Bankc

I'm at work, so I've got time. Though, I over-simplified it. There's the angle of the boat's hull in the water that changes with speed to consider. Plus the direction of the transducer's mount might affect its flow through the water and generate bubbles and mess with the readings. And there are probably a hundred other variables I'm not mentally capable of considering. Add all of that with the fact that I'm terrible at math these days (I was pretty good 20 years ago, but math is "use it or lose it", and I sure haven't used it). So I'm not prepared to put any money on my conclusion. I also know that when mounting the transducer in the standard direction that you can lose the ability to pick up sonar at speeds above around 10 mph if you don't have it angled correctly. Supposedly, you're supposed to angle it with about 3-5° of tilt so the back hangs lower than the front, and that should allow most transducer to work at higher speeds. That's something I forgot about when doing my original post, and I don't remember exactly why that is. But it could also explain this guy's results. Perhaps someone else knows more about that.

I've got tons of holes in my kayak. Be sure to seal it up with something like Marine Goop, so water doesn't seep in, if you do that. You can always reverse a hole in those plastic boats with a bit of extra plastic and a plastic welding iron (or low wattage soldering iron). Just be sure to use the same plastic, typically HDPE in these cases. Though, unless you're mounting a really heavy accessory, I'd consider looking at pop rivets or well nuts. That way you don't have to go all of the way through and risk a water leak.

I use mine all of the time. But I fish out of a kayak without spot lock. For bass fishing, the way most people do it from a power boat, it's probably not that useful, but still a good idea to have for emergencies. I could see it being better for something like the crappie fishing I used to do with my grandfather, where we'd be anchored sometimes 6-10 hours on a day on maybe 1-3 spots. That would really tax your trolling motor battery, and not really provide any benefit over a drop anchor. But I don't see most bass anglers spending a whole lot of time in one spot, so it's probably rare to be worth the time to mess with it, as it is a hassle to deal with that rope. And a spot lock or power pole is so much easier and quicker.

I've been thinking about this. If the transducer being installed backwards allows it to bend under the force of the water when traveling at speed to angle better towards the rear, and this accounts for the better image, then I could understand how he might be getting better results. And I could see this being the case, as most transducers have the joint at the front to prevent the flexing at speed. That being said, while you would get a picture, you wouldn't get an accurate one. Your depth would be off, as it would show deeper water than what you're actually in. And while you might get more detail, that detail would be skewed and unreliable. Your transducer is now running at an angle. Then again, if the crystals are indeed in the front part of the transducer, and that's the source of the better readings, would you be able to go fast enough for this to have an effect, as the transducer isn't but a couple of inches long? The speed of sound in freshwater is around 3,315mph. So a sonar ping travels at around 4,861 feet per second, which means it only takes 0.016 seconds to scan the bottom in 40 feet of water. At a speed of 40mph, or 58.7 ft/s, you travel 0.938 feet in 0.016 seconds, or 11.26 inches. That is longer than the transducer. So it seems at first that it could have an effect. However, you have to take into account that the sonar ping acts as a cone, and not a straight line. And at a 455kHz frequency, you're typically talking about something around a 16° cone. In 40 feet of water, the cone size by the time the signal bounces back up to you is going to be around 22.9 feet wide. Well take half that, because the front half of that cone doesn't matter since we're traveling forward, so we've still got 11.5 feet of cone to play with. And that more than encompasses the 11.26 inches of the distance you passed at 40 mph. So, having done the rough math (which may be wrong), I'm inclined to believe that if there are any noticeable effects, they would be due to the first condition, that the transducer is being bent backwards by the force of the water, and that explains why he's getting better readings. But, as noted, these readings will be unreliable, just like any readings when your transducer isn't level.

It's a personal preference thing, and everyone's personal preferences will be different. Me, I like slower rods when you go heavier. I find it easier to cast lighter lures, as I don't often fish much on the heavy end of my heavy rods. And when I do, I'm usually lob casting anyway. I also like a soft tip. It helps to get frogs out there, which is something I use my heavy rod for often. A fast action rod should be fine. But I'd be scared to go extra fast. That's just me though.

I might downsize in colder water, but that's about it. And even that isn't 100%.

It's hard to say. It depends on how much oil leaked into how much water. In low enough concentrations, the fish might survive. But it's not healthy for any living creature, outside of a few microorganisms.

