Koz

I've got Period 3 streaming from their website on one of my monitors right now. BTW, having multiple monitors comes in handy for stuff like this. Earlier in the day I went to the MLF website and there was no "Watch" tab on the tournament page so I guess they've been working out the kinks today. It's nice to see some big fish being landed in this format. What's up with Andy Montgomery being shut out through three periods? There are also a lot of guys with under 3 pounds. How you you do that in Florida? BTW, how many advance to the next round? The website still has the 2018 rules.

Obviously the different strains of bass make a difference as well as the forage and water conditions. And then there's where the bass falls in the food chain in that body of water. For example, when a larger alligator moves in to one of our averaged size residential lagoons it can have a noticeable negative impact on the bass fishing in that lagoon. Suddenly, even that big bass is no longer the top predator. But if that same alligator moves on to one of our smaller lakes in those same communities there is no noticeable impact. In our smaller lagoons the largest bass are usually 5-6 pounds, but in the small lake in that same community the largest bass are 10-12 pounds. While there may be other factors, the community does actively stock the larger lagoons and the small lake the biggest bass are only in the biggest body of water.

When I was 19 I was home from college for a few weeks before heading off to play in a Jr. A summer hockey league before school started up again. Just after midnight the phone started ringing and ringing and ringing and no one picked it up. I sat up to grab my bearings and get the phone and in my head I heard my brother's voice saying, "I'm sorry Shawn, I'm sorry." When I picked up the phone it was my father telling me to call our pastor and get to the hospital because my brother had been in a car accident and was in a coma.That was 35 years ago and it still gives me goose bumps. FWIW, to head off any follow up questions my brother did survive but it's not something I like to go into detail about or talk about.

Prior to the mid to late 1990's until they built an exit off of I-95 the only way to get to Hilton Head Island was via back roads. The last town on the mainland was Bluffton and there was one stretch that the speed limit went 55-45-35-15 and when it hit 15 it was right in front of the police station. Tourists would get to their hotels absolutely livid because they got a $300 speeding ticket on the way to their overpriced hotel rooms. As for drivers, I've either lived in or visited most states and I even lived in Maine for a few years. I thought traffic was great. The had big, wide bike lanes along Route 1 and I'd have no problems riding from Portland up to Freeport or Portland down to Kennebunkport. I did live in New Hampshire for a while and commuted to Boston every day. In my opinion, Massachusetts drivers were the worst. I used to call them Massholes.

This is just crazy.

I'm having a major case of deja vu right now.

Same here. I do admit there are times when it would be a benefit to be able to cast left handed, say bank fishing and needing to cast to my right under a tree or something similar. But I'd rather fish than practice casting. With the baitcaster I cast and switch hands as well and I don't have to think about it. In fact, I don't realize I'm doing it - it's just automatic.

Not everyone brings 10 rods when they fish. I usually just bring one MH baitcaster rod and fish multiple baits. I don't like fluoro or mono on a baitcaster so 20 or 30 pound braid works well for me. It's a lot easier to do that than re-spool every time I change baits

I received one of those $10 Dick's rewards cash in the mail the other day and went to DSG and picked up a KVD Chartreuse Black Black squarebill today and decided to fish for a little while. Side note - I realized I had zero chartreuse black black baits among my gear which is weird because it's one of THE most popular color combos. Anyway, on the 6th or 7th cast the bait snags. I was cranking really, really slow and there was no bump and then snag, it just snagged about 8 feet out in 4 feet of water. I moved up and down the bank, vibrated the line, and nothing worked. When those things don't work I can usually put on a glove, wrap the line around it and pull and it will come free. Not this time. There was a loud pop and the 30 pound braid broke. Dang. Well, at least the lure was free. And I still don't have a chartreuse black black crankbait in my gear.

It was a slow day fishing so I let my then pre-teen son toss the iBobber out to see if he could see any fish out there with the downward looking sonar. When a fish swims under the icon has a red tag for a fish under 18" and a green tag for fish over 18". He casts the iBobber out and calls out, "Red. Red. Red. Green. Red. Green" as fish are swimming by. I'm casting in that location, try different baits, and not a bite as he continues to call out the fish. I'm getting frustrated because with a school of fish out there I'm not getting even one bite. So I take the phone from him to see what he's looking at on the app screen. It was in demo mode. DOH!

+1 on that. In the residential communities I fish there are often small lagoons or narrow part of lagoons where I can cast from the bank I'm standing to the one across the water. And many times that grass is mowed and maintained, so that technique works with other single hook baits like jigs and spinnerbaits as well.

We have them in some of the lagoons I fish and they actually provide cover for the bass since they float on the surface. I've had good luck tossing chatterbaits around them. The only thing you have to watch out for is that there's usually a rope attached to it so that it can be pulled in and serviced. There have been a few times that I've snagged a lure on that rope line.

I say to each his own, as long as you're enjoying it. Last year I bought a Lew's Mach II baitcaster combo for around $170 and for me that's an expensive fishing purchase. Then again, when my growing son needs a new baseball bat those cost $300 - $400 each and I'm sure many think that's a steep price.

That's what she said! ? I really never gave that much thought. After much trial and error, I know what works and what doesn't in the places that I fisg. My best guess is that it would have to do with a combination of factors including forage, water clarity, weeds and structure (fish sight lines) in that location, and more.

