OCdockskipper

The first time I ordered the 6" dead ringer, I was disappointed that the additional 2" was basically all tail. I had wanted a longer worm with the same small tail as the 4" model. Then I caught my PB on it and stopped worrying about it.

Roboworm Zoom Dead Ringer I am leaving TRD's & other Zman Ned products off this because I consider them to be a separate category..

Congratulations, I thought I recognized your picture from old BassMaster magazines...?

Correct, this is for the entire Fantasy Fishing field. When you are on the page to make your selections for a tournament, go to the heading that reads "leaderboards". There will be a list of the overall leaders for all of the tournaments combined (under "all entries"). If you then click on one of the event numbers, it will format a list of the highest point getters for that event. The winner for this event (Lake Fork) was "Munoz", who had not participated in the first 5 events and then miraculously posts a 1395 score for this event. There are 2 others with the same scenario in the top 10. I hate to sound paranoid, but something is off...

As J Bab posted, it depends on the state the tournament is in & if you are sight fishing at the time. For some states like Callifornia, any fish that comes on board without at least 1 hook in its mouth is deemed to be foul hooked & doesn't count (even if it initially was hooked legally and the foul hooking occurred during the fight). Watch the video of Steve Kennedy in the 2007 Clear Lake Elite tournament, on the final day he had to release 2 5 lb fish and an 8 plus caught on swimbaits because when they came aboard, they were hooked outside the mouth (he still won the tournament). BASS Elite series has a rule that if you are sight fishing, then foul hooked bass don't count. This rule does not apply to fish caught when the fish is not visible during the fishing process. This rule is an overlay of whatever state regulations apply.

For my Home lake: Prespawn - BPS 3" speed shad run through staging areas in 5- 7 feet of water. Kill it during the retrieve, a majority of strikes come then. Postspawn - Zman TRD cast to middle of boat docks that have pontoon boats moored on them (4-5 ft of water). Strikes will come on the fall or a few moments after it hits bottom. Summer - Under docks. Depending on the fish's mood, the weather and other conditions, skip Senko's, Sluggo's or Ned Rigs as far back as possible. Other patterns show up week to week, but these three are the ones that last at least a month and are reliable year after year. One fall, I had a pattern with jerkbaits over weedbeds that lasted 3 weeks. The weedbeds were never allowed to grow to the same size in the following years, so the pattern never established itself again.

FYI https://www.portablepress.com/blog/2014/04/chomping-vs-champing/

I use both discs & streaming for Netflix. You are correct about 1 & 3, but off a little on #2. Netflix does stream in HD (720p & 1080i) which is Blu-ray quality. I don't believe it streams in 1080p, however, 1080p is an upconverted resolution, so there isn't much loss between it & 1080i. However, if you have a 4K TV, there are Netflix streaming movies that are available in 4K (4 times the resolution of HD). To see 4K in a disc, the TV, Blu-ray player & disc must all be 4K. Where the discs do currently outperform streaming is in audio. Most streamed audio is PCM, some is Dolby Digital, which are inferior to DTS & Dolby Altmos available on most Blu-ray discs. It makes a difference if you have a full surround system. If you are using the TV speakers or a soundbar, you lose that difference in audio quality. FYI, I own a home theater company & have been in business since 1997...

When I first started using stickbaits, I ran into the same thing as you. To save some money, I purchased some BPS Stickos and Yum Dingers. I found those baits to be more durable, but that turned out to be a problem. When Wacky rigged, Senko's have a subtle action on the fall that the other brands seem not to have. I would say if you are Neko rigging the stickbait, brand may not be as important. However, if you are fishing them weightless, either T-rigged or wacky, then a Senko will outperform other brands.

After years of playing BASS Fantasy Fishing, I realized a couple of events ago that when you went to the leaderboard section, you could tap on an event number to see who was leading that particular event (gimme a break, I'm old!). Anyway, when I did that for this event, I noticed something odd. Three of the top 5 point getters so far in this event did not play any of the previous 5 events. They have all zeros for events 1 thru 5 and now, in the first event they are playing, they nailed nearly all of the day 1 picks. Without going down a conspiracy hole, I have a problem accepting this as being on the up & up. If someone is good enough to ace Fantasy Fishing, why would they not start picking teams until now? And 3 folks, all who have not played at all this year, make near perfect choices the 1st time they play? Something is fishy (pun intended). My guess is there may be a glitch in the Fantasy Fishing registration that allows a first time player (or newly registered player) to make their choices sometime after fishing has already begun instead of cutting them off when the event starts. That doesn't guarantee you a win, but it does let you pick folks like Chad Pipkens & Garrett Paquette (both of whom were 1% choices) when you see they have a good bag early on. It would make sense this would show up more in this event than others because in this event, BASSTrak is 100% accurate (due to the catch, weigh, release format). In the other events, Basstrak is a guess and can often be off either way by a few pounds. It may be my ego talking here, what with my choices getting pounded event after event, but I have a hard time believing folks are walking into their first event, and choosing 1%ers that just happen to have a big day 1.

