fishwizzard

The main issue I have with floro is that when I have to pull out a snagged lure, it seems to break far up the line, rather than at the knot. I have noticed this across a few different brands and weights. While it is not a huge deal, I would rather just leave a lure in the water then a lure and 15 yards of line hanging off of it. I am going to give premium monos a try next season. I have been using Shooter Defier Armilo a good bit this year and have really liked it, even for jigs and other bottom contact lures.

Maybe I am the odd man out, but I have one of those and don't feel like it loads well with anything under 1/4oz or even 5/16oz. OP, if you are not adverse to going custom, I have a pair of short spinning rods from a builder called SmallieStix. They are both on MHX blanks and came in around $150-170. The builder is a great guy and was really helpful in guiding me through picking components. I too have a fondness for short rods, although the longer I fish the more I find myself moving to longer 6'6" to 7' rods. Major Craft has a huge range of rods with many of them being on the shorter side.

Post edited to preserve your secret. And thanks, I was fishing them on my Ned rod, with like an 8lb floro leader.

If you can PM me the secret to getting them to run consistently, I will go back and delete my posts.

I have a few of the Zman micro and mini chatters and it is about 50/50 on them running well. Oddly, I have noticed that they EDIT give me a bad rash in the jock-area EDIT, far more than they do bass.

That is good to hear, I have a SJR 6400 IMX headed my way. I threw a low bid at an auction and forgot about it until I got the "you won" email.

See, I hate having stuff banging around in my pockets, so I prefer a small pack. I sent some plastics through the wash once and my shorts were a little tie-dyed for a while.

This is more an more how I am doing things, but using a fly fishing slingbag so I can carry some little first aid/comfort items along, but I never take more than a single 3600 box and a few loose bit and pieces. But once I got into jigs and chatterbaits, the single 3600 box got too heavy, so now I am on the hunt for a few little boxes or heavy duty baggies to pare down even more.

Since you can weld you have some good options if you have a way to get your hands on some cheap unistrut you could easily make up a rack that would be able either work with both you yak and your bikes, maybe leaving a bar "loose" so it would only be a matter of a few bolts to pop it in and out. I was working up some plans for my old truck along a simpler path, but the truck died before I built it. I was able to tack a few sticks onto a larger order and iirc I was only going to be like $100-200 into materials, but I was going to use bolts and brackets for most of it, it would be far cheaper if you did most of it with welds.

I have found my Ned Rig sweet spot in a ML/F rod rated 1/8-3/8oz. It will load and cast a 3/16oz Ned very well and I have a near perfect hookset record with an open hook Ned and a decent-to-good one with a weedless one. I have used the zman heads and have only broken them when pulling out a snag by holding the spool and walking backwards, I don't feel like the rod has enough power to break one with any reasonable hookset. I tried the Ned on a L/F rod but even with open hooks I was missing a lot of hooksets.

I use a gel glue as well, anything less thick gets all over my fingers.

I tend to only go out with maybe two-three rods in my car and only bring a single one with me at any time, so I am usually limited to three or four presentations per trip. Even when I am in my yak I go so minimal on tackle I end up with maybe 8-16 options per trip.

I have a little spool of super fine lead wire ment for fly tying. I will sometimes wrap it around the shank of the hook before I put the fluke on. You can tune the plastic to have whatever drop weight you want and the lead wire helps keep the head of the fluke in place.

I wacky rig any worm once the nose is too ripped to t-rig it. So far nothing has worked as well as a senko, but 6' robos on a light wacky jig/flickshake are showing some promise.

He does, but only with #1 hooks. I like Gophers mainly for the smaller hooks. It looks like the new mold can take smaller ones, but I have yet to try these;

I just got an order in from them last month. On an order I made in March! They were never fast to ship, but that is a bit absurd. In the meantime I got some from a seller on ebay called "Yank Tackle". They are from the new mold with wire keepers, but the seller poured them on #4 light wire hooks for me.

I feel like a lot of the missed bites I get on the Ned are just very small panfish grabbing it and running a short distance. I have actually managed to land a few panfish that were not hooked, they just had a death-grip on the plastic. I use megastrike most of the time I fish the Ned, so that might be helping, but it is amazing to me how long a fish will hold the lure when not hooked. I have even landed a single super dink (maybe 6-7") smallie whose teeth were stuck to the lure like velcro, but was not hooked.

I am also an bank fisherman who has been tearing them up on a drop shot the last month or so. However, in the last week or so the basss have been showing a strong preference for jerks/cranks. I have some smaller jerks that work well on my drop shot rod and will work say a 100' run of bank with the DS and, if nothing is biting, tie the other on and refish the same area. Last couple trips, one or the other has always worked.

Got another 3 pounder from the same little pond I have been focusing on. The current hot presentation is cranks/jerks ripped through submerged vegetation. Got this on one a Pointer 75 and by the time I got her to the bank there was only a single treble point hanging on. I really want to switch them out for single hooks but the prospect of endless fussing and testing to make sure it still suspends is not super appealing. I really wish manufacturers would publish hook weights.

I have some of those Decoy HD Hooks as well, but I have yet to use them. I have a vague plan involving bubba-shoting some larger Z-man lures but haven't gotten to it yet. I did a destructive test on one with some pliers and they are quite strong for how thin gauge the are.

I have maybe three buzzbaits, all different brands, and none of them run straight and true. Is there a trick to tuning them, other then just fussing with the wire a bit every cast?

My first reel was an Okuma Avenger 3000 and, other than weight, I have had no real complaints with it. It does not feel as smooth as a Stradic FJ or Ci4+, but it is like 1/5th of the price of those reels. I also had an Avenger 500 and that little thing was a tank. I used and abused it for about two years and jsut gave it to my nephew who is dragging in 3-5lb catfish with it.

My youngest nephew has gotten bitten hard by the bass bug so last time he was up here I sent him home with a banker's box full of plastics with instructions to sort it all out and give what he didn't want to his friends. By Thanksgiving I am going to have a box of hardbaits for them as well.

I also have the Genesis version of that rod and throw Hudd 68 Specials (~2oz) on it and the rod handles it just fine.

That is likely, but I did end up with a pile of chatterbaits that were too heavy for my rod. I mean, I did the sensible thing and bought a heavier rod to throw them on, but still.