mixermarkb

After I get back into the house and see what is left, if anything, I’ll post up a wanted to buy add. Honestly I’ll be happy if I have something I can throw a Ned on and something to throw a spook on, because I don’t know how much I’ll even get to fish this year with all this going on. Thank God that I left all the tackle in the boat over the winter! At least I don’t have to replace all the baits…

Hey Guys- So without going into too many details, I’m in the middle of an insanely bitter divorce. My father in law has just now been letting me see my 8 year old for the last two weeks. The soon to be ex wife’s grandmother who raised her died two days before Christmas, and she spun out and lost it, and it’s gone downhill from there to places I never thought were possible from the woman I spent 13 years with, and still care a great deal for, despite all the hell she’s intent on dragging me through. Anyway, my son told me that his 16 year old brother traded two of my rods and reels to a friend for a bottle of vodka, and had a big party and most of my rods and reels disappeared that night, so I guess I’m in the market to replace enough of them to get back on the water. With lawyer fees being what they are, I need to do it as affordable as possible. I should know exactly what’s left, if anything, in a week or so, as I am going to get the sheriffs department to go with me and get some clothes and stuff from the house. So, I tell all that to ask if anyone took over selling the refurbished Lews reels that sportsman’s used to sell, or even if the Bass Pro outlet has anything worth going to pick up- Thanks for any info on some deals, and prayers would be appreciated, because this is all extremely hard to cope with. Mark

Phil- I’m posting this here because of the traffic this sub forum gets, feel free to move it or delete it since it isn’t Table Rock or even fishing related- Guys, I’m 48 years old. 5’11” and 245 pounds, and thought I was in pretty decent shape. Never a smoker or drinker, a little fluffy, decent, if not perfect blood pressure and cholesterol numbers at my last physical, and a clean stress test from 2 years ago. Last Monday afternoon I had a heart attack. I wasn’t doing anything physically exerting, and here is why I’m posting, the symptoms were WAY, WAY, WAY more subtle than I expected from the way heart attacks are portrayed in Hollywood. About 4:30 Monday afternoon, I had some very mild discomfort in my chest, like a slight bit of soreness. Nothing at all worse than how I’d feel the morning after throwing a spook or an ARig for a day. No clutching at my chest pain, no sweats, just a little feeling that something wasn’t quite right. I went in to the bedroom, took a couple tums, and laid down and took a nap, and when I woke up, didn’t notice anything. Later that night, the same mild discomfort came back, and seemed like it (maybe?) was radiating to my left shoulder. I couldn’t find a comfortable way to lay in bed, and my wife talked me into going to the ER just to be safe. They did an EKG, then put me back in the waiting room. After a 3 hour wait, I again felt fine, and having taken some more tums, I thought I must just be having some heartburn and told the nurses I was going to go on home, as I didn’t want to spend ER money on heartburn, even though I have insurance. The next day, my wife looked at the EKG results on our MyMercy online, and thought that something didn’t sound right, and insisted that I go see my primary. She bullied the desk people at the doc’s office to fit me in, and my primary didn’t like the EKG either and ordered a stress test and bloodwork. I had the stress test on Wednesday, and couldn’t get my heart rate as fast as they wanted due to chest pains and shortness of breath. As I was leaving the stress test to go back to work, my primary called me and told me to go to the ER immediately, troponin (heart enzyme that is indicative of heart attack) levels in the bloodwork were off the charts. Mind you, I was feeling fine at this point, had recovered from the treadmill, and was having no chest pain. Thank God I listened to her and went instead of going back to work as I was tempted to, because it turns out I had 100 percent blockage in the right side of my heart. The cardiac docs at St. John’s Mercy were able to clear the blockage with a heart cath and 3 stints, but told us that had I been half an hour later coming to the ER, I’d have died. So- I type all this to say, don’t be stubborn. If you have ANY pressure, tightness, pain or discomfort, get thyself to the ER or at the very least your primary care doc. Even very serious blockages can have extremely subtle warning signs!!! I’m extremely blessed and lucky to be alive, and frankly wouldn’t be, if it wasn’t for the Irish redhead from the south I married bossing me around. Don’t think it can’t happen to you.