I've learned to say out loud 'Beabass, beabass, beabass" about 30 times, followed by a "d**n" when Mr. Whiskers starts rolling over & over...

I would disagree, in that it is based on the area or lake that you fish. Usually, the more populated the surrounding areas are, the higher the likelihood of encountering rude folks on most bodies of water.

In addition to putting a larger prop on a Tiny Torpedo, how about going full Frankenstein and modifying the back of the Tiny Torpedo to handle a Whopper Plopper propeller? You'd be out 1 Whopper Plopper and there is a chance the thing might roll over during the retrieve, but it may be worth a shot. Sudden idea, how about removing the rear hook of a Tiny torpedo and tying a second Tiny Torpedo to that rear eyelet with 50 lb test. Two Tiny Torpedo's should kick up twice the water...

I see that happen all the time during the Spawn with the bass who aren't locked onto beds. A couple of times every day, I will spot a bass that is kind of mulling around & I inadvertently get closer to it than I prefer. More often than not, their reaction is to leisurely swim towards the boat, to check it out. A few flee in terror, but most, if there aren't any sudden movements, want to see what that big floating thing is.

It was similar to turning up the heat on a frog in a pot of water, you don't notice it until it is too late. WRB can attest to what Orange County & much of So Cal was like in the early 70's. Great place for suburban life, not rural but not city-fied. But decades of building without keeping enough spaces open changed it & its culture immensely.

I don't believe we were talking about what encourages or discourages peeing into lakes, rather the thread morphed into whether or not peeing caused a problem pollution-wise. One person peeing into Lake Michigan in & of itself does not create a problem as far as pollution is concerned. You in essence agreed because you wrote that it becomes a problem when it becomes acceptable and more people do it. The slippery slope argument is another discussion for another thread.

Regarding whether urinating into the lake is pollution, it depends on the number of urinators and the size of the lake. 1 person peeing into lake Michigan doesn't matter, ten thousand people peeing into a 1 acre farm pond does. This goes for animal output as well. We see this in Southern California, where we have too many people and not enough water. For example, there have been times where Lake Perris, a 2200 acre lake in Riverside California, has been plagued by bacteria issues caused by human contact & excretions. They have had to close the beaches there many times, once for a 100 day stretch. The Water district will not use water from Perris for drinking, they instead pull that from other nearby resevoirs that don't allow human contact.

This topic has been brought up a couple of times in the past. It seems this only happens when someone doesn't know the other person, so a good solution is to introduce yourself. Don't have to be angry, don't have to insult or threaten, just go over to them & with a smile on your face, introduce yourself. Bring up the subject of crowding people, not to lecture them but to find out if they want to keep fishing where you both are or if they were planning on moving on. Most people are a bit sheepish at this point, when they do something rude to someone else and the reaction is not one of confrontation, but conversation. The best thing is those folks will never do that to you again, for they now "know" you. For the small number who want to get into an argument about it, I keep my responses simple. Usually "Really?" conveys alot, it implies that you know they are aware of what they are trying to get away with. Asking why they would want to get so close or cut you off (once they decided to make it confrontational) puts them on the defensive. The person asking the questions has the control, no matter what is said, keep steering it back to asking them to explain their actions and why it is okay. Always keep calm, smile and avoid trading insults. I have had people cut me off or encroach in the past. I have never had the same person do it twice, with the exception of this stupid old man who uses his kayak for exercise. He always paddles around the perimeter of the lake, usually between me & where I am casting and says "you don't own the water" when I ask him why he just did that (again). So now it is a game, when I see him coming, I start closing in the distance between me & the shoreline, just to force him to go around the outside of me. He got stubborn once & tried to squeeze between an ever shortening gap and ran into a dock. I literally started laughing at him as he grumbled about stupid fishermen.

I marshaled once & was a Bass Fest judge once and all of the pro's I was with pee'd in the water. Ish Monroe made the error of peeing into the wind and ended up wetting the deck. Gerald Swindle had a couple of spectator boats following him so he waited until he was in a narrow stretch of a creek and all the boats were behind him, so they couldn't tell what he was doing. At the marshals meeting, this came up and a story was relayed about Ike at one of the Classics. Ike's marshal had to pee, but there were over a dozen spectator boats all around them. Ike told him to hold on for a few minutes as he finished fishing a spot. Ike then fired up the big motor and flew like a bat out of hell for 10 minutes to the next spot. As he came off plane, Ike turned to his marshal & said "you have about 30 seconds until they get here". For me personally, it is the large necked Gatorade bottle. If you are wearing loose enough shorts, it will even slide right up them so no one can see anything.

