FishnDave

I'll trade you 2 yellow bass cards for a white perch card and striped bass card. 😁

My buddy's mom says, "Getting old ain't for sissies!"

Just wondering... if the ambient temperature is, say, 5 degrees F, but if I am on a boat surrounded by heat coming up from 40+ degree water, or wading in a spring-fed stream where the water is warmer than freezing... how cold is the actual temperature that close to the water? I suspect it would be much warmer than the ambient temperature away from the water. I've heard of boaters having ice build up inside the boat on cold days, but it could be a relatively balmy 31 degrees in the boat and still have ice forming. On the same token, it probably doesn't get much colder than sitting/standing on ice while fishing. I've icefished for many years. With the right clothing, you really don't notice the cold. Didn't expect to have the opportunity to do that here, so I gave all my icefishing gear away before we moved...rods & reels, lures, electric auger, shack, flasher, etc. I don't regret giving it away... much less stuff cluttering up my garage now. So...for now I'm just waiting for open water and preferably above-freezing temperatures so the line guides on my fly rod don't freeze up. Looks like 2 more weeks of this cold weather, then give it maybe another week-ish for the ice on the local waters to melt off.

Those are great! I keep tying stuff too. Lotsa variety. I don't know what the fish like down here, so I should be paying attention to what you guys are using.

Yes! Wouldn't that be great! 😁

There's 2 types of Hybrid Striped Bass....the Sunshine Bass and Palmetto Bass, depending on which species males and females are used to make the cross. And there is a difference in the behaviors and morphology between the 2. One problem Iowa fisheries managers have had with HSB's is they have a tendency to run downstream through/over dams in high water events. Seems the other cross tends to run upstream instead. They are studying the use of one or the other crosses at the moment.

I think I'm officially in 4th place in this thread with just 2 species so far.

Shellcrackers and stumpknockers and sac-a-lait and gaspergou and eelpout... Don't a few states (looking at you, FL and LA) sometimes refer to Largemouth Bass as Green Trout?

Naw, Eeyore would have said the pay was just ok. 😄

Excellent! Thanks for the reminder. I bought my 2021 licenses and picked the auto-renew for next year.

I know you posed these questions specifically to Bill. I tie my own jigs for flyfishing. The Wapsi Super Jigheads have pretty good hooks on them, and come in a variety of weights and hook sizes. I like the #6 hook on these for large bass. https://www.avidmax.com/wapsi-super-jig-heads-plain/

3 friends and I had been driving thru the night up thru northern MN, heading towards a lake in Ontario. I was sitting in the 2nd row of seats. The guy driving our vehicle had a heavy foot. Nevertheless, this semi pulling an empty(?) flatbed trailer passed us around 1 am. It was very dark out, nothing much to see in the pine forests on either side of the road, so I was just watching the tail lights slowly pull away ahead of us. As it reached about 1/2 mile or so ahead of us, I watched those tail lights spin in a clockwise circle. WHAT??? The semi rolled over. We pulled over just down the road a bit from the semi, so our headlights would light the scene. This is a picture of the picture I took. We were sure we were gonna find a bloody body, and weren't too excited about that prospect. We called out a few times as we walked toward the semi. Eery quiet. Then we heard some rustling. The driver popped out of the wreckage of the cab. Not a scratch on him. He said his trailer got off the edge of road. He tried to speed up and get the tires back on pavement, but they didn't want to comply. The trailer and cab started to roll, so he got down between the front seats and went for a ride, he said. He was most concerned about finding his log book. There was papers and wreckage all around. One of my buddies looked down and picked up the log book right away. Weird. He was just an hour or so away from reaching his home near the Canadian border. We gave him a lift to where he wanted to go.

Mirror Carp:

NE Iowa Rock Bass Redear Sunfish Male Bluegill in spawning colors: Pumpkinseed Sunfish: Green Sunfish: Hybrid Sunfish: Pumpkinseed Sunfish: Hybrid Sunfish: Redear Sunfish @ 12":

I understand the slippery, but the soft doesn't sounds like much fun?

There's a place in Florida where you can pay to fish for them. Could be money WELL SPENT! 🤠

Pretty sweet! Piebald? Barramundi?

Nice! Yeah, I don't think I've seen any with any red on their fins yet. Cool!

Sounds good, thanks John! It was a beefy example!

2012, Iowa. 13" Black Crappie on fly: 2012, Iowa. 14.5" White Crappie on fly: NE Iowa Rock Bass: flyrod Creek Chub, Iowa: NE Iowa Brown Trout:

Sizeable Shiner (Common? Striped?), Iowa: flyrod White Sucker, NE Iowa: flyrod Golden Redhorse, NE Iowa Brook Trout, NE Iowa 2012 Yellow Bullhead on fly, Iowa: Yellow Perch on fly, Iowa Shortnose Gar on rope fly, 2010, Iowa.

Smallmouth Buffalo, Des Moines River, Iowa: One of my first flyrod Freshwater Drum, Iowa. Cool yellow fins on this one:

For no bigger than it is (compared to the big MO lakes), it sure can be dangerous when wind and lightning storms roll in.

I'm also using 1/80th to 1/48th oz jigs, typically, although I've gone to as large as 1/32nd....but the 1/32nd size starts to get a little unwieldy on the fly rod when coupled with a big enough indicator to float that. And I'm not fishing very deep at all...usually 2 feet or less, but sometimes as deep as 4-6 feet. That's usually the length of my tippet, so I haven't bothered to try fishing deeper than that.

Awesome fish! 👍 A buddy caught this one on a spoon in Saylorville Lake, Iowa, on July 25, 2016. He's a big guy... 6'-7"-ish? This fish bottomed out his scale....so he took good measurements before releasing it. It was calculated easily into the 70+ lb range. A coworker and his brother caught one in the Des Moines River ~35+ years ago...on a bank line with bait... that was weighed at a bait shop at 108 lbs. Much bigger than the Iowa State Record, but at the time it didn't count if caught on a bank line. He showed me the old faded newspaper article / picture....HUGE! I wish I'd taken a picture of that!