galyonj

For real. That is never a sound you want to hear a piece of machinery make.

If it were me, I'd rearrange like so: 6'6" MH/F casting - Topwater - Crankbaits - Jerkbaits 7'0" MH/F casting - Jigs - Swimbaits - Texas Rigged plastics 6'9" - 7'0" M/F spinning new rod - All unweighted or lightly-weighted light-wire single hook soft plastics

Thank you, sir. Soon as I've got some time to breathe in my work schedule, she's gonna get some TLC. I've got a whole pile of maintenance parts to put on that I just haven't had time to do more with than stack in my office in the shipping boxes.

Daggum right. You can't build a car with popups anymore. Funny story about how I came to buy this car: A buddy of mine that I came up in the car scene with had a S13 240SX sitting around that belonged to his mom before she passed, and he wanted rid of it, but he also wanted it to go to someone that was gonna be respectful of the car. I've owned three 240SXs, and had experience doing some pretty involved modifications to them. I was one of the early people that figured out that the Z32 300ZX brakes and hubs could easily swap on for a very good budget braking upgrade, for example. So I wanted to get this one as a project car and swap in an LS with all the trimmings to turn it into the track hooligan I wanted. One day we were in group chat and he asked me why I don't just buy a Corvette and save myself some effort if I was gonna try and reverse-engineer a Corvette on a Nissan chassis. The rest is history. He eventually found the right buyer for his S13 and we were all happy to see it go to a good home. Driving this car home from Asheville where I bought it was suuuuuper sketchy, though. Torrential downpour on 10 year old tires. By the time I got to my driveway, I was absolutely sure the traction control worked.

They came out when I was in high school, and I've been in love with the body lines ever since the first time I saw one. Knowing the newer models are faster and a little better equipped (I like to joke that GM spent the entire R&D budget on the drivetrain, then looked between couch cushions for the rest of the car), I still like the C5 better. Plus pop-up headlights are rad.

All of the pounds.

My entire adult life, the one constant hobby I've had has been cars. I've not yet done a ton to the Corvette I have now beyond maintenance (although I've got some small stuff done) because it's my daily driver and I couldn't afford to have it out of commission for very long, but I expect that's gonna start changing in the nearish future now that I'm 100% working from home. Most of my high speed driving is done on road courses like Road Atlanta or VIR, or tearing up mountain roads around here. I don't do much in the way of drag racing. I really miss lifting weights. I started when I first got sick in an effort to stave off the atrophy that comes with extensive nerve damage, and the strength I gained from it is all that's kept me out of a wheelchair. A barbell's the best therapist I've ever had. Haven't been to the gym since COVID, but I'll be able to start back probably next week now that I've been vaccinated. I'm awaiting the day with a mixture of excitement and dread, because I know the DOMS is gonna be absolutely brutal.

I've been doing this for a while with hard plastic lures -- even jerkbaits and hard topwaters. Never lost a fish. I feel like it's a more efficient use of my time on the water, because my ADHD kicks into overdrive with hard plastics, and I do a lot of lure switching. Snaps mean I spend more time putting lures in front of the fish. However, I only use snaps on treble-hook lures. They might do just fine, but I'm not gonna use a snap with finesse soft plastics (I like how they fall just fine tied directly), and I'm 100% not gonna use a snap on a lure with a heavier hook that requires a more aggressive hookset.

I like my Lew's reels. I wish they'd etch or mold the numbers into the brake dial on the LFS reels instead of screen printing them. All the numbers are wore off mine because of the way I'm constantly rubbing on the dial when I palm the reel. My MB took a little doing to get it dialed in -- almost certainly user error -- but once I got the brakes and tension set where I like, I've not really had to touch it since. Noisy gearing on all of them now that they've got a few fish on them, though. I'm used to it now, and I've never felt a catch or a rough spot when I'm turning the handle, so I just don't worry about it. I do have an American Hero casting reel that's got a weird issue. Every so often, on a hard cast, the clutch cam will trip the thumb bar back up into battery, causing an awful stripping/chattering noise as everything beats against itself. Feels and sounds like you'd imagine it does when a car's thrown into park while it's still moving at a pretty decent clip. That's the only reel I don't trust anymore, and it lives in the back of the closet now.

You could maybe do it with a mortar tube and a sabot.

De nada. I hope it helps!

Christmas before last we went to Oregon to visit the woman's family, and we went with her sister and nephews to the Evergreen Museum. I got to be up close and personal with so many of the fighters, bombers, and helicopters I grew up reading about and building models of, but one of the most exciting was the A-10.

