Seth

They piled the deer up this weekend! There were twelve hunters (seven disabled and five youth, I believe) and the final tally was nine deer and one miss. The guys that run that organization did an amazing job getting everything ready to go and it ran without a hitch. I was paired up with Dane. He has muscular dystrophy. While his legs may not work the best, he is a pro on the gun. We actually passed on deer hunting Saturday morning to try and call in a yote, but didn't have any luck. That evening, we sat in a blind that over looks a grown up field and sits between crop bottoms and bedding. About 10 minutes before last shooting light, a doe slipped out of the bedding and started working our way. She was farther to our right than we expected so we had to get Dane turned around to his right a bit more to be able to get in position for a shot. Once that was done, I just leaned back and let him do his thing. The doe finally turned and gave him a good broadside shot at 150 yards and he let the .308 bark. She made it about 50 yards and tipped over in the field. This was his fifth deer that has taken this year. I'm only up to three. Dad and I had a fantastic time helping out with this. I'm definitely going to get more involved with these guys. I made several new friends this past weekend and I plan on doing more with them in the future.

I've never scoped myself with a rifle, but the inline muzzleloader has tapped me a few times.

I’m just messin with you. I deal with the moving of fish here on the rivers I fish. By the end of summer, you could spend all day at some of the accesses and stand a good chance at catching a good sack.

If you think this is bad, you should be a deer hunter. They gun vs bow and killing bucks that aren’t up to somebody elses standard always get feathers ruffled.

I bet if PB2 was located on the north end of the Gravois you wouldn’t care.

I bass fish May through October quite a bit. November is for the deer. December through March is crappie and trout time. March and April is crappie, white bass and paddlefish time. I can’t do the one species all the time deal. Gets old. I catch a lot of slabs vertical fishing with the long rod too, but it just aint nearly as fun as dock shootingis to me.

That setup will probably work fine for shooting 1/32oz jigs. Give it a try and see how it goes. Most dock shooters use 6# test anyways. I'm using 4# because I have a 2000 yard spool of the stuff. If I ever use it up, I will probably go with 6#. That is a dandy black! My goal is to try and break the 15" mark this winter. The best I managed last year was a 13.5", but a buddy of mine caught several that were over the 2 pound mark.

6' medium light BPS Microlite graphite rod Pflueger President 6925 spinning reel 4# hi viz mono I also have a couple 7' light action rods that work for shooting 1/32oz jigs, but not very well for 1/16oz. The medium light will shoot a 1/16oz fairly well. Most of my shooting is done with a 1/32oz though.

Typically I am shooting the jig in to the openings of swimming platforms. The best spots the other day were about a foot wide and you had to be on your game to get the jig in that spot. This video was made this past weekend up on LOZ and is exactly what I was doing. The only difference is that his fish are hanging down deep where as most of my bites were within a few feet of the surface. That's one of those things you just have to figure out when you go.

A doe is a doe no matter if it weighs 50# or 150#. My father in law smoked a button buck ham one time that was absolutely delicious! If you got the tags and it is in season, shoot what makes YOU happy and not the next guy.

Do you guys do any fishing or just hang out and stuff your faces? I've been meaning to make it down one of these years, but have yet to do so. Maybe this will be the year!

Mitch and Scott got on me pretty good about that too. I think that is basically how I became acquainted with all of you. Now that I'm not as green behind the ears about winter fishing, I totally understand why I got my butt chewed. Ignorance was bliss at that time. I'm glad I didn't shun you all for picking on me because you guys turned out well enough to at least associate with around and old gutter shack every once in a while.

Temps look comfortable. Dad and I will be headed up towards Kirksville to guide some youth and disabled hunters with the MIssouri Disabled Sportsmen group this weekend. They have some great grounds secured and some nice shooting houses ready to go for the hunters. Hopefully the deer cooperate for them and they can lay waste to some slickheads and keep us busy with the skinning and gutting.

I just use the creme and let it sit in the sun for a day. In fact, I usually don’t even have to wash it afterwards because I just do a thin coat. I guess the creme basically evaporates after it does its thing.

The deepest fish I caught all day was maybe 5' deep. If the 1/32oz jig sank for more than 8 seconds without the line jumping, you may as well reel in and shoot it back in there. Most fish were biting within two feet of the surface up under the docks. I tried three of my favorite brush piles/lay downs in depths ranging 10-30' deep within close proximity of PB2 and only got one bite. When they are producing, you typically get bit as soon you get the jig down and hold it still for a few seconds. They could have just been fished out too. Who knows. They are a lot easier to fish than where I was shooting my jig under those docks.

Those turned out great! I did a euro on my bow buck and one that my buddy got during rifle season. Simmer in water with a little dish soap for thirty minutes, power wash and repeat two more times to get all of the gunk off. Once the racks air dried for a few hours, I put a coat of volume 40 creme developer and set them out in the sun for a day. Mine could probably stand to use another coat of whitener, but his turned out perfect. This picture is after his had been sitting in the sun with the peroxide on it for a few hours and mine after it had air dried and just before I applied the whitener to it. The smell wasn't pleasant but the worst part of the job to me was having to wear a rain suit and goggles to power wash it due to all of the meat and and gristle that seemed to end up on me.

That is some wackage and stackage!

A buddy and I started about 1pm yesterday and fished till dark. I started out hitting a few brush piles, but only caught one. It didn't take me long to switch gears and start scanning main lake docks. Found a few that were loaded up and caught around 50 crappie. Only had a few white crappie and only three or four shorts. The rest were all good quality black crappie and most of them were over 10". There was no need to measure any of the two limits that we kept. Biggest was 12.25". If you couldn't get your jig way up under the dock, you didn't catch fish. I doubt color mattered, but we were using BG Slab Slayers and Slab Busters in blue, black and orange with a chartreuse tail. They all worked as well as the other. We fun fished for a bit longer after limiting out and caught another 15-20 keepers that we released. This post has been promoted to an article

The Pflueger President is the best bank for your buck when it comes to a decent spinning reel IMO. I've got a bunch of the 6920, 6925 and 6930's. I've had two issues with them and they were on reels that were several years old and used hard. One 6925 has a slight tick in the retrieve that was kind of annoying so I stuck it on a long rod for dipping trees for crappie where it didn't matter. The other issue is on a 6930 and the drag clicker broke and so the drag doesn't make any noise. It still works perfectly fine though. Both reels still see plenty of action and put plenty of fish in the boat for me though. $30 is a steal for those reels. I don't really need any, but may try to pick up a few more just because it's a 2 for 1 deal!

We had freshly gigged suckers fried on the bank of the Meramec the other day along with some fried taders and onions. It don't get much better than that as far as I am concerned! Suckers are definitely more work to prepare though due to the scaling and scoring required. One of the guys that was present the other day had one of those $500 credit card style scoring machines. If I still gigged a lot, I would have one of those. You could flat score some suckers in no time with that thing!

I need to pick up a sticker for my new truck sometime.

I use those same hooks and I just reel in to the fish and never actually “set the hook”. Rarely ever loose fish with them. Typically, I throw my wacky senkos on a 7’ medium fast spinning setup with 15# braid and 10# fluorocarbon leader. I’m gonna have to give that mono weed guard deal a try as well.

I dubbed this one the Chinese fire drill buck because that is pretty much what it was right before the shot.