galyonj

Everybody except this guy.

I tend to agree. I always just feel...funny when I've not choked way up on a spinning rod. Doesn't feel like I have any control if I'm not in front of the reel.

Ain't nothin' mundane about new adventures.

Thank you! She needs a little love, but I've always kind of had a soft spot for the design language from this era of boatmaking.

Thanks bro! I don't think I've piloted a boat since I was a teenager, so I'm hoping my relearning experience goes fairly smoothly. I broke the transducer off the trolling motor last night, and in so doing I broke the mounting ears that were molded into the transducer body. So I gotta find my zip ties and rig up a fix. I did run over a stick last night and, as I did so, said "This'n's for Rusty!" Thankya sir! I like old stuff. Means somebody else took the depreciation hit for me.

It seems that several aspects of how we handle and interact with gear can be a bit counterintuitive. Chief among them is, as you touched on, how to hold a rod and reel. But where one grips the rod, or whether they palm the reel when they do, can have a massive impact on the balance, overall feel, and amount of control one experiences when using the reel. @bgaviator's observations about side-to-side balance holding a casting combo illustrate the issue quite well, especially if he was holding it the way that one would normally hold a spincast combo -- behind the reel. Casting combos are -- from a physics standpoint -- held with the off-hand ring or pinky finger forward of and in contact with the trigger on the rod, and the index finger wrapped around the front of the reel under the line guide, with the palm against the side of the reel. You don't have to use a death grip, but you want to nestle in tightly against the body of the reel for stability and control. I generally hold spinning combos in front of the reel, with the back of my pinky or ring finger nestled against the reel foot, with my off-hand index finger pointed along the rod toward the tip. Both of these methods at least give us a starting point, while also giving us very fine control of the rod tip. This is because our hand placement on the rod determines the placement of the hand as a fulcrum, which determines how much leverage we can efficiently exert against a weight on the other end of the lever -- the rod.

Only if he doesn't suck, though.

On the one hand (hah), that really sucks. On the other, I 100% believe that. I killed one Provoke when I got it hung in a brushpile I misjudged and, when I finally got it loose, it and the branch it was embedded in came rocketing back at me and hit the dock at my feet. The bill on the lure broke, but all the hooks on it lived on in an H2O Xpress jerkbait.

Really, it was only a matter of time. When I got her talked into going with @TnRiver46 and me, we hadn't been underway but a few minutes before she hollered at me that "we need a boat." So it's really his fault. ? So we talked about it for a while, and she started looking in earnest about a week before she sent me a link on Friday and said I needed to call about this one, cause we were gonna go look at it. We found 1984 Ebbtide Dyna-Track 150 with an 89 Evinrude XP100, being sold by a guy that'd recently retired and kept himself busy buying, fixing up, and selling boats and RVs and stuff like that. Came with two older Humminbird fish finders (a 4" PiranhaMax and a 100 series), a 12V Minn-Kota trolling motor, and he threw in a pair of pedestal seats. For $3500, I feel like we did okay. The hull and transom are solid, and the keel doesn't even look too bad considering she's a 37 year old from East Tennessee with a fiberglass hull. I didn't really want a fiberglass hull, but for the price I couldn't make myself walk away. Took her out for an hour or so this evening to shake everything down and see what happened. So far so good. I need to get a charger for the trolling motor battery, fix a couple of the storage hatch locks, little stuff like that. Extended the trailer wiring a little bit to work better with the hitch on her Edge, which I'm pleased to report did a very good job towing.

I don't think I ever truly appreciated a nice, smooth drag until I got into fishing with little hooks and presentations that, consequently, required me to develop a sort of touch to successfully land the fish.

That's pretty close to what I was about to type out. Ton of great options for this kind of combo at OP's price point.

I just wanna say that is a beautiful speck.

If you situate your arbor knot in the middle, you never have to worry about finding an answer for this question.

I hadn't thought about them in a long, long time. When I was in school we used Jaz drives, which was like playing Russian roulette with your project files.

Did you back it up to a different cloud?

It didn't occur to me that people from out west talk funny until I met She Who Must Be Obeyed. They use "barbecue" the same way we use "Coke" here in the south, but the word carries even less meaning. Out there, they "have a barbecue" at which food is cooked on a "barbecue." And not a single piece of meat's been on that grill for more'n a few minutes.

Honestly, I think we worry a whole lot more about water visibility than we really need to.

Absolutely. I've not used the Jr, but the full-size drives white bass nuts and I think they'd draw in big slabs.

A small jighead and a bite-size piece of soft plastic'll catch dang near anything that swims. I love it.

100% this as far as I can tell. Pick a jighead you like and run with it. My only real criteria is a small hook that's not pot-metal garbage, so Z-Man's automatically out.

Astrology and stuff. When the moon's in asparagus, the fish don't bite. I thought everybody knew that. Also it's entirely possible I'm just terrible at fishing, because the vast majority of the fishing I do could probably be charitably described as "tough." Rare is the day that I have multiple hookups from the bank at the spots I can get to easily. I'd love to say something like "but it makes it that much sweeter when it happens," but, really, it just sucks to have to grind every time I go.

All modern rods are hollow, aren't they?