There isn’t one. You have to slum with a St. Croix Legend Elite Magnum Cranker 🤓

Shhhhh. Don’t talk about big swimbait bites. Those don’t work in the wind at all, no sir.

Got three rods rigged with Neds. Hard to beat this time of year for sure!

Hello fellow Ozark Anglers! I’m headed with a good friend of mine to Bull Shoals this week. He likes to fish, but is a once or twice a year kind of fisherman, so I always feel a little pressure to put him on some good fish. Sooo, instead of my typical after action report, I thought I’d share my pre-trip game plan and prep, and then report back how things actually went once I got on the water- So here goes- Watching the forums, and the weather, what I’m expecting to find when I launch on Monday is a lake that is high and rising, roughly 20’ higher than the last time I fished it. I’m also expecting a mix of bass in spawn, pre-spawn and post-spawn behaviors. I’m guessing there may be a bit of a shad spawn happening as well. All this leads me to make the guess that there will be a lot of ways fish can be caught, and it’s gonna take a decent amount of “junk fishing” to get on any sort of pattern. I’m fishing out of Protem, mid lake. I’ve got all sorts of smallmouth water right around me, plus a reasonable boat ride to Shoal, Big, Buck, Little Buck, and the Music Creeks. I’ve been catching quality largemouth all spring on secondary points with big rock near spawning pockets with crankbaits and swim baits, so my game plan is to start in those same kinds of general locations on the first morning, staying in the clearer water cove type creeks. Given the flooding conditions, I’m going to start off with topwater (likely a Redfin and a walk the dog bait) and small 3” swimbaits over those locations, trying to keep out of the flooded jungle on the bottom. I’m looking here for a quality largemouth or three. I’m going to put the boat near the old lake line, and fish semi parallel to the bank. I’m looking to cover the shallow bushes out to about 30’. Im looking here for clues as to wether the bulk of the fish have moved up shallow in the bushes, or are suspending outside the brush over the old lake line, as I’ve caught them both ways in previous high water years. If I’m finding I’m getting bit inside the near bushes and up in the pockets, I’m gonna play with baits like a Fluke, wacky senko, shakyhead, or flipping creature baits, as well as seeing if I can get them to chase a squarebill or spinnerbait. If I’m getting bit off the bank, I’m gonna live in topwater land as long as they will hit it, as well as slow rolling swimbaits over that old lake line and maybe run a vibrating jig around deeper bushes, as well as a jerkbait and big swimbaits we have wind. Depending on the results of this, my next step is either go to the backs of the bigger river type creeks, or go looking for smallmouth. If I go to the rivers, I’m gonna be throwing a squarebill, a buzz bait, spinnerbaits and vibrating jigs, looking in water 8’ or less, for big rocks, lay downs, sawdust mats, etc etc. If I go smallmouth hunting, which probably fits Mat’s skills better than shallow power fishing, I’m going to start the search for flat pea gravel, that doesn’t have a ton of extra cover on it. Smallmouth love to spawn on these kind of locations, and with the lake flooded, I’ve found that they can at times really stack up anywhere they can get to bare gravel. That’s where I’m gonna pick up the Ned rigs and go to work, with the good old fashioned smoke grub and of course the small swimbaits also on deck, and keeping the jerkbait handy if the wind comes up.

I’m coming down Sunday night to ride the elevator up. I had a pretty solid game plan based on what I’ve been doing all spring and where I thought the fish would have gone, but that was based on the lake being 10’ higher than the last time I saw it, and now it looks like it’s gonna be closer to 25’ up. gotta love Mother Nature and the Corps of Engineers…

Nice! what were the water temps where you were? water color?