I get what you're saying. But the law is anything but black and white. That's why we have judges and juries. And there are a TON of laws on books that no one follows because everyone knows they make no sense. In Virginia it's illegal to hunt nuisance animals on Sundays, except racoons. So be sure to pick up your mouse traps Saturday night. In Minnetonka, you can't drive a vehicle with dirty tires. Horoscopes, palm reading, and fortune telling are illegal in Yamhill Oregon. In Oklahoma, eavesdropping is illegal. So wear earplugs in restaurants. In North Dakota, killing a pigeon is illegal without permission. In Billings Montana a performer may not leave the stage during a performance. So don't expect the singer to walk into the crowd. In Massachusetts it's illegal to sing the National Anthem off key or alter it in any way (it's a good thing Woodstock was in NY). In Maine, you can't dance in a bar that sells alcohol without a permit. You can't buy or sell a vehicle in Iowa on Sundays. You can't eat fried chicken with a fork in Georgia. Big Napkin strikes again! My point being, the laws are there for a reason, and sometimes that reason isn't a good one. And in most cases, the people charged with upholding these laws know that and use their power to the betterment of society versus blindly upholding arbitrary laws just because that's what was written. There's a difference between technically illegal, practically illegal and morally wrong. And the three don't always go hand in hand in hand.

You'll rarely regret getting too big of a trolling motor. Though, for a 10 foot boat, 30lbs will work well enough. A bigger motor will work a little better, but whether the slight performance advantage is worth the extra cost is up to you. I wouldn't go with anything that runs on 24v or 36v. That would be far beyond overkill. I'd get one with a continuously variable speed as well. They not only give you more control, but they tend to save battery life at slower speeds. Other features like spot lock, remote controls, and other stuff would be really nice to have, but you'll pay significantly for those upgrades. So it may not be worth it to you. I'm also going to recommend a lithium battery. Those lead acid batteries are very heavy, and don't last as long. Usually about 3-5 years versus 7-10 years. Also, you're not supposed to drain lead batteries below 50%, so you can get away with a smaller lithium battery. A 50 Ah lithium battery will have the same amount of usable energy as a 100 Ah lead acid or AGM battery. If you look around, you can find some cheap ones from China that often tend to work pretty well. I've got a 50 Ah Weize brand lithium battery that wasn't too expensive. Chins is also a good brand. But do your research, as there are many brands to avoid. There are more premium brands like Battle Born and Dakota, but you'll pay significantly more for them, and you're mostly paying for a warranty and customer support, as the technology will be about the same. So it's up to you if the peace of mind of a warranty (that the company will actually honor) and being able to contact the company is worth the cost. But especially on a lighter boat where you'll probably be removing the battery to charge it, 60lbs, vs. 15lbs is a HUGE difference and well worth the cost.

I vacuum seal every meat before freezing it. Two reasons. One is the whole freezer burn and freshness thing. But the second and more important reason (for me) is that they can thaw out a lot quicker. Just makes sure that the pieces of meat don't overlap each other to increase their surface area. If you have a sous vide machine that can run without heat or a water circulator, you can usually thaw out your meat in less than an hour. Sometimes, though not usually with fish, I'll sous vide cook the frozen meat without thawing it.

My primary lake is about 100 ft deep. You won't find any fish at those depths. The water it too stained for light to get that far down. Usually, 30ish feet is as deep I find them. In the 60+ zones, you don't hardly find anything alive, so it's not worth your time to even look. In all honesty, I don't find finesse fishing for suspended bass to be very productive in deep water. Not without live bait, anyway. But sometimes, especially in the deep winter, it's your only choice. What success I have had has come from finding a bunch of fish on my depth finder, noting how far they are off the bottom, and fishing at or just above that depth. So I might see a school in 35 FOW suspending about 5-7 feet off the bottom, and I'll tie on a drop shot with a 7 foot leader between the hook and weight and just drop it over the side and let it sit. Or maybe I'll cast it out and extremely slowly hop it back or just drift along with it. I'll typically use something like a 3/8 oz. weight, but it depends on the wind and current. I just use whatever is the lightest weight that I can keep control of.

I do a variety of things. Sometimes I'll cut the hook off and leave them rigged up and store them that way. It can rust the hook, but I've found that so long as you don't use the cheap Eagle Claw hooks, they tend to last well enough. You still might get some rust, so I keep them separated from my other hooks. I'll also shorted my soft plastics to get more life out of them, as I wear out some spots, I'll just move further down the bait to get my hooks into fresh plastic. I don't worry about the colors bleeding together. But I'll usually keep the white and lighter colored plastics separate from the reds and darker plastics. And I'll keep the ones that are too far gone for remelting later. You can make some fun, custom colors by remelting various colors together.

