Ktho

My boat is very dry I don't recall ever getting wet beyond a misting from crosswind. The Ranger i've been on can get wet at times but haven't experienced getting wet in it in freshwater. In the saltwater with a even a little swell the ranger gets pretty wet but it can smoothly crush through nasty chop going 50mph+

I have an 1860 Blazer Bay that I use in freshwater and I absolutely love it. The Ranger Bahia I've been on and some of the other saltwater bay boats I've seen are essentially CC bass boats with the way the livewells and rod storage are constructed. It's great being able to fly down the lake while it's capping. I'm not sure why others don't give it a try sometimes because these desert lakes out this way can get quite nasty when the wind kicks up.

I like trimming the front skirt strands on football jigs to make it like a finesse skirt when fishing clear water. I keep it bulky for dirty water. I don’t mess with the weed guards. For trailers I like beaver style or just less action trailers for football jigs and I like more active trailers like a paca craw or rage craw for pitching/casting jigs.

I like using the regular 3/0 gamakatsu ewg over the superline. Have never had them bend or break fishing 50# braid with a buttoned drag. I’ve heard people have problems with gama’s tho, like quite a few so obviously your mileage may very.

It’s a very easy fix so I’d just take care of it. Tips are put using a hot melt glue, real cheap at a mud hole or a place that sells rod building supplies. Just take a lighter to it to warm up the guide, it comes loose real easy and just pop it off. Some people heat up a glue stick and put some on the blank, others roll up a little and put it inside the guide, some do both. But after glueing it up just shove it on there and line it up and peel off the excess. The glue dries pretty darn fast but you can always reheat it if you need to realign it.

The woodies are considered better and demand outpaces supply so sometimes they go well above sticker.

I didn’t have any problem when I flew to Phoenix with gear. Brought a reel, bunch of lures and hooks and didn’t have any issues carrying on. Not sure how much relies on TSA and what you’re good with, but it went through the X-ray no problem.

I’ve always hooked crawdads in the little hard shell hood that’s over/above/behind their eyes. They’ll live forever hooked this way and when stitched you can get them walking right towards you in a natural way. Or if the cover is real light you can just let them walk around. I don’t use any weight. When bit I let them run with it a little bit 5-10seconsds and then whack em real good. 6lb-10lb line.

There’s several factors I think about whenever I’m choosing a lure and that’s depth of fish, type of cover, and activity level of the fish. Unless you’re able to be on the water a ton there’s always going to be a little trial and error on any given day to figure out what they’re into. With electronics you can take care of depth and cover easy enough.

Pitching to me it doesn’t matter, the reel is in free spool when the bait touches down or is just clicking over. There’s always gonna be the chance that the fish hits it instantly and there’s a little delay due to the inevitable slack in the line. Flipping the reel stays in gear and you have a fixed amount of line out for maximum control of the lure, if a fish hits you can swing right away and it’ll pick up any slack there may be.

I think I’m a little more enthusiastic about green pumpkin than others but it’s absolutely my top tier confidence color for fishing any kind of plastics when fishing water with any sort of clarity. Most of the time the lakes I’m on are 8ft+ visibility to downright gin clear.

Green/brown jig, green pumpkin plastic, white topwater. Don’t throw cranks much but when I do it’s either a chartreuse pattern or a shad pattern. I’m pretty much always fishing clear water reservoirs.

Looks like a rather small lake without a many big defining structure elements. Id go out find the grass and figured out what depth they’re liking. I’d favor the deeper grass closet to shallow water but in a small lake sometimes they don’t necessarily follow traditional locations since they don’t have as many choices to pick from.

It’s possible to have a failed spawn. My home lake had a really bad golden algae bloom and a die off happened at the time of spawn, the bass were struggling to live so didn’t end up spawning.

What hooks do you replace the stock ones with after they get beat up? My front hook became a double hook and the others have been bent and rebent a bunch. Hopefully my 110+1 can come close to 1/3 of what you’ve done! That’s incredible it’s lasted so long.

Caught my first smallmouth and striper out at Havasu and got into some largemouth as well! Night fishing with a jerkbait worked really well.

Let's do it, I'll probably be going back this weekend. With finally have warm stable weather and the full moon coming up it could be pretty killer all over this week.

Crimping is a form of connection. It's a little aluminum sleeve typically and you use a crimping tool to smoosh it shut. It's used to rig lures like butch brown rigging a hudd or thumper tail. You also see it a lot when rigging marlin lures, hoochies etc when targeting big game and heavy line where tying knots is really challenging. When done right it's as strong of a connection as you can possibly get.

Stuck a good one pitching, only fish I managed to land for the day.

Guys at Clear Lake smash fish on the drop shot even when water is 2ft vis. One of the lakes near me is basically always 1-3ft vis and drop shot does great as well. Only bait changes I'd make is using a little bit larger. 7" straight tail worm instead of 4" and 5", a 5" senko is becoming really popular as a drop shot bait in my friend circle as well. Drop shot does excel for me in 30ft+ water but jigs, neko, ned, etc. basically any normal bottom contact bait can be fished as deep as you want.

There’s a park lake I can fish from shore 15 minutes away but for boating it’s at least a 70-90 mile drive to launch the boat.

I'd start with the rof5 68 special and then go from there

I got some JDM skull jigheads earlier this year, haven't tried them but I love the look!

Primarily 3/8oz but sometimes 1/2oz on a 7'3" MH Xfast rod, 12# or 15# fluoro leader over braid, 7.5:1 reel.

I've never tried most of the vertical stuff like jigging spoons, flutter spoons, ice jigs, damiki rig etc. and spybaits I haven't tried, I think I've done most everything else.