Seth

Is this is v12 600r motor I've been seeing pics of recently?

I don't think you guys have much to worry about. We've fished around and watched your nephews two years in a row now and even tried the same techniques and didn't even come close to what they caught. If it were that simple, we'd all be hauling in mega bags of trout like them. I'm gonna try to talk dad in to fishing the Lazy Valley tourney this year. He's wanting to come back down and fish sculpins again. He's already buying better equipment just for that purpose lol. It was a pleasure talking with you guys at the weigh in. Hopefully we'll get to do it again her in a few weeks.

It seems contradictory, but I feel way more at home with a jig rod in my hand than bait fishing. I had to fiddle around with my hook and weight setups before I actually started catching fish. Dad likes to rib me about it since I always gave him crap for being a "lowly bait fisherman". Good luck to you in the Elfrink as well. We always seem to struggle a little more in that Elfrink tourney that the Masters and RAW for whatever reason so we'll how it goes.

It's not the worst I've ever had a boat iced up. This was a few boats ago after we made it home from a Tablerock snagging trip one March.

Taney sucks. Can't even catch a cold down there these days. 😁

@hillbillyflyshackno need to feel bad for using bait when it's legal. Dad is a bait guy and will fish bait from the back while I toss a jig when we fish RAW and he typically catches our biggest fish of the day. There is no denying that live bait catches nice fish. All of our weigh fish came on black jigs and sculpins. Our biggest was a 3.05 rainbow and it came on a black jig. Our numbers were still way down compared to normal, but we grinded it out all day in a few areas and it paid off for us again with a fourth place finish. We didn't fish clean and a couple late day mishaps likely cost us the #2 spot though. We prefished a few hours on Friday with minnows and caught several nice fish between 1-2.5#. I don't think we ever boated a fish on a minnow Saturday though. Crawlers produced several fish for dad, but they were all 3/4# stockers. @Phil Lilley the Kunz teams are sculpin fishermen. They anchor up and "catfish" them. We watched them do it last year and bring in that 16# bag of fish so we tried it ourselves for a while this year and it produced several nice fish for us as well. They were fishing directly across lake from us early and we watched them land one of their two big bows. Lookin forward to the Elfrink in two weeks. I sure hope this weather breaks by then or it's going to be brutal out there! My boat is frozen up tight right now. Hatches are froze shut and it's covered in 1/2" of road slush. Too cold to do anything about it right now though.

You know it's a pig when it gets those two that excited! Awesome team work!

I'm usually not anywhere that requires me to wear a mask for very long so I just keep it in the pocket and throw it on as needed. Getting the vaccine shot doesn't sound appealing at this time so I'll keep wearing the mask and avoiding people for a while longer until we get to see how a larger portion of the population reacts to the vaccine.

and you've been addicted to catching bass ever since, right? 😁

I just sent my Paypal money @abkeenan

That is true. You started all this mess by knocking off my big walleye on the Norfork that day! Shame! I'm usually the guy netting all of my buddies nice trout instead of the other way around so I attribute to lack of practice for him. 😆

Sure did! 😆

I guess I hadn't posted in this one yet, but my #1 goal was to win one of Lilleys winter trout tournaments. We finally made it happen during the Masters tournament last weekend. This has been my #1 goal for a few years now so I'm glad it finally happened.

Yep! We finally squeaked one out by .11 lbs! The two days leading up to the tournament produced some great fish for us, but the day of the tournament was a grind. It was much easier to catch numbers from Lilleys on down, but the better quality fish came above the resort. The numbers were far lower above the resort though so we just had to grind it out and have faith in knowing we were around the right fish and it was just a matter of getting a few to bite. Fortunately we put two rainbows in the boat around 3# fairly early on and then hit a pocket of nice fish later in the day to finish out our bag of 13.49lbs. We should of had over 14lbs, but my buddy accidentally knocked off a bow pushing 2# that I had on when trying to net it. It ended up not making any difference so I'm going to enjoy giving him a hard time about for a long time. 😁 Everything we weighed in was caught on black, white and orange/head sculpin jigs. Once I get the video put together, I'll share it on here.

I did see a guy dive in after his hat on an opener a few years back. Looked pretty similar.

I'll be out after them tomorrow. Does that make me a die hard or an idiot? If you answer yes, you'd be correct. 😁

Just the mapping portion to keep track of how far I've traveled. I do think Livescope could be really handy on Taneycomo if the water is off. Those bows tend to school up by size and many times they are just roaming out in the open so I believe Livescope would allow me to stay on the better quality fish. It seems like we catch several decent fish in short order and then the school moves on and we have to spend time hunting them down again.

I agree with you if you're looking at it from a high end tournament perspective. That's a very small portion of anglers though. Most guys just want to go out and catch something for dinner and a used $300 side imaging unit can drastically improve your chances at doing that.

It's amazing how much of a difference those couple of degrees make. I can smoke them when it's 42 degrees, but it goes down hill in a hurry below that. Anything sub 40 really makes for a tough bite.

I hear ya. I'm crossing my fingers we get some nasty conditions on the tourney dates this year.

Not to mention it keeps some of the traffic down. It blows my mind how busy Taney gets on a nice winter day.

If you mount the transducer at the proper height, the kick up feature should save your transducer if you run too shallow. I've gotten to where I don't even bother raising mine up anymore even when the rivers are shallow. I stuffed my boat pretty good last year and the bracket kicked up and the transducer was fine. Just had to shove it back down after I got unstuck. My transducer is mounted so I can lower it when I'm on a lake if I wanted, but I never bother doing it because I can still get good side image readings at it's normal height and it's more protected in case I happen to drift over a log or something.

Get a transducer board. Drill two holes to mount it and then you can adjust your transducer in the future as often as you want without drilling new holes. Since you have a welder, you could also just weld on a little offset on the transom for mounting transducers to. Here's a couple examples.

Where's the law that says you HAVE to use forward facing sonar to catch fish? I mean, if you truly get tired of using something then sell it or don't turn it on. People stuff, use it, get tired of it and sell it all the time. I'm not sure I've ever heard somebody say that they didn't enjoy fishing because they went out and whacked on them every time. I've never heard anybody say they'd rather go "fishing" than "catching". I'm gone out plenty of times and strictly threw topwater knowing I could catch more using something else. Why? Becuase I can and because that's how I PREFERRED to fish that day. If I wanted to go out and try to catch a limit of something without using sonar then I just leave the sonar off that day even though it seems kind of backwards since you bought it as a tool to help you put more fish in the boat in the first place. It's like saying I would rather use a sledge hammer to bust of a concrete pad when I have a jack hammer laying next to it.

multi post....