68-58 is about right for me. Once it hits the mid to lower 50's, the bite becomes very unpredictable. There might be a few good days here and there, and some really good, but the good days are fewer and further between. By the time the water hits 50, the bass pretty much lock down. You can still catch them, but it's usually a lot of work for very few bites.

I'm against it for tournaments, as I think it's starting to cross the line where the advantage over the fish makes it "unfair". But I think it's obvious that as long as there is money to be made by allowing FFS in the pro fishing circuits, they will allow it to continue. Those short-term endorsement dollars are worth way more to them than the long-term consequences the rest of us will have to face. And as long as the big tournaments allow it, the people who govern the lakes and rivers will allow it because they don't want to miss out on those tournament dollars. So regardless of what you think should or shouldn't happen, we all know how this story ends up. People follow the money until the problem either becomes so big that it hurts the money, or people get used to the consequences and accept them as the new normal. We tend not to do the "right thing" until there's money in it. So what happens now? Our great grandkids might grow up watching fishing tournaments where they release a single bass into the lake and whoever catches it wins. Or maybe the fish adapt and learn to thrive under these new conditions, and just won't bite anything when they hear a sonar ping. Sonar could become a disadvantage. Nature is resilient like that. Or maybe global warming gets them long before FFS does, and this whole argument is moot. Or maybe a nuclear war wipes out the human race in a single afternoon and the fish evolve to gain superpowers and super intelligence due to radioactive fallout we left behind. Who knows?

That's what I was thinking! Rig it up and see what it catches! Something in that lake eats bats, I bet. But yeah, if you ever get bit, get your rabies shots. There's no cure for rabies once you've shown symptoms. And it's 100% fatal. Once the virus touches your brain, you're dead. It's only a matter of time. So that's one disease not to mess around with. Fortunately, it travels slowly and along your nervous system, so you do have time to seek medical attention and get treatment after getting bit. And the vaccine works, so it's pretty easy to treat so long as you catch it in time. Also, bats are of great interest to scientists because their immune systems make them pretty much immune to all viruses. Which is why they carry and spread some of the nastiest diseases out there like Covid, Sars, Mers, Ebola, and a whole bunch more. Probably a bunch we don't even know about yet. And since they don't die from these diseases like just about every other animal might, they live to spread and keep on spreading those diseases. But if scientists can ever figure out how they do that and find a way to share that trait with humans, we might have a method to effectively eradicate virtually all viral diseases. So for now, they're one of the most dangerous animals to the human race. But in the future, they could be one of the most important to us, and potentially liberate us from disease.

Best shallow water bass fishing? That's gotta be South Florida, right? South Florida is to shallow water bass fishing what Hershey, Pennsylvania is to milk chocolate and Hollywood, California is to movies.

In Oklahoma, our lakes aren't even native "species". All of our lakes are man-made. They destroyed whatever native habitat existed by making the lakes. And our rivers tend to run dry or nearly dry for parts of the year, again probably due to all of the dams making all of the lakes. So at best, they're only part time habitats for fish. So does it matter what gets stocked in such an artificial, natural environment? I mean, you don't want to get too crazy with it, as what lives in these waters will make their way both upstream and downstream. But I'm not worried about invasive species in our lakes, because on some level, they're all invasive species.

I think fall fishing is best for kayaks and canoes. At least for me. Summer, winter, and spring are all better for big boats. In a kayak or canoe, you can't easily move several miles down a lake to hit up multiple areas looking for a pattern. You often have to make a decision and stick with it. In a big boat with a big motor, you can often explore all of the main lake points, for example, traveling 20-30 miles or so. But in a kayak or canoe, you're often stuck with one, maybe two points, and knowing that if you strike out on one and decide to try the other, you're going to spend half an hour or more not fishing to make that travel to see if that second option is any different. But in the fall, you can pick a section of lake and try out everything in that section. Try some deep water. Try some shallow water. Try some stuff in between. Since the bass can be anywhere, you're not wasting time making long runs looking for similar conditions in a different spot in the lake. You're able to quickly and easily try different conditions in a similar spot. Plus, you're looking for baitfish, which ball up and are easy to find on sonar, or sometimes just by looking at surface. They may not stay in one place long, but they're still easy to find when you lose them. And often times, I'll just follow that ball of baitfish around, losing it and finding it again and again.

