Seth

Giving somebody who can already fish a tool like this will only make them that more effective. Those open water fish can now effectively be targeted where as before it was more of a crap shoot. At least with crappie you could spider rig to cover water, but you don't' get that when bass fishing. Watching guys target schooling bass in open water at the pro levels was pretty neat. Some guys that fish local lakes closer to home have even been able to target big suspended largemouth. The lakes don't have as much variety in species so you can pretty well tell if a fish in a perch, bass or catfish.

I think it would be tougher to utilize in rivers since you're typically drifting. Spot locking would help. Electronics don't really play much in to how I fish rivers though, but that's just me. They are vital when I'm on lakes though, especially for crappie more so than anything else.

They typically do, but dragging jerkbaits and flies still produces below the trophy area. Some don't want to bother with constantly rebaiting or risk deep hooking fish so they will resort to artificials and flies. The drift rig is just a term for the swivel/sinker/leader combo. What you put on the end of it is totally up to you.

Yes for when water is running although you can technically use anytime. Bait fisherman use it below Fall Creek all the time.

Any idea as to why the creek chub population seems to be crazy this year? Is it due to more weeds throughout the lake? I don't recall ever seeing them like they are now. The big browns shouldn't be going hungry anytime soon. That's for sure.

I'm a tight wad so unless I REALLY gain an advantage by buying something, I usually don't mess with it. Side imaging and the Minnkota Ultrex are two things that I had no problem shelling out $$$ for. Having those two pieces of equipment really helps out a lot. The side imaging got put to work finding the fish and the Ultrex spot lock feature was used so I could fish from the back deck. The wind kept blowing me in to the spot I wanted to fish and without being able to spot lock and fish off the back deck, I would have had a hard time effectively fishing it. Heck, I'm still running a 998 hdsi bird unit that's going on 10 years old. I'm still able to find what I need with it so I haven't bothered to upgrade to a newer mega unit for the cleaner image.

We fished MM 1-6 yesterday and found fish to be hanging around main lake docks in the 15-20' range. They seemed to be oriented near the cross bars of docks an the support cables on the wind blown sides. Needed at least 30' of water under the dock to hold fish. They were finicky though. We'd only catch 2-4 per dock even though the graph showed it holding a bunch of fish. 23 keepers was the best we could muster. Bait color didn't seem to matter. I checked several secondary point docks with 25' or more of water, but didn't find much of anything

I've ran that shoal before in the jet boat when there were boats clogging the Narrows channel. It was a bit nerve wracking the first time since it looks like it's 4-6" deep when the water is completely off. I still worry about sucking up a trout and losing power every time I run that when it's low. 😁

Good luck! Trout usually bite well on those nasty winter days. When I was down in October, it was in the 30s and raining while I was jerkbaiting up near the cable at night. Miserable weather conditions, but I had a good rain suit and the trout were biting well so I barely noticed.

The Garmin Force is his actual trolling motor. The old Minnkota Powerdrive is just for the Livescope transducer so he can point it in a certain direction while being spot locked. If you spot lock with the transducer on the trolling motor, it will constantly be moving instead of staying pointed towards your target.

Sounds like a fun trip! My boat is in the shop so no fishing for me this weekend, but a buddy said he went for a few hours on the Gasconade yesterday morning and said it was brutal. They caught four dinks and that was it. They caught them pretty good the weekend before, but the water was also 6-7 degrees warmer.

My overall average length during that CAM tourney was only 11.8" (720/61). We started out the day in the trophy area and caught several fish between 14-18", but not at the rate that I was happy with so I came back down river and focused on eddies that were chock full of 10" dinks. Would have been interesting to figure out the average size before I left the trophy area versus when I came below it. I'd never purposely do that in anything besides the CAM tournament. I"m not sure I'd even do it again to be honest since it's just a fun charity tournament. That dinking them to death style of fishing gets old to me pretty quick.