Nice. Mine desperately needs to have the mechanism cleaned and lubed.

Same as everybody else, I reckon. The spinning rig I have is a 6'9" ML/F with a 2500 series reel, so I put it together for the purpose of throwing light stuff with thin-wire hooks. 18 months ago, all the spinning combos I had were for the girlfriend, and I thought finesse fishing was stupid and boring. It occurred to me that getting skunked when I know there are fish under me is orders of magnitude more boring and frustrating than fishing a ned rig or a trick worm or whatever. I generally have stuff like ned rigs, light shakyheads, weightless and lightly-weighted wacky rigs, or unweighted plastics tied onto my spinning rod. I'm as comfortable and accurate throwing panfish lures with it as I am throwing lighter bass lures. It's just an incredibly flexible setup for my needs, and it's just about the first rod I pull out of the rack when I'm getting ready to go. My baitcasting rigs get everything else. There's plenty to go around.

I haven't been out there in a good while, but one of the ponds I used to fish had a resident beaver that got real mad at anybody using the dock. I never saw him, but I'd hear him tailslapping to tell me how big and scary he was.

This isn't terribly strange or unusual, but it's what I got. Last year, fishing on the morning of what was gonna turn out to be a brutally humid July day, I briefly made a friend: This duck got up on the platform I was fishing from and hung out with me for I guess the better part of a half hour before it realized that, no, I really don't have any food for it.

You and me both. My problem is that I don't have enough confidence in my decisions to plan what I'm gonna take, then stick with that decision once I'm at the water. I think @TnRiver46 might've got a little hernia when he grabbed my backpack helping me get my stuff out of his boat.

Ran outside to take the bins to the street for trash day and saw the sticky yellow mess that's become of my car now that we're firmly in the grip of pollen season. So when I came back inside I found a picture of the last time I really cleaned her up to remind myself how good she can look. And, since I'm procrastinating, I thought I'd show y'all, too.

6th Sense Provoke 106 has excellent hardware out of the box Rapala Ripstop has a neat spoiler Special note: The 4-6' suspending H2O Xpress jerkbaits will flat-out catch you some fish, too. I catch just as many on them as I do on the nicer ones I've bought (and lost, or broken). I caught this year's PB on a sexy shad H2O Xpress jerkbait.

Yeah. Might help, anyway. You maybe don't need to go super overboard with the exercise, but I feel like it helps me a) not let my mind wander too much while I'm fishing, and b) not act the fool at every piece of junk that the lure touches. You still wanna fish, and you still wanna work the lure the way you're gonna be working the lure, but really let yourself feel what's going on at the other end as much as you can during the retrieve, instead of just waiting to feel a fish. To paraphrase @BassWhole!'s comment above, the next time you take a lure out for a nice drag, and it feels like it's hung on something or it feels a little funny, reel up some slack and gently raise your rod tip a little bit. If the feeling goes away or you can tell that you're bumping across a log or whatever, you go back to what you were doing and work it back to you. If you feel weight, or the line changes direction, or you can't feel anything at all anymore, it's time to commit to that hookset.

I've been lucky enough to see Waits live twice. 1a and 1b for my favorite concerts I've ever seen. Can't say enough about it. This is what I'm listening to while I work today. Love me some slow metal.

That's gonna happen, yeah. I probably should have expanded on the concept rather than just posting what I did without qualifying the answer. Yes, and... Watching the line can tell you a whole bunch, but my experience is that fishing a jig-type presentation requires understanding how that presentation should and should not feel when it's moving along on or near the bottom where I'm throwing it. I don't have electronics, so I kinda like having a few casts to give myself a chance to feel around with that presentation and acquaint myself with where I'm fishing and how it feels to fish that lure on the bottom where I'm at. So my personal rule for fishing these presentations is very simple: If it doesn't feel like I think it ought to, I'm setting the hook.

I don't have a whole bunch of experience with different rod makes. For some reason, when I got back into fishing, I got in with Lew's, and when I got my first TP-1 Black, I just didn't have a whole lot of reason to keep looking very hard. I've had two -- a 7'2" MH/F casting that I broke in a stupid accident, and a 6'9" ML/F spinning that I find in my hand way more than I ever thought I would. They did me a huge solid and, due to supply issues, replaced the casting rod under warranty with a similar rod from their Custom Series line, and I like it okay, but every time I use it I wish I had the TP-1 I broke instead. I'm hemming and hawing about getting another to replace my Falcon Bucoo in my every-day lineup. Nothing against the Falcon, but the way I like to fish has changed, and I keep wishing I had a rod with a faster tip.

Always.