AlabamaSpothunter

This is a man who was convicted of violent rape and assault and served 2+ years in prison. Biting a dude's ear off was child's play. This is a man who has the faces of Mao and Che tattoo'd on his body, yet he's beloved by Americans 🤔 🤣 If this wasn't an exhibition, I'd love to see Jake Paul knock Tyson out. Zero % chance either fighter gets knocked out, or even punished imho. It will be like the Roy Jones Jr/Tyson exhibition.

@TnRiver46 Certified TN River monster LM there 💪

Some folks like myself are wired hyper sensitive and trigger happy, having a little duller sensation and significantly slower action inherently imparts some delay into the equation, thereby allowing fish to eat the bait better before the angler both detects the bite, and then sets the hook. If you have a natural delay built into your game, than I don't see why you wouldn't just go with a parabolic graphite action. In some situations and for some anglers, too much sensitivity can actually negatively impact hookup and landing percentages. All that said, were kind of splitting hairs here. Individual angler preference is many times based more on confidence rather than theoretical advantages of a particular piece of equipment or bait. If you buy a glass rod and have success with it, most likely you're going to stay a glass rod man.

Imho it's not the noisy vs. subtle aspect as much as it's the reactionary vs. realism aspect. I feel like big fish outside of really deep water situations have far too good of eyesight and experience to be easily fooled on slow moving bottom contact presentations during daylight. On the other hand, I catch the majority of my 7lb+ fish at night using slow moving bottom contact presentations. I think those same fish are way more easily tricked into biting a reactionary moving bait during daylight in my experience. Force them into a position where the bait surprises them, and their predatory instincts take the wheel. I.E. speed cranking a crankbait into the bottom or cover. They might be following that bait from splashdown until the boat/bank and never commit, but once that bait slams into a rock or branch, boom she eats. Fishing big glides will teach you quickly how many big fish will follow a bait, and as you evolve you learn how to trick some of those big girls into committing by forcing her hand through speeding that bait up or spinning it right back around into her face. You learn they'll never commit based on realism alone, it takes a triggering mechanism to get a commitment. Sorry kind of off topic but @king fisher touched on something I think quite often about. 4/5 of my biggest fish the last two years have been off moving baits.

I've personally never seen a correlation between cloud conditions and Bass feeding activity. I had some of my best days when it's sunny, and also when it's cloudy. The only conclusion I can make is go fishing when you can, cloudy or sunny......you never know when you're going to catch your white whale.

A guy named Austin Neary has a youtube channel called Frostin Austin. He's a big bait specialist, and just did 3-4 different videos on Fork doing exactly what you're looking for. He's not a local so his approach would be similar to one that you'd take. If it were me, I study those videos and try to recreate it. He caught a bunch of big fish, a number of 6s and 7s. Don't want to link the videos here, but they're easy to find, and then ones I'm talking about are just a few weeks old.

Great job, and hope the recovery and treatment keep going well for you friend!

Ironically I just bought a Berkeley Magic Swimmer the other day but had never heard of the OG before. I didn't learn it was a soft bait until this thread. Now I want the soft version lol. Little pricey though at $15. I immediately caught fish on it, think I caught 5-6 fish on with a nice 3lb+. Very cool bait, and it's one of those baits that seems to shine best when fish are actively feeding. It's a very aggressive bait on any kind of retrieve except a slow steady retrieve. Jerking the thing produced most of those fish, if not all of them. It kind of blows out when you jerk it but it certainly triggered the fish. ETA: 125 size in the Olive Chrome

Only the flagship models from Shimano and Daiwa are currently made in Japan. Yes, if they moved the production of the high end models to China that would indeed upset me.

All that I can gather thus far points that this new change will negatively impact the middle of the road guys the most. Those guys who average an AOY finish between 15th and 50th. The guy who consistently got a top 50 cut almost every event. The guy who might not have ever fished on Championship Sunday/Monday but was always good for a top 40 finish. That guy went from taking home $10k checks for a 37th finish(minus $5k for entry/$500 for fuel/$500 for lodging/$300 for misc.) to a $500 check for making 37th in a 2025 event. That dude went from making close to $4k to actually losing close to $1k after expenses. You basically have to finish 27th or higher to cover your expenses. Honestly the more I think about this, the more I see it's going to be a really bad deal for the anglers. To me one of the biggest problems with the MLF is that the top 10% of the anglers absolutely feast, while the bottom 90% fights for the scraps. I feel like BASS will now have a similar problem, they are making it easier for the top guys to earn more money, meanwhile the middle guys are taking it straight on the chin, and the bottom guys are still losing money just like before.

