tjm

will borrow a boat to finish the tourney, anyone want to volunteer their boat?

More restrictions might lead to better fishing for some fish or for some people but it also might lead to more restrictions and that could lead all game fish being reserved for contest fishing, since contests are games and subsistence fishing is not a game. Then all the church fish fries would have to use carp and then carp would become endangered and that would mean more restrictions and.....

On the old click pawls bending the spring slightly would usually reduce the drag and the noise.

I won't argue for more selective harvest until all contest fishing is prohibited. I might practice it, but in my mind filling your freezer is no worse from a conservation standpoint than culling and relocation are. Wanna go gigging?

Many people can go home 6 times a day with a limit too. Then again how many boneless fillets count as a fish?

My other question was why he didn't get bucked off, thrown out, even his cap stayed in the boat. Thing looked almost like a planned stunt for a movie with the camera mounted to see it all.

Probably obvious to you boaters, but, why wasn't there a large rock hole in that hull? And does this sort of thing happen often enough that he doesn't seem particularly disturbed by it?

Do they keep track of many times the same guy leaves and comes back?

With that light of line, I think I'd skip the leader and use ~3' of tippet. Or use a 12" leader and a 2' or more tippet. Did you weigh that reel?

I reckon anytime there is a fish fry for more than 2-3 people that either over limit or store bought fish has to be involved. But it's possible that by filleting a trout or crappie that each one could provide 16 pieces.

I thought this would be a tutorial on cutting and wrapping. 1600 trout would be enough to grow about 800 tomato plants.

I agree that the current color will work, but, I think the whitish belly and orangish gills would also work with any of several darker backs too. Baitfish all resemble baitfish so salt patterns and fresh patterns can often interchange.

It's the drugs and the tourneys, even people get lost when drugged up and if you hauled them off 50 miles from home and turned them loose they might never find their way back either. On the other hand all those growth hormones that get flushed after the fried chicken suppers is why those bass get so huge. Have to take the sweet with the sour, even if you don't like sweet.

I think that if you look up fish migration, that you will find it is applied to fish that travel from salt to fresh to spawn or in some cases those that travel from fresh to salt to spawn. I don't think that travel within an impoundment and it's tributaries constitutes migration, and I tend to think fresh water fish within the impound/trib system will use most or all of the impoundment as forage and temperatures dictate and that at spawning time they will simply seek out the appropriate conditions nearest to their current location in the lake. I don't think I've ever seen a study on this, pertaining to impoundments and warm water fishes.

Your definition of complicated and mine are not the same. Tie one in 3-6 minutes, I'll start getting interested. about the fifteen minute mark, I'd scrap it hook and all.

4#+ seems like a trophy smallmouth in my creek, but I stopped weighing them years ago. They all go back any way.

A seaducer is a simple and quick big fly, a gurgler is one I like to fish and not too complex, either one kinda taxes my attention span.

Tying those things is too much like self abuse, I'll stay with simple stuff, I think. They are pretty to look at, though.

Dying CDC Rit should work and Kool-aid might, if you can work out the colors you want. I wonder why a marker wouldn't work? The feathers aren't buoyant, but the tiny dry fibers trap air and air floats. Wet fibers don't trap so ... My first reaction to the CDC craze was that Gartside was doing the same thing with his CPF a long time ago, so I never got around to buying any CDC and as long as I have gotten by without it, I see no reason to now. Hare foot likely floats a lot better, and I think can be subbed for CDC in floating recipes. However natural ants don't float very long and there is a good possibility that fish may prefer the ants wet. I've never had an ant pattern that consistently performed well for me and haven't tried one in years, maybe I should revisit them. @cohafly that's nice work. I like simple stuff.

People bought it all up after the Tuesday in November, if it's not back on the shelves by now it might not be for a long time?

As a kid in the '50s, I've heard lots of eels used to come up the Elk River tribs stories. Pensacola Dam stopped that they claimed. No fish ladder they said. so with Bagnell being older and about the same height, is there a fish ladder there or how do those eels get up and down?

Small? Fork tail plus spots plus white belly, I call it a channel cat, but my cat fish experience is rather limited. For whatever reason I've never caught any cats except bullhead on my flies.

Isn't the bullhead's tail more rounded at the top?

My east coast inlaws had city refuse and recycling bins, separate for several different classes of recyclable garbage and at the land fill the dozer man mixed them all together before covering them. Nobody is recycling all the miles of lines that are hung up in trees or broken off in the lakes. Who recycles old clothes? Most of them are or contain plastic. Who gives a rat? we'll all be dead before the earth is and let the grand kids sort it out.

Plastic is the greatest long term environmental impact that we have ever created. It will be in landfills and the oceans thousands of years in the future, and some plastics last longer than others. As conservationists anglers are failures, we have widely adopted and encourage the use plastics like GSP and fluorocarbon that will last many times longer as waste than even the older plastics like Dacron braid and nylon monofilament. Why does no one talk about stopping plastic use and production? Because we have been programed not to. We must follow the programing and promote the agenda. As Pogo said so long ago "the enemy is us" .