Seth

I kept seeing schools of nice fish today between Fall and Short Creek and I am pretty sure they were big gizzard shad. Any ody else seeing those? Are those left overa from the floods?

Caught it by Short Creek on a 1/16oz sculpin/ginger jig and 2 lbs line. Fell just shy of the 20” mark and 1oz shy of 3 lbs. I’ll be putting the Doty jerkbaits to work on the browns tomorrow.

Darn.... I will be on my way to Colorado to shoot an elk during that time. 😞

The crave case will be on me for sure!

I'll be up on Lake of the Ozarks with 4000 other idiots trying to catch that lucky $100,000 bass that weekend.

I'm with you 100% as this would be amazing for the bass that get moved around on the river tournaments that I fish. The question is how would you enforce this at lower levels though? Small bass tournaments aren't going to have a marshal to weigh fish and verify the authenticity of what that angler says they caught. I know the kayak crowd uses length, Hog Trough measuring boards and pictures to keep score, but I doubt everybody will want to go by length. Even if you took a picture of a scale, it wouldn't be hard to "add" weight to a fish and snap a picture.

Seeing all the nice browns being posted on Facebook really has me itching to get down there this weekend! I've got to play guide and put some people on some rainbows so we have some fish to eat for Saturday evening, but otherwise I intend to chase browns the entire time. My 20" curse needs to end this weekend!

I was all over the board this season. At one point I think I was ranked as high a #2 or 3, then dropped down to around 15th and then back up to finish at #6. What a roller coaster! Last year was much more consistent for me where as this year I had two really high scoring tournaments to help out with a bunch that were pee poor!

I thought the BFL entry fees were only $250 for boater and $125 for non-boater? That's pretty standard for reservoir tournaments, right? You jump up to the Costa's etc then the price to play definitely increases.

It may have been cold, but we still caught a few.

Nothing like having to shovel snow out of the boat in April to go catch trout.

That's how I feel and I'm heading down next Friday. Those brownies better be hungry because I haven't caught one in FOREVER!

It was a warm snow.

My buddy boated a 20.5" tank that weighed 4.33# this past Saturday. It's the biggest small mouth to hit the deck of my boat. She ate a PBJ Tackle HD Stealth finesse jig paired up with a Hi-def craw in the limited edition kiwi craw color. Crankbaits and spinnerbaits produced far more fish, but the jig produced the biggest by a long shot!

46lb 1oz

Happy birthday! I wish I wasn't 3 hours away as I would love to come hang out!

I'm coming down at the end of the month and I will try to make a trip over to the dock to say Hello and hopefully catch a glimpse of ol Frank. His buddy Franky was no slouch, but he pales in comparison to this brute!

I'd like to see a mix of MLF style and Bass Fest style tournaments. All the fish get weighed and released in both tournaments and the only difference is the math used to calculate your "score".

I need to make it a point to get back in to winter fishing for bass this year. I'm really bad about just going after crappie and trout once our tournaments are over with though. It's tough choosing between all the good fishing in the winter time or chasing deer!

The Osage has really come alive this year. I've heard of several 4+ pound spots and a lot of 5+ largemouth being caught this year. The biggest surprise to me though is the number of nice smallies being caught! Every once in a while somebody would catch a decent one on the Osage, but there have been several 3+ and even 4+ smallies weighed in during tournaments this year. I boated my PB Osage bass last month in a tournament out of St Thomas that weighed 5.43. Caught it on the spinning rod and by sheer luck managed to land it even though it had me so tangled up in a brush pile that we had to snag the line and pull the fish in by hand! Had a couple other big largemouth show themselves that day, but didn't land them The fishing gets better and better the closer you get to Bagnell. Start at Tuscumbia and work your way up. St. Elizabeth area can be decent too, but Tuscumbia on up is definitely my favorite part of the river. Here is a video of our last tournament out of St Thomas. The big one is towards the end.

It depends on the brand. If you read my posts, I mention Plueger President and the sizes that they use. Just look up the spool capacity of those reels and then go with whatever is similar for the brand of reel that you are looking at. The sizing varies between brands.

Good point Bill! For my float and worm/jig setup, I run a 10' BnM Sam Heaton Super Sensitive crappie rod with a Pflueger President 6930 spooled up with 6# trilene XL. For leader, I just use 2# mono. I already had that setup for dipping brush for crappie and then started using it for jig and float fishing after trying Duane's 9' Lew's crappie rod setup. It works very well.

Same here. Check stations were great until the closest one shut its doors and forced us to have to drive about 30 minutes out of our way to check in our game. Telecheck is wonderful!