Trav

hmmm....I heard surface temps were about 37 degrees as of last weekend...

I mix it up until I find how they are looking at food. Sometimes they are looking up and sometimes they will be looking down. Other times they want something right at thier level. Usually I will cast and give a count of three then reel. Then repeat with a count of five, then seven and so on until the count hits the depth which works. I don't like bouncing bottom too much with grubs. The darter jigheads I use tend to dive under rocks and I like to avoid getting hung up.

No problem...

I had some difficulty finding the bigger females last winter but caught a lot of twelve to sixteen inch males using three and four inch grubs. Smokey Salt and Pepper seemed to work the best but I think they would have hit almost any color. Once I found them I could boat about twenty of them in one area. The best locations were transitions where cliff banks ended near gravel. They seemed to be staged right on the edge of the channels in about tewnty feet of water. Good luck. I look forward to reading how you do.

These guys should have it. Boat Motor Recyclers 1104 Riverwood Drive Burnsville, MN 55337 1-952-894-4888 I bought a rebuilt for a 1990 50HP Force last month. Ordered it over the phone and it arrived in three days. Cost me 550$(including shipping). I could have bought a used one for 350$ but opted to buy the rebuilt. The rebuilts come all sealed and ready to install.

No problem....

Took a ride up there yesterday. It is about a foot down. I like to see it about three foot above pool during spawn....maybe March will be rainy..

"VanDam and Martens fished within earshot of each other throughout the Classic, plying the waters of an area known locally as Tank Pond, a popular spot for recreational and local tournament anglers on Lake Cataouatche. It's a stump-infested backwater on the west side of the lake." http://sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/tournaments/classic/news/story?page=b_classic_11_Reid_Gamer

It's a fish! I may be wrong but I recall reading someplace a fish's pain memory is like three minutes. Not sure but I guess it meant they are so instinctivley driven, the drive for survival never stops. So much so, they never feel pain longer than three minutes. They dont notice the big gaping hole I rip in its jaw. And when I spend ten minutes jerking it scared out of its mind to my boat, he would have forgotten the pain from the hook. The fish also forgets all about the alien abduction as I probed it with my digital camera. And when I release it, the fish forgets it was even suffering from PTSD. And for some reason, some of them will let me subject them to this tragic ordeal over and over again....? In my opinion...I think they like it. For them, it is the cool thing to do. Why do you think so many of them do it?

There are a lot of piles in the lake already. There are GPS locations available from the corp of thier drops. I think they have fifty or so..? You really don't need to drop any if you have a good sonar. Of course, the best piles we owe to guys like Straw! Some of those piles are huge....several years worth of drops in the same locations. And those piles you have to hunt for with your electronics. I like to troll for walleye while I scope. Everytime I see one on the graph, I make a notation so I can go back for those bass! I am sure I haven't spotted even one percent of what is out there. Although, I am looking for piles which have drifted into 30 or even 40 feet of water...

I have busted through four inches of ice before to get out in a lake...Once it is ok to launch there will definately be guys out there breaking it up to get out to the main lake. Especially since it is common knowledge walleye get frisky right after the lake is iced out. I am hoping to be out on Stockton within the week.

the ice is 6 inches thick at hermitage ramp.....lets see...two inches a day if it stays above freezing? That is the rule of thumb I learned growing up in Iowa. But who knows...

May or October would be better months......

I am all about the info..if I had any I would definitely share.

Thanks for calling me back. It is always good to ask for permission and/or research before doing wild ideas..haha. If I did everything which crosses my crazy head I might have quite the list of ammo people could use against me for a good laugh.

Plenty of fish pics here-----> http://www.facebook.com/index.php?lh=7ff33bfb04ac30ae6530c83888b37835&#!/album.php?aid=3896&id=100000008753152

My biggest probs are on rods. It isnt so much the line grooving but it is the eyes loosing their eye guides due to friction.. Then there is the bail guide to consider. Which has been less of an issue over the past years. I am not a big guy of buying high quality rods, I bust the crap out of them and usually buy new stuff every year. I do however buy the best when it comes to spinning reels. I mostly buy Penn but have Diawa and Shimano as well. To be honest, none of the Diawa or Penn reels had any affect to braid or floro. Just the rods. When it comes to reel guides Shimano was an issue. Not good when I am talking about a 80 dollar reel. However...I have a couple Shimano Salt waters which took the salt water wire type line fine. But they costs me 300 bucks a pop. The fact I will buy a 200 dollar reel and slap on a 50 dollar rod is probably an issue to think about. Since I run so many cranks and deep divers the fact the tips wear out and I cut them down is a benifit. Stiffer the rod the less stress I have to reel. Yet...it does create a higher friction to the reel. Line is the issue here though... Floro sucks in the high timber/rock envirement I work, yet braid rips my cheap rods to peices. Mono is perfect but it stretches to the point I have to change it everyday. I do know my reels out perform the rods I break and beat up but in the long run mono is cheaper to replace everyday. Haha....what do you do when you crank and beat the hell out of your rods?... Line is important ,.....