I hope your open positions pay enough to live on. Some of the hardest working people I know are still in desperate measures, because the jobs they have never did pay enough to support a household, and darn sure aren’t keeping up with inflation. We have thousands of people in this country who have full time employment at Walmart and are still qualifying for food stamps, and that’s just one example. Pre-pandemic, it pretty much took two paychecks to make a middle class household work in the US. A lot of people I know just decided during the pandemic when child care wasn’t available to simply tighten the belt buckle and scratch it out off of one income, and found that the benefits of having a stay at home parent in the house outweighed the little bit of extra money they were putting in the bank after paying the (insane) costs of childcare. Until we have a childcare solution that doesn’t cost most of a full time paycheck, those people just aren’t coming back to work any time soon. Add to that the million or so folks who died from Covid, and the numbers who are still dealing with long Covid or the many after effects of severe Covid, and we have a whole lot of people who aren’t going back to work any time soon. Most thieves are just lowlifes who will always be lowlifes, but there is a large number of honest, hard working Americans who just happen to come from backgrounds where Mommy and Daddy weren’t around to pay for college, co-sign for that first car loan, teach them how to manage money, give them Grandpa’s old (paid for) house as a starter home, give them seed money to start businesses, etc etc. Starting a life from scratch when you come from a background of nothing has never been easy, but it’s way, way, way harder today than it was during post WWII America, due in no small part to the lack of good paying manufacturing jobs. I’m not justifying crime, but if we don’t do some serious work on making a blue collar middle class life achievable to the normal kid trying to claw out of generations of poverty, rather than the rare exception, crime is only going to get worse as those at the bottom scratch for scraps.

Yep. Huge gap between the haves and the have nots right now. The have nots are getting more and more desperate…

I’m sorry to hear that, I’ve had my stuff stolen twice. I feel your pain.

Shhhh. Repeat after me- Bull Shoals is fishing tough, and the roads around it are terrible! It’s just not worth driving 160 or 125 to get to a lake that’s always flooded and has no fish. stop. talking. about. bull. shoals.

Lots of good info here- Take what I’m saying with many grains of salt, but I’ve found Sunline Sniper fluorocarbon in 7 pound test to be MUCH more forgiving than Invisix or any of the other fluorocarbon I’ve tried. I may revisit braid to leader some this year, but I hate leader knots, and wind knots have been a problem with every braid I’ve ever tried. I didn’t hate nanofil, but was never 100 percent sold on its abrasion resistance. My only gripe with Sunline Sniper on spinning tackle is that they quit making it in the green color.

I have a hot foot, and enjoy it, but I try and not use it too drastically. Steering wheel blinker style trim switch to me is the deal- that’s what I use to adjust for changing water conditions most of the time.

I’ve been in a boat one time with a guy who thought he could catch up to the walk with only input from the steering wheel, and not get out of the gas or trim down. Will never ride with him again, as he did his very best to wash the decals off the sides at 75mph.

We are just different folks, because while I may not frame it as “a lesson” to a client, I’m not going to sell a $250,000 sound system to a church without being there when it’s commissioned to answer questions and make sure their operators know what they are doing. Do we lose some sales to online big box retailers who are happy to just drop ship them equipment at bargain prices. Yep. We also pick up sales from folks who have been that route and get lifetime customers by making sure they know how to use what we sell them. I don’t care if “the lesson” is just what switches control what pumps in the livewell system, a good boat dealer is going to be there with whatever knowledge a given customer needs on delivery, otherwise they may as well be buying from the guy at Bass Pro who’s never been in a boat in his life but just got the job based on his used car sales skills.

You never try and “drive through a chine walk”. If it’s started walking, the only way you get it back is trim her down and slow her down. You can however, drive a high performance pad V hull in such a manner that keeps it from walking, and while it’s a very common topic of discussion on sites like Bass Boat Central, it’s way easier to teach to someone on the water than over the internet. Lots of folks safely operate high performance hulls with a single outboard. It takes skill, and common sense, and understanding that WOT isn’t always safe.

