Seth

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!

I second Corell. His work is amazing!

My family checks in 10-15 deer ever year and 4-8 turkeys every spring and have never had an agent come by and check on our game. Based on Dablemonts article, we should be expecting to get harassed by an agent every time we harvest a critter and check it in. That guy sounds like a tool, but that is just my two cents.

So is Larry giving up hunting then because I'm pretty sure that all game has to be checked in via internet, app or telephone. It has been that way for years. You can't just "give up telechecking" unless you plan on not killing anything or just not check in game, which is illegal.

Water was up and dingy from all the rain, which made sight fishing impossible. I got lucky and hooked in to a good one on a green/white rubber leg jig around noon. It didn't really put up much of a fight and just sort of wallowed on the surface and gave a few half hearted jumps so it was a bit of a let down. I'd ran off and left my tape measure and scale at home so we took a few pictures and I put it back. I figured it was around 4.5-5#. The fishing was fairly slow for me using jigs, trout magnets and trout worms. Anglers using bait were getting lots of bites but that's not really my thing so I stuck with lures.

I really like the Browning Air Streams in 6-6.5’ paired up with a 20 or 25 sized Pflueger President. FYI, Bass Pro has the Browning air Streams on sale for $45.99 right now.

Well I ran by Bass Pro in columbia today and was set on buying a St Ctoix Premier. That was until I realized the Air Streams were on sale for 45.99. I had $75 in gift cards so I picked up a 6’ and 6.5’ Air Stream for $22 out of pocket. I couldn’t pass that up.

It doesn't matter, it's a giant regardless! Congrats again and cudos on being so concerned with getting her back in the water alive.

Awesome fish! I'm surprised it weighed that much. This is a 27 incher I caught back in 2005 and it weighed 10 even. It was a big gut eater so it was thick too. The number of big bows caught in the past few weeks is incredible! Hopefully it continues for a few more weeks till I get down there!

1/80-100 jighead painted pink beneath a 3/4" round weighted bobber. If there is flow, you may have to add a little split shot a 1.5-2' above the jighead to get it down. Ideally, you will need a rod at least 7' long and preferably longer depending on the depth of the water. I personally fish it on a 10' BnM Sam Heaton Super Sensitive crappie rod. The long rod makes casting a lot easier when fishing deeper than 7'. Lilleys has all of that in their shop. The easiest thing would be to swing by and pick up what you need. Those pink worms are usually sold out at the surrounding Bass Pro's and Walmarts anyways.

I'm glad to see that the biggest rain total estimates have shifted east.

I use the Cabelas tournament ZX rods. Buy them on sale for $70-80 or $100 anytime. Hard to beat for the money IMO. With 1/4-3/8oz spinnerbaits, I use the 6'8" topwater/jerkbait model and the 7' spinnerbait/swim jig model for 1/2-3/4oz. I've never fished a spinnerbait over 3/4oz so no clue after that point.

That's why I love fishing clear water. I like to cover as much water as possible and target those active fish. The dirty it gets, the slower I usually have to fish and it kills me! If you are going to fish slow in clear water, you better be using something extremely realistic and the HD craw does it better than anything when it comes to a craw pattern.

I did pick up a couple War Eagle Screamin Eagle spinnerbaits in the mouse or sexy shad pattern from Walmart to try this fall when the water clears up. I'm hoping to have some luck burning them across some shallow, boulder filled stretches of the Gasconade. With this monsoon headed our way, I may have to wait till next year to try that pattern out though. Those white/chartreuse 3/8oz War Eagles have been very good to me the past few years in stained water.