The carb on my lawnmower had gotten so bad, that I was rebuilding it every year. I was getting tired of doing that, so I bought a replacement carb off Amazon for like $10-20, I don't remember. It went in okay, but it's got a slightly different design, and the engine wanted to run at probably 4x's the speed it originally was set to! I had to do some serious tweaking to get it down to 1.5x. I've got every adjustment as far as it will go and the metal throttle rod is bent like crazy now. It burns fuel quicker and is louder than I'd like, but it doesn't bog down in heavy wet grass anymore, so I'll live with the 1.5x speed. Especially since this motor is found in other devices where it runs at the higher RPM. I just need to make sure my blade stays balanced, and I'll be fine (I hope). There are some more things I could do to bring it down further, but I'm over working on that thing. The next time it needs the carburetor rebuilt, I'm just buying a new mower. It's a good 15+ years old anyway.

Oh, I'm an 11, for sure! The lakes I fish are a -8, though. Just terrible. So that averages out to a 3. And that feels like safe number for me.

Remember, there are a bunch of different types of "lithium" batteries. And they're very, VERY different from one another. EV's are almost always lithium ion. Same with cell phones. These are the ones that are known to explode, catch fire, and be almost impossible to put out when they do. They also have a very high energy density (lots of charge per gram), and a long lifespan, so that's why they're used. Typically, so long as they have a good BMS (battery management system) that doesn't allow them to overheat, they're fairly safe. Though, flood a battery with salt water so the internal cells short before the connection to the BMS, and there's not much you can do. Trolling motor and starter batteries are typically lithium iron phosphate or LiFePo4. They're much safer and much less likely to overheat, explode, or catch fire. They're also usually about the same size as lead acid or AGM, but weigh significantly less. So they have a higher energy density than lead acid or AGM, but nowhere near the energy density of a lithium ion. They also tend to last a long time. So they're a good choice where safety is a top concern and you can live with the larger and heavier size. I.e. not good for cell phones and EV's, but good for replacing older styles of batteries. Then there's lithium polymer batteries. These have enormous energy densities! They're also very, very dangerous and much more likely to catch fire and explode. But they're much lighter than even lithium ion. They also don't have very long lifespans. You'll find these most often in things like drones, where weight is crucial and safety isn't (since no one is riding in the drone, it won't will anyone if it explodes). They typically come in soft pouches to allow them to expand if they overheat so they don't explode. But if they expand, they're useless and dangerous, so throw them away. And there's lithium iron disulfide batteries. These are typically sold as replacements for normal alkaline batteries, like AA, AAA, 9v, etc. They're not rechargeable, but they tend to last longer than alkaline batteries, especially in storage, and they almost never leak, unlike alkaline batteries. So while they're more expensive, they're great for devices that you don't use that often, but don't remember to remove the batteries when you store them. They're also better in high drain devices. They're safer and less likely to explode and catch fire than even the alkaline batteries that we all grew up with and never feared. And there are even more types of "lithium" batteries out there, but those the main ones you'll run into. And my point is, "lithium" isn't a category of battery, as one type of "lithium" battery has almost nothing to do with any other type. It's just an element on the periodic table and one of the most common elements at that.

They've made some HUGE changes to engines in the last 20 years. I wouldn't worry about the number of cylinders these days. Instead, focus on the towing specs. The transmission, frame, differential, and all of that stuff will have a lot to say about how much a vehicle can tow. Just look at the new Chevy Silverado 1500. That 2.7 liter 4-cylinder engine puts out 420 lb/ft of torque and can pull 9,500 lbs!

I've rebuilt a few carburetors in my time. They're usually not too bad, so long as you can work on it all in one sitting. If you have to stop and come back to it later, it gets dicey. It's not hard work, but it does require focus.

The sound of B1-B bombers flying a few hundred feet overhead. Lots of things are loud. But few things are THAT loud! Fishing next to an Air Force Base has a few downsides. Also, the sound of fighter jet breaking the sound barrier overhead. It doesn't happen here, but it happened frequently when fishing at Proctor Lake in Texas in the 90's. A plane would silently fly past, and you knew what was about to happen, and you still needed a change of pants.

The wind direction can mean something, but it doesn't have to. It largely depends on where you live. Here in Oklahoma and Texas, I've always heard "South and west they bite the best, north and east they bite the least". And it's often true. And the reason is because of where we sit, geographically. Our weather patterns are usually caused by the merger of cold, dry, low pressure, arctic winds from Canada being funneled down by the Rocky Mountains and warm, wet, high pressure, tropical winds from the Carribean being funneled up by the Gulf of Mexico. So usually, if the winds are coming out of the north, east, or northeast, it's because a cold front just passed through. And if the winds are coming out of the south, west, or southwest, then a warm front just passed through. But not always. And the type of front doesn't always play a part in the bite. So it's more of a general idea, not a hard and fast rule. I typically use wind direction to adjust my expectations and plan locations, but I don't rely on it to decide if I'm going fishing or not.