You think the 12' boat could carry the 300# driver and the 40HP? Do you think a 40-50-70 HP cap would remove the 40' boats from the fishing lakes? would limiting speed through HP affect the erosion/wake boats? I don’t know about 300 pounds, but I was every bit of 225 when I ran a friends little 12’ race boat. I think he was closer to 60 horses than 40, but it still went plenty fast enough to scare ya. My idea of recreation on the water is bass fishing, but lots of other folks idea of on the water time is wakeboarding, jet skiing, overnight cruising, slalom skiing, putting around in a pontoon while consuming adult beverages, etc. A basic part of living in a democracy is that they have as much right to their pursuit of happiness as I do mine. Their pursuits require quite a bit more horsepower than a basic 40-50-70 horse fishing boat needs. How are you going to write a HP limit law that keeps fishermen from committing suicide by horsepower and yet still lets a family runabout have what it takes to pull a skier out of the hole? More (selectively enforced no doubt) laws aren’t the answer, and in a capitalist society, if one is in the business of selling a given product that is or can be dangerous, it only makes good business sense to teach your customers how to not splatter themselves on a bluff while driving their new toy. I mean, I guess maybe a lot of dealers don’t care about return business once they sign that 20 year finance agreement on that $90k rig that is a $70k rig as soon as it leaves the lot- cause they figure they aren’t getting return business from that poor upside down feller anyway- but if I sold bass boats, I’d be darn sure I was giving on the water check rides at delivery, and if I was buying a boat, I’d insist on it.

Well, strictly speaking, he showed me how to keep it from happening. Which is exactly my point. Darn near every brand of 20-22’ bass boat hull with the 225-300+ horsepower motors that are sold these days are fast enough to chine walk and get away from the driver if the driver doesn’t have the skill set to balance them on the pad. It’s totally irresponsible for a dealer to take someone who have spent their boating life so far in a 60 horse tin rig and expect them to hop into a brand new BassCat, Triton, Skeeter, Phoenix, etc etc and run near 80 without some instruction, but it happens every day. Combine that with a little ego about not wanting your $90k tub to be slower than the other $90k tubs in the club and you have a recipe for getting people hurt.

Be careful what ya wish for is all I’m saying-

40HP on a 12’ drag boat hull made of potato chips and epoxy will go pretty “fast” while 400HP on a 40’ LOZ or Mississippi River cruiser is gonna burn a lot of fuel but hardly be “fast”. As I said, too many variables to easily regulate.

What’s that speed limit going to be? 70? 65? 55? 45? 30? I’m all for self regulating, because there are just too many variables. My current Champion 203 tops out at 72mph gps. On most days with nice weather on Bull Shoals, 72 mph in that boat is completely safe. 72 mph in the very same boat on a LOZ summer weekend with a gazillion other boats and jet skies would be a fatality waiting to happen, as it would running WOT across Oakland on Bull Shoals with a 40mph March wind out of the North. There are just too many variables for laws to really be effective. Take the 30mph nighttime speed limit for example. My boat is actually safer running about 35-40 on a night with good visibility because the bow fully drops and the boat is up on the pad where it’s more maneuverable, but that’s on a uncrowded lake, not LOZ going home after a July 4th fireworks show with 1000 other watercraft. If lawmakers have to step in and come up with a speed limit, I can tell you right now, it’s gonna be lower than it needs to be, because it’s going to come from the worse case scenario, AND they are going to see the enforcement of it as an opportunity to make money for the government coffers.

I beg to differ. When I made the jump from a pretty quick little Champion 18’ with a 175 to a Champion 202 “light n dry” with a hopped up 225, Kerry from Kerry’s Marine in West Plains followed me to the ramp on Bull Shoals, and spent about 20 minutes showing me how to drive it to control the chine walk. It still took me most of the summer practicing to get the hang of it fully, but the chances that I would hurt myself or someone else in that boat had I not had that on the water lesson would have gone up dramatically.

I’ve blown up two powerheads and one lower unit in roughly 30 years of bass boating. Wanna guess what speed I was going when all three let go?