FLW Outdoors Magazine - From the Editors

Three Tournaments in One

2010-04-11T19:53:00.006-05:00

The first annual National Guard FLW College Fishing National Championship is supposed to be a three-day tournament, but it's shaping up to be more like three days of tournaments, with each phase being dramatically different from its predecessor.

On Day One at Fort Loudoun Lake southwest of Knoxville, the Auburn team of Dennis Parker and Shaye Baker burst out of the gate with a 16-pound, 10-ounce stringer of six bass to lead the field of 25 two-man teams. Murray State's Kalem Tippett and Steve Miller then positioned themselves as the stalking horse with a 15-pound, 12-ounce stringer. Just when it appeared as if the event would boil down to a nail-biter between the Tigers and the Racers, Day Two spoiled the script.

As Auburn faltered with one bass that weighed 1-pound, 2-ounces and Murray State couldn't manage a single keeper, Texas State came on like a stampede. Jay McCollum and David Cosner, who started out in fourth place with 13-3, brought in 9-10 in the next round and captured the lead with 22 pounds, 13 ounces. Likewise, the University of Florida, which had seemingly taken itself out of the running on Saturday with 6 pounds, 6 ounces, posted a 15-pound, 9-ounce stringer Sunday to claim second with 21 pounds, 15 ounces. Texas A&M is the only stable influence in the field. It was in third on Saturday, and stayed in third Sunday with 4 pounds, 8 ounces and a 19-13 total.

"Oh well, even if we don't win, we can say we were in first place on the first day of the first College National Championship," said Auburn's Baker. Though that might be true, and the Tigers are in fourth place ahead of Murray State in the final round, it's still safe to say that anybody could win. It's been that kind of competition.

Auburn and Murray State's anglers blamed a lack of wind and current for making their fish go off the feed, but the final round could see another turnaround as damkeepers at Tellico Dam downstream start generating again bright and early Monday morning.

Still, that could also play into the hands of McCollum and Cosner, who are fishing the same main lake points pattern as Auburn and Murray State. The trump card might be any spawning bass a college angler can land, as swiftly warming temperatures are starting bass toward the banks and shallow flats. Might the current activate the bank runners again that Auburn and Murray State relied on to get them to the head of the pack on Day One?

Or could a couple of more lunkers such as Cosner weighed in Sunday nail it down for Texas State? Anything is possible; the only thing certain is that it's anybody's tournament to win.

Collegiate Weigh-In Will Settle All Bets

2010-04-10T13:23:00.003-05:00

The first round of the FLW Collegiate Bass National Championship is waning, and the 25 two-man teams are working their way back toward the take-out ramp at Knoxville. Who's ahead? We'll find out at 4 p.m. or thereabouts when the opening weigh-in starts on the campus of the University of Tennessee. Though a few boats report good sacks of bass, Fort Loudon Lake hasn't been altogether kind to everyone. The team from Eastern Kentucky University, for example, caught more than three dozen bass by mid-afternoon, but only a couple of them were keepers. Ditto for the University of Oregon, which hauled in enough small fries to stock a good-size pond.

Although it's anybody's game now, Auburn, Ohio State and Texas State seem to be emerging as the early favorites. A member of the Texas State team from San Marcos boated a 5-pounder and it was the largest reported. Those guys were culling by 1 p.m., as was the Auburn team of Shaye Baker and David Parker. Of course, many of the boats are out of range or just keeping mum about their catches. All will be revealed starting at 4, and set up the competition heading into the next two days.

FLW College Championship

2010-04-10T09:25:00.000-05:00

10:30 a.m.

The action has slowed in the FLW College Championship. We're with the Hampton Sydney College team and the guys are fishing docks. It's slow going so far. The Ohio State team came out strong and had about 9 pounds in the boat within an hour or so. But now they've gone quiet. I'm sharing a boat with Nick Tate and Phillip Hopper of the host University of Tennesse team. Fort Loudon Lake, where the tourney I taking place, is their home waters and they wish they were competing instead of just watching. I told them that the home water advantage wasn't all it's cracked up to be.