The rods and tackle bag are just for looks. The tackle bag is just there to hide my trusty ol crank telephone! I've fished some unpressured stretches of river on the upper Gasconade where catching smallies is easier than falling off of a log. Could two guys catch 100 fish in a float on that stretch? I think so, but you'd better make it a long float and be wacking on them pretty good the entire time. You'd have to boat a fish every 6 minutes for 10 hours straight. Counting breaks to eat, pee and crap and you'd have to catch them even faster . The quality of fishing is relative to the area you are fishing. Try fishing some of the waters that I regularly fish that get pressure and see how close you get to that 100 fish day. Aint happenin! I've seen several guys who fish those dumb unpressured bass show up in my areas and leave with their tail tucked between their legs after a day of fishing. I've got documented proof that I boated 61 fish during the last CAM tournament that Lilley held and I was beating on them pretty good for most of the day. There was heavy generation so I did have to spend quite a bit of time running the boat up to restart my drift so deduct time for that. The tournament is 7 hours long so say 6 hours after you take away the time I spent driving the boat. I averaged about 6 fish an hour (360 / 61 = 5.9). Anybody that fishes for trout and smallies knows it's easier to catch a bunch of trout than it is to catch a bunch of bass.

I enjoy gigging and have defended it, but I do think it has an effect on the smallmouth and walleye. The amount of nice smallmouth and walleye caught this past year is better than I have seen it since I really started fishing rivers in 2012. The only difference that I am aware of is that we've had a couple years in row of high water during the fall and winter that made the river ungiggable. There are more river tournaments going on now than has ever been and yet the fishing is still improving. One guy I know has been consistently catching 5 fish limits of smallies this winter ranging from 16-20# on both the Gasconade and the Meramec. Some are during tournaments and some are while fun fishing. Some things just aren't explainable though. The big largemouth were back this year in decent numbers, but they were virtually non existent in 2019. They must have been on some weird pattern all year long because those fish didn't magically grow from 1.5lbs up to 3-4lbs in a years time.

Keeper is just a bass of legal length that you could keep. "I probably caught 50 fish today, but only 10 of them were keepers. None of them were big though." "Fishing was slow, but everything we caught was a keeper. One was a toad."

@Al Agnew I'd take anything ol snoop says with a grain of salt. Nobody alive besides himself can live up to those 100 keep days that he pulls off every time he goes out. He can toot his own horn with zero proof and call everybody else out with the best of em!

I wonder if the season passes still work in that case or if that's only for the catch and keep season?

Bill Clark of Van Buren, 78, is a life-long hunter of deer, turkey, and small game. He has also pursued elk in Colorado and Wyoming in the 1990s. He and his family own 80 acres east of Peck Ranch Conservation Area where they conduct timber-stand improvements on the heavily forested property and also plant clover and native grasses for elk and other wildlife. Clark says he applied for the elk hunt because he supports MDC’s elk restoration and management efforts, wildlife management in general, and wants to help the herd by thinning a bull. He adds that he frequently sees elk on his property and has noticed an increase in local tourism since elk first arrived in the area in 2011, including an uptick in elk driving tours at Peck Ranch. The feller that drew the land owner tags says he sees elk on his property, but it is only 80 acres so who knows if that's during a different time of the year or what.

A guy I'm friends with on FB went last weekend and caught several trout and smallmouth. Didn't see anything very big though. I'm assuming it's still open 7 days a week like it has been in the past.

4 for 5 now! Only the land owner tag has yet to be filled.

Two more bulls (quite a bit larger) were harvested yesterday. This one was taken on the public land that surrounds the refuge portion of Peck Ranch. This one was killed on private land in Shannon County so I'm sure it was fairly close to Peck Ranch as well.

At the highest levels I think you can only get info from other people fishing the tournament. Outside info from non tourney anglers is supposed to be prohibited.

Of course. The best guy in our bass club has fed us info on days he couldn’t fish and we still didn’t win crap. 🤣

If so nearly all of us would be guilty of breaking that rule. Buddies share info with each other all the time since several of us fish with different partners depending on which club we're fishing.

Yea I'm not sure which one that would be. Hwy 30/Frogs Landing is the furthest down one can trailer in the UMBC tournament. It's held in early June.