Seth

The Elfrink video is finished now.

My bad....

Today was the third time he went in to the final day of the Classic in the lead (shared lead with Welcher this year). He managed to hold on and pull on the win by 5oz over Welcher this time though. Congrats to him! He was due for one! https://www.bassmaster.com/news/christie-conquers-bassmaster-classic

Those are the oldest I can find on Facebook. Everything older would be a physical copy and stored somewhere at dads if they haven't been tossed out. Some may have been on Photobucket but that account is long gone.

The only time I've even caught multiple flatheads in a night. My buddy and I caught six one night back in the mid 2000s. Nothing big but they were all 4-16lbs. We would have been 18-20 years old in this pic.

This is still my biggest paddlefish to date. I caught it right at daylight on March 15, 2009 on the James River arm of Tablerock. It weighed 80lbs.

I love my Legend but I find myself wanting a little beater flat bottom more and more for things like the Meramec and gigging. Boats are just a tool and one size doesn't fit all (although I will say that my current rig does a lot things fairly well).

My biggest Taneycomo rainbow caught in June 2005. It was 27" long and weighed right at 10lbs. Landed it on a white trout magnet and 2lbs test. There were three of them like that cruising around the docks scarfing fish guts that trip. A white magnet was the perfect match the hatch bait for the situation. It also had somebodies white power egg broke off in it's mouth when I landed it. Targetting gut eaters is pretty cheesy but I didn't know any better at the time. All I saw was a giant trout in front of me and I wanted to catch it. My ignorance on fish handling at the time also lead to the fish dying by keeping it out of the water far too long for pictures. I spent hours trying to get that fish to stay upright so I could release it but the damage had already been done.

I realized two things that day. You can't hardly beat a sculpin for nice fish and bait fishing like that (even when catching solid fish) is BORING! We still had two hours to go when we ran down lake to toss the jig and do a little trolling but I'd had my fill of "catfishing" for the day. I'm working on the Elfrink tourney right now. Should have it done in the next day or two. If you watch the videos in order (Masters > RAW > Elfrink) you may pick up on what we figured out as the tourneys went on. Weather limited the prefishing this year so we had to basically figure it out in the tournaments. We stunk it up at the Masters (and yes I know the banner is click baity) but we did catch one good one towards the end. I almost skipped making a video for that one but I try to keeps things authentic. That means showing the good along with the bad.

You got it. If I didn't fish hard year round, I definitely wouldn't have the boat that I have now. It's not a cheap setup (almost 40k new these days) but it's far from the most expensive and it took me nearly a decade and a couple of good boat deals to get in to it. I just shake my head when I see people going out and buying the latest and greatest toy without knowing for sure if they are going to actually get their use out of it.

I keep telling myself I need to buy a kayak. There is a lot of good fishing around here that you can only fish with a canoe or kayak and I don’t take advantage of them.

Bill, Roland and Jimmy are still out there doing their thing in their 70s and 80s. I'll never match their ability but I'd sure be glad to match their longevity.

Unless you're upgrading to something better, I have never understood how selling a boat could be considered one the best days. That would be the worst day for me.

That's a HOG! Congrats on the fantastic catch!

Oof. Yea I heard that didn’t go so smoothly. Sounds like the fish took a bit of a beating in the process……

Parking lot? I wonder if this is the 6 pounder my buddy said he watched get hauled from the parking lot down to the water after the boat was trailered last Saturday…….

Same here. I’ve only turned in two or three and we’ve boated 10-12 in the past year. I had two last weekend, the 22” brown Friday and another bow that was probably 21” in the tourney.

Do you think they are stocking further down lake that normal this year? It just seems Cooper Creek on down through the landing is almost void of fish this winter. The few we have caught down there in those areas have been pretty solid fish that have likely been in the lake for a while instead of the traditional silver bullets that have always been so prevalent in those same areas.

If that is the case I think they are going to need to tweak some things. While I don't mind the current situation because I've caught more trout over 20" out of Taney in the past year than I have the rest of my life combined, I am afraid that the added difficulty is going make people stop coming to Taneycomo. While I don't really mind that part of it for my own selfish reasons, it won't be good for the resorts. It makes sense though. Last winter was the best of both worlds because you had less pressure in 2020 due to Covid having things shutdown. The affects of the added pressure in 2021 when things got back to normal and reduced stockings have brought us to this point. I was down last September and I didn't feel that the fishing was still fairly "normal". Things got MUCH tougher over the 4-5 month span between that trip and when I started coming back down for the winter trout tourneys.

Amen to that! I don't even know where to tell people to begin at this point. In the past I could say "Do A if you want to just catch numbers" and "Do B if you want better quality". There doesn't seem to be a plan A anywhere right now and I've tried all of my stocker spots over the past month and a half with barely anything to show for it.

Maybe for the average angler looking for a meal of crappie, but tournament weights have gone up becuase guys can single out the biggest fish before even wetting a line. Look at what Josh Jones had done in the American Crappie Trail. He strictly Livescopes with a single pole and the other guy in his boat is only there to net fish. That's how precise he is with targetting those bigger fish. The weights in crappie tourneys on Lake of the Ozarks have gone up quite a bit as well and it's purely due to Livescope. I've heard of more 2 pounders the past few years on LoZ than I ever have. One thing that people have realized is that the biggest crappie are typically loaners. People who aren't catching larger crappie with FFS just aren't utilizing the technology in the proper way. If you're fishing for dinner there really is no point in doing so either IMO.

I just went through my GoPro footage for the tournament. We boated 5 fish during the first half of the day and 13 during the second half when generation dropped down to 2 units. Six of our weigh fish came during the second half. The last drift of the day along the bluff bank produced 6 of our 18 fish in about a 30 minute span. That was by far the most productive drift of the day.

I already updated the 2022 fishing goals thread on that one. 😁 I broke my 20” brown curse with a 22” 4.3 pounder the day before the tourney. Caught it on a black jig along the Short Creek bluff.

Our final weight was definitely not indicative of how tough the fishing was. We threw black jigs that morning till around 11 then went and drug scuds for an hour because we only had two or three fish. I think it was after noon before we had a limit. Once the water slowed down to 2 units, our jig bite picked up a little bit. It wasn’t great but the fish we caught were solid. Our room mates who took 2nd did well dragging scuds early on when 4 units were running but the bite died off after the first few hours. We stayed above Short Creek all day. My partner had a monster on for a few moments before it buried him in a tree. Sure wish we could have seen that one! It gave a few big slow head shakes then started to swim towards us before it found the tree. a couple more pulls and he was gone. It was HEAVY!

Knocked out #2 today with this 22” 4.3# Taney brown