Colin Moore

2010-04-08T10:47:00.002-05:00

I'm on the way to Knoxville, heading to the first-ever Collegiate Bass World Championship. The tournament begins Saturday morning and will include 25 two-man teams from colleges and universities around the country. This is an event that you have to qualify for to get in, so it pits the very best young bass anglers from the college ranks against each other. It should be exciting, and I hope to see you there.

Kentucky Native Brings More Than 25 Years of Experience to Publication

2010-02-09T13:38:00.003-06:00

MINNEAPOLIS (Feb. 9, 2010) – FLW Outdoors announced Tuesday veteran outdoor writer and editor Colin Moore has accepted the position of editor-in-chief of FLW Outdoors magazine.

Moore brings more than 25 years of experience in both the fishing and hunting industries to the magazine, including stints with Grand View Media Group and B.A.S.S. Communications, Inc. In addition, Moore also has served as executive editor of Outdoor Life magazine.

“I am pleased and proud to join the FLW Outdoors team,” said Moore. “For many years, this company has served the nation’s sportsmen and provided them with opportunities to fulfill their dreams or just enjoy their time spent outdoors more. I look forward to the challenge of building on what my able predecessors have accomplished, and being part of the team that will explore new opportunities and ways to use the new communication tools available to us. Certainly, we’re in the digital era now, and growing our presence on the Internet and in the various forms of social media is going to be a priority. At the same time, we’re going to remain devoted to delivering the quality information that our magazine readers have come to expect from FLW Outdoors. The goal is to combine all our media platforms into a vibrant, interactive community where the folks we serve feel welcome and engaged.”

“On a personal note, my wife Brenda and I are glad to be returning to our Kentucky homeland,” Moore added. “Through the years, our career paths took us to a lot of wonderful places north and south, but somehow we never felt completely at home anywhere except when we were in Kentucky. So this return definitely has us excited and looking forward to spending a lot more time with our friends and families.”

Moore received a B.A. from Murray State University in Murray, Ky., in 1972 and a M.S. in journalism from Columbia University in New York in 2005. Moore’s numerous awards include accolades from the Florida Outdoor Writers Association, Florida Sportswriters Association and the Outdoor Writers Association of America. In 2005, while at Outdoor Life, Moore won the Henry Luce Award from Time Warner for the Best Feature Article of the Year. The award is presented annually to the editor who assigns and edits the article judged the best of the previous year across all titles in the Time Inc. family of publications.

“When we decided to expand our reach into hunting and other outdoor activities as a complement to our leadership position in the fishing industry, we knew we needed someone with a wealth of experience to help tie everything together from a content standpoint,” FLW Outdoors President and CEO Charlie Evans said. “There is only one person we wanted for this position, and it was Colin. His expertise in fishing, hunting and the entire spectrum of outdoor sports is unmatched.”

FLW Outdoors magazine was founded in 1980 and is the world’s leading authority on bass and walleye angling. In addition to the print and online versions, FLW Outdoors magazine offers even more information on facebook.com/FLWMagazine , twitter.com/flwoutdoors and flwmag.blogspot.com .

Saying Goodbye to Sawdust

2010-01-28T09:16:00.002-06:00

By Sean Ostruszka

It has finally stopped snowing.

Almost every night for a year, my apartment’s living room would get a dusting of snow. It gingerly fell through the air, coating everything once it came to rest – my coffee table, the couch, the TV remote, a wastepaper basket. It even got in what little hair I have on my head.

Then I discovered polyurethane resin. Now the snow storms come far less frequently.

To clarify, the “snow” was actually balsa wood sawdust. As an avid lure maker, almost every night I tinker, fiddle with and make lures. However, living in an apartment with no work room means most of my work is done on the coffee table in my living room. Hence the snowstorms. Honestly, I can’t believe my wife actually put up with the mess for a year.

