Seth

Josh Jones weighing in Share a Lunker sized fish every other week isn't helping it either. People are paying him 2k/day to take them out fishing now. He said people have offered up to 5k! It blows my mind that people would throw that kind of money towards catching a stinkin bass.

I was going to mention that Christie ended up winning that final day with old school dock fishing and that is had zero to do with Livescope but that would have been incorrect. Livescope told him right away that the fish had left so he knew to move on to something else. Not seeing fish can be just as helpful as seeing them. I've not thought about it from that standpoint.

If I can buy somebodies sloppy seconds for a good enough price, I may have to hop on the FFS bus myself.

Would this be somewhere in between? I grew up eating this stuff. Haven't had it in years but kind of want some now.

99% of those big fish are being caught by guys using forward facing sonar and A-rigs. If you don't have it or know how to use it then you will not come close to the results that those guys are having.

I swear my 998 has done that since day 1. The power button quit working on it recently as well so I have to disconnect power manually to turn it off. The sonar and everything still seem to work well though. Thankfully I found a good deal on a Helix 9 g2n mega si unit a few months back so I'm going to retire it or possibly move it to the trolling motor.

I feel the opposite. This forum is more on topic and not nearly as toxic as just about any other forum or social media group that I frequent. If you want toxic, go hang out on a deer hunting forum. Bowhunting groups in particular are the worst. They constantly fight over whether deer were old enough to shoot and the choice of weapons used for hunting them. Case in point would be the Missouri Whitetails forum. I think I've finally had my fill of that place. Most of the posts are just old guys crying about turkey populations and politics. It's a far cry from what it once was.

You complain about lack of fishing reports and never post any yourself even though you fish more than most. Ain't that the pot calling the kettle black? Oh and gosh we better not forget the golden rule of not posting anything regarding a stream smallmouth or else we might ruin the entire fishery. Everything else is OK though! I'm headed to the river to fish. Sorry I can't post a report and give up any of my secrets but I expect everybody else to post reports. Could you be more hypocritical? I probably most more actual fishing content than most (if not THE most) on this forum so you can miss me with that crap about not posting fishing related content...... Anyways, I hope you crack em. You're the only guy I know who can consistently catch big hybrids and I'm envious!

If the Ivermectin is prescribed by a doctor I don't see why it's a big deal. They are the experts that went to school for many years to learn how to treat us as patients so let them use all the tools necessary for results and not just the ones that make big pharma the most money.

I haven't gone the past two years. My urge to go on opening day has dwindled since I started doing the winter trout tournaments on Taneycomo. I'm taking some high schoolers down for a field trip on March 24. I'm not sure if I will mess with going down before then or not.

Yep those are crappie. They have been setup like that for a month now.

You would have been close to getting a check with just those two fish alone. Just under 8 took 4th. My big bow was probably 21" but needed a few cheese burgers. It only weighed 3.49. I added the time stamps in the upper right to show how long it actually took for us to catch our fish. Our morning bite was pretty well trash until we talked to Toby and started dragging scuds like them. Once the water dropped down to 2 units, the bluff side jig bite really picked up. The big one my buddy broke off and the big bow I landed were the only two quality bites we had on the shallow side all day. Our total fish count for the day was 18 and 13 of those came after noon.

I'll make it down for the Lazy Valley tournament one of these days. I usually skip the following weekend after a trip so I can get caught up on things around the house. Lilley's is talking about moving the Elfrink up one week in the future. If they do that, I should be able to make it for the Lazy Valley tourney since that will give me a week in between tournaments. Congrats on the strong finishes!

Not sure why the display picture is so blurry on that one. I guess I used the wrong resolution in photoshop when making it.

The Elfrink video is finished now.

My bad....

Today was the third time he went in to the final day of the Classic in the lead (shared lead with Welcher this year). He managed to hold on and pull on the win by 5oz over Welcher this time though. Congrats to him! He was due for one! https://www.bassmaster.com/news/christie-conquers-bassmaster-classic

Those are the oldest I can find on Facebook. Everything older would be a physical copy and stored somewhere at dads if they haven't been tossed out. Some may have been on Photobucket but that account is long gone.

The only time I've even caught multiple flatheads in a night. My buddy and I caught six one night back in the mid 2000s. Nothing big but they were all 4-16lbs. We would have been 18-20 years old in this pic.

This is still my biggest paddlefish to date. I caught it right at daylight on March 15, 2009 on the James River arm of Tablerock. It weighed 80lbs.

I love my Legend but I find myself wanting a little beater flat bottom more and more for things like the Meramec and gigging. Boats are just a tool and one size doesn't fit all (although I will say that my current rig does a lot things fairly well).

My biggest Taneycomo rainbow caught in June 2005. It was 27" long and weighed right at 10lbs. Landed it on a white trout magnet and 2lbs test. There were three of them like that cruising around the docks scarfing fish guts that trip. A white magnet was the perfect match the hatch bait for the situation. It also had somebodies white power egg broke off in it's mouth when I landed it. Targetting gut eaters is pretty cheesy but I didn't know any better at the time. All I saw was a giant trout in front of me and I wanted to catch it. My ignorance on fish handling at the time also lead to the fish dying by keeping it out of the water far too long for pictures. I spent hours trying to get that fish to stay upright so I could release it but the damage had already been done.

I realized two things that day. You can't hardly beat a sculpin for nice fish and bait fishing like that (even when catching solid fish) is BORING! We still had two hours to go when we ran down lake to toss the jig and do a little trolling but I'd had my fill of "catfishing" for the day. I'm working on the Elfrink tourney right now. Should have it done in the next day or two. If you watch the videos in order (Masters > RAW > Elfrink) you may pick up on what we figured out as the tourneys went on. Weather limited the prefishing this year so we had to basically figure it out in the tournaments. We stunk it up at the Masters (and yes I know the banner is click baity) but we did catch one good one towards the end. I almost skipped making a video for that one but I try to keeps things authentic. That means showing the good along with the bad.

You got it. If I didn't fish hard year round, I definitely wouldn't have the boat that I have now. It's not a cheap setup (almost 40k new these days) but it's far from the most expensive and it took me nearly a decade and a couple of good boat deals to get in to it. I just shake my head when I see people going out and buying the latest and greatest toy without knowing for sure if they are going to actually get their use out of it.

I keep telling myself I need to buy a kayak. There is a lot of good fishing around here that you can only fish with a canoe or kayak and I don’t take advantage of them.