Champ188

I struggle mightily at times with this "live and let live" concept ... some of those chuckleheads just need their butt kicked. Might not do any good in the long run but at least then you'd have the satisfaction of knowing you did your part to educate them. 😆😄

Gotta say that while I haven't encountered many kayakers in my fishing travels, the ones I have run across on the whole have been pretty darn entitled. Cutting between me and the bank I'd been on for 30 minutes to fish ahead of me and giving me the old line, "You can go anywhere you want, I'm just a little kayaker with limited mobility." I get that and do my best to give them all the room I can, but this particular dude was nowhere around when I first started fishing that stretch. Recently at Horseshoe Bend on Beaver, half a dozen cartoppers each took up the extremely limited truck/trailer parking spots at the ramp. They could've easily shared those spots, but no, they had to be entitled jerks and center themselves (longways) in each spot.

And I get your point about Connell ... kid seems to be a good fisherman so I hope the rumors are false and he continues to shine. My bad for perpetuating them, regardless of the reliability of my source. I still say, forbid contestants in the high-paying tournaments to practice with or to solicit/receive info from licensed guides and let the rest work itself out.

I don't always agree with what he has to say, but Randy Blaukat hits the nail on the head in this episode of his Intuitive Angling channel on YouTube:

My post was attributed to a source whom I consider reliable. There's always controversy around no-info rules on every circuit because it's an unenforceable rule. The anglers are naturally left to self-regulate because obviously you can't assign a "monitor" to go with them every step of their lives. Star-struck fans run up to pros all the time at the gas pump and spew info to a contestant before he can say "Sir, I can't accept any information because of our rules." Lakefront property owners do the same, as do fans out on the water during practice, at restaurants, sponsor booths, hotels, etc. Info is gonna be passed to the anglers regardless of what rules you put in place. Only way to make it fair is to say you can't hire guides or ask anyone for info, but whatever you may overhear or receive unsolicited is OK. Or just put a period after "can't hire guides" and let the rest sort itself out. BASS ran a successful circuit for many years under Ray Scott and then Helen Sevier without any such silly rule.

Yep, a lot of "2-pound crappie" are caught and never weighed. Fact is, most aren't much more than half of that weight. A true 2-pound crappie is a giant. My grandfather caught them regularly at certain times of the year on Lake Ouachita in Arkansas.

BFL had 235 boaters + amateurs last year for a tournament that had to be rescheduled. They'll scare the heck out of 250 again if they don't hit it. Hopefully, since there are very few bass actively spawning, all of the boat traffic will have the few that are very skittish and hard to catch. It's not ideal, but I can live with some prespawn/postspawn fish being hauled around the lake. But it irks me to no end --- and always will --- to see the people who claim to be all in for taking care of our fisheries schedule tournaments on top of the spawn and defend that practice as harmless. It is NOT harmless to take hundreds of bass off their beds and no amount of pro-tournament rhetoric (spin) is going to change that one bit. This is not an attack on the Big Bass Tour --- it's my conviction about all spawn-season tournaments regardless of name or number of participants. If we really love our fish like we say, let's stop the springtime tournament insanity. Hey Johnny, step up and REALLY GIVE SOMETHING BACK to the sport that made you a billionaire ... at least start the discussion around what can be done to independently study, discuss and potentially take action to protect the fishery where your signature lodge stands.

The purest love ever ... and for all of mankind.

Rooting for Watson, too. Enjoyed being river rat buds with him in the old Central Pro-Am tournaments. As for Connell, I've heard from a reliable source that he's another pre-tournament info outlaw who just hasn't yet been caught.

Buying up all we can find for as little as we can, then gonna start sellin' em for $100 each. You know, kinda like the old pre-Rap Warts. Right now we are in marketing mode, using the whiners to chum the waters for what will soon become a buying frenzy. 😂

Still got mine. I safeguard it with my life. 🤐😁

By all means, don't get in the way of the spoonbill snaggers. Almost like some of the striper guides on Beaver ... they own the water, you're just borrowing space from them. Love it in the winter when you're trying to navigate your way up/down the river arms and they sit out in the middle of the channel with their shad/balloon spreads and shake their fist at anyone who dares to drive within a quarter-mile of them. Sorry, but I'm not running up on a shallow flat and hitting an underwater tree, rock, etc., just so that I don't disturb you fishing in the middle of the channel.

Perhaps the best single sentence of fishing advice I've ever read. The older I get, the more time I seem to waste sitting on inactive fish --- both shallow and deep. You can't force feed a bass. It simply doesn't work.

Actually, you may be spot-on. I throw my Fins around shallow cover a lot more than most people. Not sure why. Doesn't work. Never ever. 😆

Good stuff, Bill. I have a buttload of RKs but they are all in the 55 series. Gonna grab a couple of those 50s and head up to SK on Monday. Haven't been on the Rock in nearly a year. That's just too long.

I agree. Pre-Johnny, the fishing tackle department was managed by a darn good local fisherman named Chris Johnson. His hands were tied to a degree by corporate policy, but he kept the good stuff in stock for the most part. Anymore, the tackle space is dominated by BPS -branded JUNK that probably prevents more people from catching fish than it helps.

Like everything else he's done? Nothing built, nothing back, nothing better.

The Rogers store is the biggest cluster I've ever seen just trying to get waited on, then you wind up with a guy (any/all of them) who knows nothing about fishing equipment; rather, he wants to stand there and tell you how overworked and underpaid he is. I just walked away from one the other day then went home and bought two new spinning reels online, where I knew my computer could help me a whole lot faster than any of the numbnuts/meth heads they have "working" at that store nowadays.

Spinning rod should tell you a lot. My guess would be either a small swimbait scrubbed across the bottom or a Ned.

Thank you, Vernon. And agreed on the shirt thing. I could go the rest of my life without having to see that again.

Surge Shad seems ok but doesn't get the bites for me that my Fins do. You just have to find a few good Fins and hang onto them.

Where's all the Rock Chalk folks? Not hearing much clucking or chattering from them today. Shoot, Arkansas even won DESPITE the refs. LOL

Me either, buddy. Sure not making a 6-hour drive towing the boat for a 7-pounder. Lots of places to do that closer to home that are a lot less trouble. I'm getting old and soft. I'd rather drive a couple of hours to Bull Shoals and catch 30 smaller fish a day, go back to the motel and back the rig up to the room, take a hot shower, go have a nice dinner at a wide choice of restaurants, then come back to the room and watch my choice of sports on cable TV while I fall asleep in my cushy bed. The womenfolk call that "glamping" nowadays, I think. Sign me up.

Wait, you spanked a tranny? I'm mortally offended. I thought you Yanks were WOKE! What the heck? You can expect to be scheduled for LGBTQ sensitivity training in the very near future.

And a whole heckuva lot more elbow room on the water.