To my wife’s joy, some six months ago I began talking with a medical student in Brazil who was making lures out of polyurethane resin. Seeing as he had little spare time away from studying, the student needed a way to make lures that was faster than carving them from balsa. Resin lures were the answer.

Polyurethane resin is an extremely tough and rigid urethane that is similar to the plastic most mold-injected lures are made of. In fact, many of the hard swimbaits coming from out West are made from resin. It comes in two parts that have to be mixed together, and in its unaltered state, the resin doesn’t float. However, by adding microballoons – hollow glass spheres that look like a fine powder and decrease the weight of a casted piece – the resin can reach a density of roughly 0.5 to 0.6 g/cm3 (water has a maximum density of 1 g/cm3). To put that in perspective, balsa wood has a density ranging from about 0.1 to 0.13 g/cm3, while basswood and pine range from 0.3 to 0.6 g/cm3. That means the resin isn’t near as buoyant as balsa wood, but it is still buoyant and light enough for lure building.

The beauty of resin is its capability to quickly replicate the same lure over and over. Any lure builder knows every lure made from wood will work slightly different from the next depending on slight differences in shape, wood density and weight placement. With the resin, one lure is exactly like the next. Better yet, lures can be made in seconds.

Alumilite is a company that specializes in making these casting resins, and they have a multitude of options. Some of the resins are actually cured hard in 90 seconds, though I prefer resins that allow for a little more working time. Compare that to the hours that go into building one balsa lure.

The downfall is price and initial time. A plank of balsa costs next to nothing. A 28-ounce kit of polyurethane resin and a jar of microballoons will run around $43. Builders will also have to purchase RTV silicone rubber to make the mold to shape the resin. A 1-pound jar goes for $27.50 on alumilite.com. Like I said, it is not cheap, though Alumilite does sell complete starter kits that come with everything a builder would need, along with instructions. Go with the Super Casting Kit for $70, as the smaller one doesn’t really have enough silicone for most lures.

As for the initial attempt, that can be a hassle. First, a master has to be made of the lure, which can be carved from wood, resin or even wax. All the rest of the lures will end up like the master, so extra time has to be taken to make sure it is perfect. Then the mold has to be made. How to make a mold is explained in the instructions, and there are some great videos on the Web.

Once those two steps are done, though, it’s all gravy. I can go home, mix up a batch of resin, pour it into the mold and have a finished lure in minutes. I’ve since gotten into making two-part hollow lures with the resin that are better for making topwater lures or adding rattles. However, I’m learning they can be a headache that takes a lot of forethought and effort. Then again, that is what most lure builders enjoy about the hobby – figuring out those little headaches and creating something that may one day catch them the trophy of a lifetime.

Personally, the more I use the resin the less I believe I’ll ever go back to balsa. Don’t get me wrong, there will always be lures that are simply better when made from balsa, like shallow crankbaits. But the possibilities are endless with this stuff. Besides, I also like being able to see my coffee table again.

If you are interested in learning more about polyurethane resin or lure building in general, feel free to e-mail me at sostruszka@flwoutdoors.com

How Cool is Chrome?: A former walleye pro has the answer, and what may be the toughest chrome finish available

2010-01-21T15:04:00.007-06:00

By Curtis Niedermier

If fishing lures are designed as much to catch anglers as fish, chrome lures may be the best lures in the business. On the store shelf or in a tackle box, a shiny Bill Lewis Rat-L-Trap or Rapala Original Floater staring back is a powerful draw to choose that lure. It has worked on me. I’ve got Rat-L-Traps in every size in the traditional chrome with blue or black back.

On the water, chrome at least holds up to its advertisement. Fish eat chrome lures. The problem is the chrome finishes rarely hold up, especially if they spend much time banging bottom, shredding weeds or catching toothy fish. I once shredded the chrome finish off another brand of lipless crankbait within about five minutes of ripping it in sparse grass clumps. Three or four hangups were enough to lose it completely.

