galyonj

Honestly, the next fishing-related stuff I buy will probably be bibs and some kind of rain jacket, but I may well throw one or two pairs of those long pants in the cart before I check out. I've come to accept that I'll always look at least a little stupid, so if it keeps me from getting cancer while at the same time keeping me from being miserable and sweating as much as I would otherwise, I can live with looking a little more stupid.

My favorite Oakleys were the old Half Jackets that I could swap lenses out in -- which was handy, because I'd use them for everything, and the lenses would get scratched up pretty bad. Loved those things. They fit my massive dome like a glove. Oakley's hinge pins are absolute garbage, though.

This is what I use. I like them okay, and they're pretty tough. Lens quality/clarity is on par with Oakley (which I used for years, but had to make myself stop because it hurts a lot to keep losing $100+ pairs of sunglasses). I have two pairs: One pair of the smoke grey polarized lenses, and a pair of the amber polarized lenses. I've learned that I hate amber lenses for daylight hours (regardless of cloud cover or anything else), but they're pretty cash for driving through clouds of mosquitos and gnats at night. At least they keep the bugs out of my eyes and I can still see the channel markers.

I got curious and had to go look it up. Turns out that S. vitreus (walleye) and S. lucioperca (zander) are more closely related than I/we had given them credit for. So that's neat.

Nosir, not me. I can cast a senko over them mountains.

If it's over 3, I'm diving in after it. Under, and I'll try to tease it out like these others people said.

I forget about C&C since I don't work out that way anymore. Nice people.

I agree. Big game's pretty good line that's caught a whole mess of fish for a bunch of people, but the real beauty of it for you, OP, is that it's cheap. Fluoro's just like any other line -- there are good and bad brands -- but it really hurts to ruin $20 worth of line when you blow it up. Learn on cheap line. Then just keep using cheap line, because Big Game or Yo-Zuri Hybrid will do just fine even after you've learned to set your brakes and use your thumb.

Lot of places around here don't even stock 'em. If I ain't looking for green pumpkin, I'm SOL at brick and mortar stores here.

I'll take your share, bro. Pink gets bit if there are smallmouth around, and there are a lot of smallmouth hiding here.

Oh, she thinks it's funny. She read it over my shoulder one day and was like "And don't you forget it!"

They don't weigh anything, dude. They're elaztech, of course, but they also have almost nothing in the way of salt. I think they just overpowered that tiny jighead I was using. I love that the whole worm floats, but they're a royal pain to get to the fish. Yessss. Though I don't fish many squarebills anymore. I'd say my list now looks more like this: Plastic worms Jigs Lipless cranks Spooks Jerkbaits Ned rigs

I just bought some pink trick worms so I can have some in that color that'll cast better for me than those Z-Man worms I was somersaulting through the air last time we went with you. Also: Hi, I'm John, and I'm addicted to buying fishing tackle. It's been...about 10 hours since I last bought some more junk. However, with no small amount of soul-searching, and the love and support of friends and family, I feel like I'm doing a lot better. When I started fishing again, I told myself I wanted to target bass primarily, and I didn't want to deal with live bait at all. But I didn't really know what I was doing, and I didn't really have any confidence in any artificial lures, and I didn't really have a sense of how I liked to fish. So I bought gobs of stuff. Just...so many lures and hooks and weights and colors. You get the idea. Then I went fishing, and didn't catch anything, and so I bought more stuff that was slightly different because surely it's the tool and not the artisan, right? Here's the problem, @bgaviator, and I bet it's one you and a lot of other people can identify with: I spent so much time changing lures and buying new stuff in an effort to find something that would get bit and I could be confident throwing that I never really gave myself an opportunity to use any lure long enough to learn how to really fish it and become confident with it. It didn't help that, until very recently, I spent a lot of time fishing really heavily pressured spots on the bank, and even on a good day there weren't a lot of bites to be had. Then I got really lucky, and @TnRiver46 messaged me on here one day, and I kinda feel like we've got to be homeboys, for which I'm grateful. But aside from getting to add a hilarious friend, I've learned a lot from just watching the decisions he makes when we fish together. While I'm staring into this cavernous tackle bag wondering what might possibly get bit, he's busy catching fish on one of a handful of lures. And if he's fishing a curlytail worm on a ballhead jig, just throw behind the boat, because nothing close to him is gonna pay any attention to you. So how do we get to that point with landfill-drifts of fishing junk in our houses? We have to artificially limit our choices. Last Sunday, She Who Must Be Obeyed and I went out on our little boat hoping to miss the rain. Unfortunately, because the act of both launching and recovering the boat looks like two monkeys trying to **** a football, we forgot our tackle bag. All we had in the boat with us was what was on the rods that got loaded onto the deck before we left the house. We were only out for about an hour or so before the 10000% humidity and the complete absence of a breeze drove us back in, but in that time I only fished one lure: A black trickworm on a 1/16oz shakyhead. I only caught two fish, and they weren't anything to write home about in and of themselves, but the experience had value because I feel like I have so much deeper an understanding of how that presentation works now than I did before. Tackle Warehouse cannot put an order of confidence in a box and ship it to your house. You have to build it. And the only way to build it is by forcing yourself to pick a horse and ride it.