Please ignore TnRiver46. I have been authorized by B.A.S.S. to distribute tickets to the 2020 Classic at Lake Guntersville with the weigh in's at Birmingham. Tickets for the morning takeoff are $10 per day for standing room only, $150 if you want to sit on one of the boats & chat with the anglers prior to takeoff. There is one special ticket for $375 that allows you to fire the starting pistol to send all the boats off at once. For the weigh-in, general admission is $25, but there are some special seats. For $125, you can drive one angler into the arena for the weigh-in. For $239, you can carry one of the anglers fish to the scales. And the special for this year, for only $1400, you can replace Trip Weldon and weigh in all the fish for one of the 3 days. The only potential downside of any of these special tickets is that you must wear a shirt that says "DICKS" across the front & back, which may lead to some confusion as to the type of person you are or whether or not you enjoy San Francisco. Please contact Glenn here at Bass Resource to secure these tickets before they are sold out. I believe Glenn is including a Circuit City gift card with every order for a limited time.

My sister lives in Southern Georgia, right on the Florida border and has a couple of small lakes on her property. Each has a small gator that rules the roost, but are pretty people shy. First time this dumb Californian went to visit her there, she told me what was the best way to navigate around the lakes and to never take shortcuts across the feeder creeks. So of course, after fishing one side of the larger lake, I cut across the feeder creek to get to the other side. As I am going along, all of a sudden one of my legs is knee deep in mud. It was stuck and not moving. As I wiggled my leg out of my boot to get it free, I remembered seeing one of the aforementioned gators earlier in the day. I would have been in a bad position to fight him off had he decided to come over & investigate what was struggling in the mud. With added urgency, i got my leg free, recovered my boot out of the mudhole and started listening to what my sister advised...

As a lifetime member of BASS, I am partial to taking their side on decisions they make about the organization & tournaments. That said, I really believed they blew it with this decision. I have been a huge proponent of having the 50th Classic back at Lake Mead. Returning full circle to the lake that was the first home to the Classic, to a lake the Elite series has never (& probably will never) fish and a lake that is unique compared to most Classic designations should have reason enough to choose Mead & Las Vegas as the site. But there is another reason, one of symbolism, that should have driven this decision towards Mead instead of any other locale. The 1971 Classic was a way for a new organization to burst on the public radar, to introduce its competitors to those who may be interested in fishing, but not followers of tournament fishing. With the changes to the Elite series, the 2020 Classic will also feature many names that the casual observer doesn't yet know. The 2020 Classic could have been special if it was treated as a rebirth of both the organization and the tournament. Focus would have been on the first Classic, the current Classic and what has changed in that time. It would have given this new set of anglers a chance to help the organization start anew. Instead, by choosing Gunterville & Birmingham, a great bass lake full of folks who are knowledgeable about the sport, the focus for the casual observers will be less on the lake and more on why all the famous names they know aren't fishing it this year. If the bite is tough and the numbers are low, many will point and say that the new anglers can't yet fish under Classic pressure like the old anglers could. I know BASS was founded in Alabama and there isn't near the support out West that there is in the South. But this is the 50th Classic, not the 50th year of BASS. This tournament should cause reminiscing about the 1st Classic, not the one held in 2014. I know it is too late, there is no way that BASS would ever change the location after announcing it. It is just a shame that they wiffed on this pitch.

I pulled up the website for Bailey lake and it is listed as having catfish, perch & stocked trout in it, so the first question is if there is a population of largemouth bass even in the lake. You can't catch bass if they aren't there. Considering the time of year, your location & the clarity of the water, you could spend an hour or two just walking around the lake slowly to see if there are any bass on beds. Don't worry about catching them, you are just trying to get a feel for if a population exists. If they do, the most basic advice I can give for an 8 acre lake is to go small. A 3" soft swimbait, a small curly tail grub, a small Pop-R, whatever direction you go, remember that the forage in that lake is not large. Lastly, slow down. Unlike a large lake where the forage can swim miles away, pond fish know that what they are eating can't get too far away from them. A lot of small water fish are unwilling to chase or chase far, they know the forage has to come back to them eventually.

There was a spill at the Whiskey plant upstream and now all of the fish are drunk.

The dye boxes available were nice, but they didn't work for my situation so I made my own. It is a fairly small container, so it doesn't take up much room. The front two slots are for Scent appliers (Fish Sticks), I like to keep them upright so that if they get too warm, they don't melt all over the place. The middle spot is for a paint container while the back two spots are for dye. I made the holes for the dye a little too large, so I wrapped some duct tape arounds them so they fit snug. I made a small channel on one side for dye markers. I keep a couple of paper towels inside to clean baits after dyeing and am able to do all of the dyeing in the container to avoid spills on the carpet.