Seth

Gosh I wanted to get down there so badly! I'd already promised to take dad up to LoZ to chase crappie and catfish prior to the flood gates being opened on Taneycomo though. We had a great day, but I was definitely Jonesing to be on Taney!

So a kid fishing out of a cheap aluminum boat that runs 35 mph that invested $2k into FFS is cheating the kid who is fishing out of a 70mph glitter boat that doesn't have FFS? The aluminum rig with FFS is FAR more affordable than the glitter boat setup.

Could say the same thing about kids stuck fishing in a little aluminum boat vs those that have access to a 20’ bass boat with 250hp outboard. The kids success also depends a lot on who they are fishing with too. I’ve helped in several youth tourneys and the kids that do well are always paired up with those of us that do well fishing ourselves. Somebody will be at a disadvantage for one of many reasons no matter what.

We used to catch them every so often on the Osage, but haven't in several years. I haven't heard of anybody catching any of the Meramec.

You might have 5-6k in graphs sitting on the bow of your boat but at least you weren't scoping! 😁 I leave my scoping setup at home quite a bit when I'm fun fishing. It's still fun to beat banks and catch fish. It's no different than throwing a top water all day when I know I could catch em better on a shakeyhead. Topwater is just more fun!

That was something that took me a while to learn. First you had to catch fish in a spot enough times to know it was a decent. After that, you always knew it held fish, but that they wouldn't always bite so you'd just have to keep checking it throughout the day and hope you hit it when they started biting. I feel like that is what seperates your more consistent tournament anglers from the rest of the pack. With FFS, you don't have to spend as much time learning which areas are holding fish, but you still have to know when to move on because they just ain't chewing at that moment. You can really tell when a guy is somewhat new to crappie fishing, but has good electronics. They will spend all day wasting their time on a inactive school because they can see the fish. If you're not catching those crappie every few cast then you need to go find new fish. They just can't comprehend this line of thinking when they already have a bunch of fish right in front of them.

Cherry. I think Livesay is telling the truth becuase everytime they videod him catching a fish, it looked like his front units were completely powered down. Not that it takes anything away from Hank. He's already a master with the jerkbait so FFS should only make him even better. He's proven he can win without it.

Well he can say what he wants but that is 100% a Livescope image between his legs......

That's very true. We did find a 34" brown floating on Taneycomo a few winters ago, but floating trout are pretty rare it seems. You see plenty of them laying on the bottom though.

I feel like the average size fish we catch on LoZ has gotten better as well. We rarely keep anything under 10" these days. Up until a few years ago, we always kept quite a few 9-9.5" fish to fill out our limits.

Do bass even float when they die? There was a big fish kill on the Osage last year and a lot of fish were seen floating, but no bass. The bass fishing was terrible after that so I'm assuming they took a big hit too though. With all the tourneys out of PB2, you'd think the banks would be lined with dead bass.

Every tourney anglers is going to be guilty of that if they cull fish though. The only way I can see one not being guilty of that is if they only catch a limit or less. If you've got your crap in order with your cull system, you shouldn't have to keep fish out of the water very long anyways.

I've seen a ton of spoonies in the 80-85 pound range and I thought they were huge. It's hard to fathom one that is twice the size of those!

I don't think there is a tournament guy alive that isn't going to keep the first five keepers he boats. All I can say is if I am after numbers of fish, I'm a lot better off to leave the Livescope at home. I'll catch far more fish without, but my average size is better with it.

So you feel that it's better to put more fish at risk of injury/death while trying to find those larger fish? No matter if you're using FFS or not, everybody is still after the same fish in the end. One is just weeding through more fish and at the same time putting more fish at risk to injury and death while trying to find those same big fish.

What if they don't own a scale? Some guys only care about inches.

Arguably one of the best fishermen in the state. He dominates on the rivers and the lake. He’s hard on catfish too. Dude can barely read a graph and gets it done with pure fishing talent and time on the water. I’ve donated a lot of money to him. Robbie is right there with him and the thought if them two paired up is scary….. He’s one of the very few to catch a legit 6+ pound smallmouth in MO. He’s likely caught two, but one came during catch and release season a few years ago and didn’t have a scale. This one was caught in a tourney on the Meramec and it weighed 6.40.

I'm pretty much a white, black, green pumpkin guy when it comes to soft platics. However, one of my favorite baits to fish is a zoom trick worm. They come in a wide variety of colors. According to that app, bubblegum just appears white to a fish. I can tell you that I've used a pink trick worm and white trick worm A LOT and the pink easily outfishes white. Chartreuse and yellow both appear yellow on that app, but I have had much better success on yellow than I ever had with chartreuse.

Well I'm glad I kept my mouth shut the other day when we had our back and forth about FFS. I wanted to make a comment about you not know squat about it, but I would have wrong. What you said about learning to use it is was spot on. Crappie are the perfect fish for learning FFS. They don't move a lot and they are easy to find.

Same here. I've played my share of games while growing up, but I can't say that any of it has helped me when it comest using FFS. The biggest asset for me when it comes to learning this stuff is YouTube. Doug Vahrenberg helped me learn side imaging and The Garmin Guru did the same when it came to Livescope. Before I ever owned either type of sonar tech, I already had a pretty good understanding of how to dial things in and put them to work. I think the younger generations are just a lot better at doing the same thing that the older crowd. I'm a soon to be 38 year old millenial so not really young, but not old either. Working in IT leads me to a lot of Googling and YouTubing for solutions though.

I'd be curious to see how many are fishing out of 80k+ boats in general.

Since the vast majority of bass fisherman probably don't own FFS or tournament fish, I doubt it will matter much. It's just another market for them to hit. Stick FFS on the package and the wannabe bass anglers with $$$ to blow and no idea on how to properly utilize their new fangled sonar will be lining up to buy it.

It won't plane out like it's supposed to though so I wouldn't really call that working. If I can still see my targets and catch the fish, what more do I need from my electronics? It's no different than disabling all the filters on 2D. You're screen is far more cluttered, but you're also getting a lot more information to the screen versus if you had filters on to make it "clean and pretty".

Anglers spend too much time worrying about getting that pretty picture than using it to find what they need. My old Humminbird 998 hdsi would still find brush and fish like my newer bird with Mega side imaging, but it wasn't as "pretty". If it weren't for buttons not working on the 998, I'd probably still be running it. Same goes for FFS. I'm using a 10" Garmin with the LVS32 and a 12v lithium battery with my gain set pretty stinking high. Do my images look as pretty as the one you posted? Not even close. Can I find what I'm looking for and does it help me catch fish? You bet your butt it does!

and here I thought it was because those areas were marked as off limits during the tournaments.....