Okay I'm gonna try this but I'll warn you that I've just barely begun scratching the surface of reading topo maps and trying to tie that to bass behavior, so...you know, YMMV. If your bass are already postspawn and they're chasing baitfish, I just about bet that you'll find some on steep points and dropoffs close to the creek channels. I don't care if there are docks there or not, but that'd be a bonus because every fish loves a shadow to hide in.

I like JJ's, but can't say one way or the other whether it got me more bites. Never used any of the colors. When I had some, I'd just draw it up in a syringe and then dose entire bags of soft plastics with it. I opened a bag of black trick worms the other day that I dosed over a year ago, and they still stank. So I figure at least I got my money's worth. Caught fish on a tough day with them yesterday. I will agree that contrast is important, though. The vast majority of the time, I fish very dark colors like black, pb&j, or junebug, or I'll use something that's got a lot of pop to it like white, chartreuse, or bubblegum. However, almost none of the water I fish has more than a foot visibility at any given time. So YMMV as far as that goes. I have a lot to say on the subject of this thread, but this is long enough already.

It's taken a lot of hard work and really smelly days to reach this level of performance. It ain't for everybody, I'll tell you that. The Lady dumping a bluegill in the tackle bag was pretty clutch, to be honest. I don't even need to use scents now, because everything in the bag smells like fish slime.

Fishing for zander looks like it'd be pretty rad. I've been watching the Zander Pro videos that KanalGratis.se have been releasing on YouTube. They're a lot like walleye here, near as I can tell.

Fishing in clean clothes is way overrated for me. Especially because I seem to be a magnet for just... every body fluid that a fish can expel. Sometimes all at once.

JJ's Magic. Scent additive for artificial lures. That's a whole other philosophical argument in fishing. Some people believe scents work; others not so much.

Handy things, those shorts (shants?). I used to have a pair and somehow knelt on the slider for the zipper bang-on centered at my left kneecap. The pain was blinding, but it was worth it to go from office mode to party mode that quickly.

Love that color.

Tonight was...an adventure. It had started cooling off fairly well, so we decided to run up the river a little ways and fish the brushpiles on the channel-side of one of the islands there. Missed a biggun on a spook right off the bat, and otherwise they really weren't buying what we were selling. We did get into a little school of rock bass, and that was a lot of fun. And I got the picture below on the way back to the ramp. Broke a chunk off the skeg on the big motor on the ramp. She didn't trim the motor up to run it onto the trailer, and I should have checked with her before she did it. Even then it probably would've been fine, but nobody thought (or mentioned) trimming up before we pulled it out, either. Whatever. Prop looks okay, though, and as it wasn't running when it hit hard enough to break, the odds are pretty good the gearcase is still in pretty good shape.

Well, he was real ambitious.