Sometimes you have to appreciate the fact the other guys out there are fishermen too...I give space to tourney guys. Been there done that.... I did see a couple guys looking desperate on Pomme on Thursday who had a space in mind who run up on other guys to fish. This is sketchy on ethics in my books. I am pretty easy on tourney guys when it comes to location selection but it is wrong to jet in and and jet out. You should at least respect wake.

The tourney guys are fishing a three day thing. Still haven’t heard any news on weigh-ins or who is sponsoring it. The lake has been hammered with fishing pressure the past few days. We put in at Hermitage again this afternoon. Headed straight up the Pomme arm only to have the lower unit on my boat go out. What a bummer that was. Did fish some as we trolled to the state park where we met my father with my trailer. Water temps up the Pomme arm are a bit warmer than the Lindley Arm was yesterday. They ranged between 75 to 77 degrees. We did manage to catch eleven Largemouths so the trip wasn’t a complete loss. For the second day it was black wiggle warts catching the most.

I talked to the Corp and they have decided to remove all tires and have banned future use of tires. The state are the ones setting up those wooden pallets.

I called the Hermitage Corp office this morning. They said there is going to be a clean up project this weekend to pick the tires up. I am expecting a call later today as to whether those tires can be used for this purpose. Will let you know what I find out.

I took another look at my contract...it states 325MB a "day". I know it sounds like a lot but it goes fast when they include all the downloads used while browsing. Each page you load adds to it. I used five percent of my daily allowance just reading OAF while drinking my coffee this morning and I still have a fantasy football team to maintain....another five percent there... I also run a website for a non-profit and go through a 30 to 50MB everytime I have to update through the Host company. I have learned to take advantage of the "free" hours of 1AM and 6AM. Just kind of sucks when you have no other options. I have a landline but the phone company says they don't support highspeed net in my area. One mile north and one mile south I would be OK....kind of dumb.

I noticed someone has been setting up some old pallets along the shore for fish habitat. Pretty smart thinking if you ask me. There are a lot of advantages to having the water so low and establishing habitat is definitely one of those things. I have been trying to cut out old trotlines and fishing line since there is so much of it visible. Wish I had a bigger boat so I can pick up all those old tires scattered all over the lake. I bet if a couple of savvy guys with a big pontoon could collect all the tires, there would be close to a hundred of them in the Lindley Arm alone to build a reef. If I had the chance I would gather them all up and tie them together along one of the now shallow sand bars. Stack them five high and fill them up with big rock. If you space them about three feet apart you would have a thirty-foot long wall for summer shade. Heck, I have a buddy who has an old fourteen-foot flat bottom boat which can be used as a tow barge to stack all the tires on if anyone wants to help me build a wall this winter. Might be fun! Any takers? I haven’t even been up the Pomme arm since they lowered the water. I can bank money there will be even more tires to stack and fill with rock. Might be nice to give those bass some shade for the hot months and give us some easy cover to work. The lake is supposed to stay low for another couple months. Shouldn’t take more than a few Saturdays…..

Another Wednesday and another busy tourney going down. The lot at Hermitage was packed full of rigs. Does anyone know what tourney it was this week? Or what the winning weight was? We put in at Hermitage around one this afternoon and fished until sunset. The water is now five feet below pool. The ramp there was accessible and they had even moved out the loading dock. I talked to a guy who was putting in a pretty big boat and he said Hermitage was the only ramp he would still use. He said Nemo has had some sediment pushed down by an earth mover and they left it in a pile in the water at the bottom of the ramp so he couldn’t launch there. I didn’t notice any last week so it must have been done recently. He also said the ramp at the state park marina ramp is now too steep for his rig. His boat was one of those big tri hull sun cruisers, maybe 26 feet or so. We again stayed in the Lindley Arm and threw nothing but cranks today. Water temps were between 72 and 74 degrees as the evening warmed up. Twenty-eight Largemouths was again our total today. (and one lonley little white) It was funny how we caught the same number of fish this Wednesday as we did last Wednesday. The wind was just about perfect as we could drift a shoreline and fish it pretty thoroughly without moving to fast or too slow. I started off thinking standing timber today but the tourney guys were pretty stacked up in those areas. Fished one little stretch and decided to work flats instead. It was a good move. We didn’t catch as many keepers as last week. Only about ten of them went over fifteen inches but I would have had a solid fifteen pound bag where last week I would have only mustered a twelve pound limit. The best bite was found in ten feet of water. We are going back out tomorrow. Haven’t decided whether to try out the Pomme Arm or just go to Stockton for a change of pace.

Hughes internet is worse. I moved to a place where there is no Phone DSL or cable access and am "forced" to go satelite. Hughes has a 500MB limit until 1AM so I have to save all my uploads/downloads until Late at night. It really is robbery to pay a hundred bucks a month for internet and still have a limit to how much it can be used. Living in the country sure does cost a lot of money!!!