same problem. Some teachers, unfortunately, are boring and not very good teachers, and she's most disengaged with school when she's most bored. Ask around for who the best teachers are and pick teachers as much as courses. Look for teachers whose teaching style matches your learning style. Keep those grades up. You won't be sorry.

I don't know, Kent. They seemed pretty smart when we down there a couple of years ago on the BR trip!

As a nonscientist and an amateur angler, I'm going to stay mostly out of this one, but it's important to keep the facts of this study straight, at least as this nonspecialist understands them. I would. Or at least this: a 20-year controlled study would be widely viewed as an unusually comprehensive exercise in data gathering, I think. Not sure what you mean by personnel. Regulators? Managers? Scientists? I'm most interested in the latter and don't know enough about LMB research to characterize how this one study fits in. I have a feeling that these researchers, like most scientists, would shy away from a one-size-fits-all fisheries management approach. The conditions on the ground at each water body need to be taken into consideration, of course, but certainly one of the bedrocks of wildlife management policy since at least the 1930sat least as understood from this layman's erratic reading through the yearshas been to minimize the harvesting of breeding adults. I think these researchers are calling not so much for a universal closed spawning season as for the setting aside of spring spawning sanctuaries where appropriate, an approach that has been successful with a lot of other species. In general, the question "If the resource is declining, why are people catching so many bass?" is a bit of a red herring (pun intended). The only way you can answer the question is by looking at a body of water where the catch during spawning was at least partially restricted over the same time period. I remember a lot of years ago driving around a remote part of Cape Breton with a local writer and marveling at all the wildlife we were seeing. His response was you should have seen it 150 years ago. And he's right: the definition of what constitutes plentiful gets adjusted downward with each generation. If you read some of the 19th century nature writers, they describe overflights of passenger pigeons that would literally block out the sunlight for hours at a time. Now they're extinct. The point is not that the same thing is happening to LMBI'm catching them just fine, thank youbut that it's useful sometimes to question our assumptions. If any of you fisheries scientists out there can add links to summaries or full text of other reputable LMB studies into this discussion, that could be really helpful in judging this one. Meanwhile, I'm going to try to drop an e-mail to these researchers and invite them to join the discussion and clarify their position. Norman

The results of 20-year largemouth bass study done out of the Univ. of Illinois has just been released. You can read about them here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090414153532.htm Although there no real surprises, there are few notable findings and recommendations: 1. Vulnerability to being caught appears to be a genetic trait. This means that a body of water can become harder to fish over time not because the fish are getting smarter but because, unless catch and release is practiced, the LMB who are genetically predisposed to getting caught get selected out. In other words, catchability might be inherited and not learned. 2. Catch and release is somewhat irrelevant during spawning season. Researchers determined that male bass removed from a nest for more than few minutes likely destroys the nest as other fish quickly move in to feast on the eggs. 3. The researchers expressed concern over the explosion of bass tournaments held during the spawning season, when large numbers of males are removed from nests for long periods. "There should be no harvesting bass during the reproductive period," one of the researchers says. "That makes sense for all wildlife populations. You don't remove the adults during reproduction." He recommends creating spawning sanctuaries for at least a portion of most lakes, making fishing there off limits while the nests are active. That, he says, would "help protect the long-term future of the resource without completely restricting fishing."

Gives new meaning to catch and release . . .

You'll be fine. Just keep at it. Try different depths. It's not the cold; you just haven't found where they're hangin yet. When you do start catching, notice where you are, what the depth of water is (or how far from shore you are if you can't judge the depth), and how you were working the bait. It's all about learning what works on that day and where the fish are that day. They're deeper now than they will be in a few weeks around here. Remember, you can't work those baits too slowly this time of year. Patience is key, and stay ready to be surprised. Let us know when you hook your first of the year.

I don't remember the last time someone put me down for fishing, and I live in one of the most urbanized sections of the countrythe Northeastand work at an Ivy League school. Stereotyping has been around since humans first formed groups, and it's going to be around forever. It cuts both ways: we do it to the "elitists" and professors about whom we don't know squat, and they do it to anglers and hunters. This is not a good thing. I am as comfortable around professors as I am around outdoorsmen because I've always believed it's important to move in different worlds, to get to know people who are different from you and to try to understand how they got that way. Talk to someone about his (or her) passion, no matter what it is, and you get a lot closer to learning what makes that person tickand you might even learn something about yourself. People who surround themselves with people who are just like them are missing out on a lot.

Fishing in the rain can be fun and productive, but be careful when the wind is blowing the rain at you and the air temps are in the 40s & 50s. Hypothermia can hit quickly. I once hiked for a few hours with a guy I met on a trail in the White Mtns of NH, and while we were walking along in windy fog above treeline in temps around 50, he suddenly started shivering and in no time his body temp dropped and he almost passed out. I helped him to a sheltered spot, put some dry clothes on him, and boiled some instant soup on my backpacking stove to get him warm again. I was surprised how quickly it happened. Under the right conditionscool, windy, and wetthe same can happen on the water, so always go out prepared.

Solo. I like to concentrate and observe, not chat. Sometimes I even forget to eat lunch.

I'm about an hour south of Nashua and started catching at my local pond about a week or so ago. You can definitely catch quality bass in 40 degree water. I've caught some of my biggest bass in cold water. I caught a 3lb, 10oz LMB in 44 degree water on my first day out this year, and last year I caught one just shy of 7 pounds in April. A jig might work, but I think the fish are still too lethargic for a spinnerbait, and I find hard baits generally more effective than soft plastics in the early spring. Whatever you use in cold water, you need to work it very very slowly. The fish are basically moving in slow motion right now. I have my best luck in cold water with the Rapala Husky Jerk. I use the HJ10 or HJ12, but any size will do, and with so little vegetation around, you don't have to worry about the treble hooks hanging up so much. I've had my best luck with the gold HJ, but anything with a bit of flash should work. Cast it out and let it sit for a good minute then give it a couple of twitches and let it sit some more. Bass will often slowly drift to the bait when it's sitting suspended and hit it when you twitch it, exposing that flash. In the pond where I fish, they seem to be hanging out in about 6 to 8 feet of water right now. Hope this helps. Good luck & have fun.