The sales rep at a Dakota Lithium booth told me it was BS, and a marketing ploy when I asked him about it. I brought up how Ben Milliken is always pimping a 16v dedicated battery for electronics.

The gamble is no different today with the change in entry fees as it was before when they paid them. Jacob Fautz does a good break down what it costs each derby in terms of expenses.....fuel, lodging, food, and tackle. It's ridiculously expensive to fish the Elites even without having to pay entry fees. Imagine driving your $120k Skeeter towed by your $80k Toyota all the way to the SLR from Alabama, rent an AirBnB for a week, buy a week's worth of groceries, beat 60% of your competitors, and your reward is driving home to your family with a $500 check. That same dude last year would have taken home a few thousand dollars for his troubles. As somebody said in a comment section on FB......"nobody in a pro sport should be competing for a $500 check".

The plot thickens......that's a pretty damning example of the financial aspect in terms of a true tier one pro angler in Drew.

Easily the biggest news in the pro derby side of things in a really long time. Nobody saw this coming, and I'm really interested in learning why Bass felt the need to do something so radical. Good for the anglers, but BASS is still riddled with problems that make the product close to unwatchable for about half the events. https://www.bassresource.com/bass_fishing_123/bass-elites-pay-103024.html

Congrats on such an amazing year Katie! It's been a real pleasure to read your reports and see your beautiful fish. You've grown into one of the best anglers on this site in a relatively short period of time as well.

New spinning setup..... Stradic 3000XG on a Levante Shakeyhead and I managed to score some D Braid in 15lb to wrap up the combo. As always, Digitaka is amazing. Hopefully I don't like the D Braid too much since it's no longer made. I've read bad reviews about the stuff that replaced it.

That's a crazy looking bait @softwateronly, I'll have to look into those. Awesome fish, and your facial expressions are why people Bass fish.

The only pic that's close to providing a clue to how big it might be is the mouth pic as Katie alluded to. That pic, and then just judging the fish's health and build qualities I'm going to say it's likely in the 6s somewhere. I highly doubt it's less than 5lbs. Congrats! What I can say for sure based on all the pics is that the fish is at absolute peak health, and I suspect she'll get bigger. I don't know your locale, but any fish that is built like that in October has figured out the game and is thriving. Don't let not having a weight sour such a special memory and interaction with a prize/peak specimen.

I can't say whether a SDJ knot is stronger or not, however I've made the switch over to using the SDJ knot on all my big baits like glides and A-Rigs. It ties easier when using heavy lb test lines. The Palomar was a pita to tie on big baits. I do however use the Palomar for a number of other techniques, so I really like that knot.

Did you examine the end of the line......you usually can tell pretty easily if your knot failed or if your line broke. If the end of your line has a bit of pig tail in it, it's likely your knot failed. If it looks perfectly clean and straight, it's likely your line just broke, more than likely at a place where there was a nick. With high dollar, heavy baits like Chad Shads, you really want to be downright obsessive about retying, and constantly rubbing your fingers up the first 10ft or so of line to constantly be checking for nicks. I go through line faster on my big swimbait setup than any other combo. I'm often times cutting off several feet of line because I notice the smallest imperfection in the line. I lost a Chad Shad in January literally inches from the net.......and it was all my fault as the knot had failed. I learned this by examining the end of the line as mentioned above. ETA: If your casting motion on big glides isn't great, you can actually abrade the line through the act of casting I've found. Something I still don't completely understand, but have observed it enough to know it's real and happening. My guess is the bait's treble hooks somehow contact the first several feet of line upon casting if done the wrong way.

**** Reading in angry monkey noises

Hope you get back to feeling well soon brother!

I haven't caught 56 fish over the last half dozen trips out Katie, thank God you're catching enough Bass for all of us on the suck bus 😁

Thanks, I've been in contact with them but it's a slow process since they're in China and I can't do it over the phone. Gambling on Chinese products is always a fun time 🙃

Well this battery is turning into a real headache. After fully charging again last night, it read 13.54v. This morning when checking the resting voltage it read 13.21v which is below the threshold for a fully charged battery according to their manual. Guess this battery is defective. Dang.