Phil says there's a 50% chance of an early spring:

So I went out for a few hours this morning and fished at two normally productive lagoons. Air temperature was around 60 and the surface water temperature was 66 degrees. Skies were cloudy all morning, but no rain. The only thing I managed to catch was a 6" crappie whose mouth was smaller than the small crankbait I was fishing. I was fishing in the Sun City Hilton Head community and recently the grounds crew chopped all of the shoreline aquatic vegetation as well as a lot of the vegetation on the bank at the water's edge. In other words, they destroyed some prime bass habitat. I took the time to use both the sonar and the mapping features of my iBobber. The lagoons that I fished were only 4' and 7 feet deep respectively and only a few small fish passed through the sonar cone. But mostly nothing showed up on the sonar at all. I had set the iBobber up on my heavy rod so I could bomb casts pretty far off shore. I took the time to map the bottom of some normally productive spots and it revealed zero vegetation, rocks, or other structure. No humps or dips. Just flat, open space. Granted, I did not map the entire lagoon, just spots that were productive in the past. I'll probably try again tomorrow, but this time I'll start with the iBobber. I'll also look for some past productive lagoons where they haven't destroyed all of the shoreline vegetation. While I'm not happy they did that, since these are stormwater ponds it is required that they remove excessive nuisance vegetation. According to the solunar calendars I looked at, today was supposed to be good fishing between 8:30 am and 10:30 am. Tomorrow is supposed to be better and Monday even better than that. First I need to find the fish. There's a spot in one larger lagoon where the bass spawn every year and I checked that out but there was no activity nor did I see anything using my polarized glasses. They may have even moved through the storwater system to connecting lagoons.

My son bought a LH baitcasting reel and I tried it out a few weeks ago and it just didn't feel right - kind of like when I bought my first LH baitcaster after all of those years fishing with RH spinning. The one thing that caught me off guard when I first bought my RH baitcaster was when I caught my first 4-5 pounder on that setup. Since my right hand is my dominant hand I felt weak horsing in the fish with my left hand holding the rod.

Like you I used a spinning setup exclusively for years and never thought twice about getting a baitcaster. Then one day I was in Dick's Sporting Goods and I had $10 in Dick's cash to spend plus Dick's also had a promotion they were running for a few hours that day that gave me $20 off if I spent $50 or more. And on top of that they had some combos on sale so there was no better time to buy a new rod and reel. I ended up buying a Lew's American Hero baitcaster combo that cost me around $25 after the sales and incentives. That was one of the best fishing purchases I ever made because it got me into using baitcasters and I've never looked back. I still throw spinning gear now and then, but I prefer the baitcaster and I've purchased a few more since then. I like everything about them although initially I had a hard time getting the cadence down with a right hand retrieve. But I overcame that in a day or two. I bird's nest a little now and then but that's usually because I forgot to reset the tension after changing baits or because I get a little too whippy with my casts. Is it necessary? Not for the average bank angler. But I can tell you that for me it seems easier to fish than a spinning reel especially working different presentations with the right hand retrieve (although it feel feel awkward at first). I guess the best way to describe it is that it "feels right", especially when your fishing a frog or a walking bait. Maybe that's just me. Go ahead and give it a try. You won't be disappointed.

I had a Pflueger Trion three years or so ago and I really liked it. When I upgraded to a Pflueger President I handed over the Trion to my son and he liked it for a year or so until he ran it over with his bike. For fishing the Trion is good. Not so much as an accidental bike ramp.

"Honey, does this shade of red make my bass look too big?"

We literally have thousands of lagoons in my area and some of the residential complexes have active fisheries. We're lucky because 3-6 pound bass are fairly common and there are plenty of 7-10 pounders caught in these lagoons every year. The larger bodies of water that support bass or fairly heavily pressured so I don't feel the need to fish there when I have plenty of good, low pressure fishing all around me. I've made the trek to Lake Murray a few times and that was OK and I plan to get up to Lake Marion and Lake Moultrie sometime this year. If I don't have any luck on my lagoons this weekend maybe I'll give Sergeant Jasper Park another try. This fishing there is OK, but the Rangers have told me it's been years since anyone landed any big bass in there. Thanks for the tip. Maybe I'll scout some locations in nearby Georgia as well.

Are you fishing in larger bodies of water? I fish in lagoons, some pretty big and some small and the maximum depth in most of these is around 8-10 feet. The bass seem to be sitting on the bottom in small hollows and I have not come across a school of bass this winter. This weekend I'm going to bring along my iBobber to use for fish location.

What I have found here in the SC Lowcountry is that temperature is relative when it comes to bass patterns. In other words, for a bass up north a 38 degree water temperature is cold while in my part of the south a 58 degree water temperature is cold. My water temps are in the 50's now and neither bass nor bait fish are in the shallows along the shoreline and it's that way around here every single year. If I take a bass from my area and put it in a NY state lake in the winter I'm not sure it would survive. Likewise, a NY bass might not survive the steamy waters we have in the summer. I'm a believe that bass and their patterns are relative to their local climate.

That's an interesting array of opinions from everyone, thanks. Personally, I never put stock in them. But both the weather and the fishing have been lousy this winter it was nice to see a warm weekend coming up that just so happens to coincide with the tables. Cabin fever has set in this winter and I'm itching for some decent fishing.

Both the Bassmaster and Farmer's Almanac solunar calendars show that this weekend will be the best fishing weekend in January. How much stock do you put in that? Frankly, bank fishing has been so poor this weekend I may consult a Ouija board as well. The weather here has been in the low 50's lately, but beginning Wednesday temps climb into the 60's with upper 60's on Friday and Saturday but with partly to mostly cloudy conditions so I'm not counting for the water in our lagoons to warm up that much. That's the thing here - while we do have moderate weather in the winter it's usually cloudy and damp all winter long with little sun. Kind of like living in England. We're still a month away from sunny days. But by the end of February the fishing really starts to ramp up. I can't wait.