But chrome lovers take heed, a former FLW Walleye Tour pro is here with a whole new look on the chrome market. Keith Eshbaugh of West Alexander, Pa., is the owner of Dutch Fork Custom Lures (custompaintalure.com). He has been a walleye and muskie tournament angler for years and happens to be a walleye stick on the Three Rivers near Pittsburgh. Throughout his tournament career, he often custom painted lures for himself and fellow anglers. Now, he not only paints lures, but he has developed a method to put some of the most impressive chrome finishes on crankbaits a guy can find.

“A lot of the bait companies, they took the chrome baits off the market because they weren’t holding up,” Eshbaugh said. “The two main ways they do it are electroplating – you can electroplate plastic if it has the proper base coat, but it doesn’t hold up too well – and the other is vacuum chroming. My chroming process is a lot different. It is completely new to the fishing industry.”

Eshbaugh is still a little guy in the lure business, so he is understandably guarded of the details of his process. All we know is it is tough enough to hold up to toothy walleyes and even muskies, and there may not be a freshwater creature around that can do more damage to a lure than a muskie.

Colors and Options
Because Eshbaugh does all his work by hand, he can create virtually any chrome finish a customer desires. He can also put it on just about any material seen in today’s lure industry – metal spinner blades, balsa crankbaits, plastic stick baits.

I saw firsthand a handful of plastic and balsa lures common to both bass and walleye fishing, and I’m still amazed at how well all those colors shine. He doesn’t just paint designs over a chrome base. He can blend from one chrome color to another to make detailed baitfish patterns, bright multitones, black chrome, various shades of copper and gold, and just about anything else.

Some of his more common requests are to recreate discontinued chrome patterns and take standard color patterns, such as perch or even some bass anglers’ soft-plastic craw patterns, and transform them into chrome patterns. He can also add extra details, such as scale finishes over the chrome.

Make Fish Commit
It wouldn’t be fair to talk up all these chrome lures without touching on where and when to use them. Paul Doute of Southgate, Mich., owns Angler’s Quest, a Lake Erie and Detroit River charter service. He is also an FLW Walleye Tour co-angler and a fishing educator with Lance Valentine’s Walleye 101.

For handlining and open-water trolling, he has learned that chrome lures work best under certain conditions.

“On those days when the water is clean, or slightly stained, with high sun and no clouds, I usually try to use the chrome to get fish to commit from a farther distance,” he said. “In my opinion, with the big game fish, the last thing to get them to commit to actually taking a lure is sight. They may hear it, they may smell it, but to get that final commitment to actually strike a lure, it is by sight.”

Doute prefers his color patterns to have some transitions from dark to light colors, as well as natural forage patterns. The flashes of color changes on the sides help imitate fleeing forage fish and get walleyes close enough to think about biting.

Additionally, some chrome patterns are proven to just flat work in specific situations. Based on 20 years of records from handlining in the Detroit River, Doute knows that a No. 11 or 13 Rapala Original Floater in the clown color pattern is the most productive lure in the early season. Clown has a red head, yellow back and chrome sides. Unfortunately, that particular rendering has been discontinued, and formerly, Doute had to pay a premium on eBay for one. That problem is now solved with custom chrome from Dutch Fork Custom Lures.

Clarifying

2010-01-20T08:45:00.002-06:00

"With all due respect to the editors of FLW Outdoors Magazine, the facts you state in your article on the new Yamaha motor are incorrect. Two stroke engines are NOT going away with the new 2010 EPA regulations. The Evinrude E-TEC two-stroke technology is EPA compliant and as a matter of fact, has been since the regulations were announced two years ago! Please check your facts so the buying public is not mislead with wrong information on EPA regulations." - Anonymous

Thank you for the comment. You're right, not all 2-strokes are going away. Evinrude will indeed continue producing EPA compliant 2-srokes. Yamaha will, however, discontinue producing 2-strokes, which is what the blog intended to state. Sorry for the confusion.

On Loan for $25: The Rapala Shad Rap Story

2009-12-12T19:11:00.003-06:00

By Sean Ostruszka

It has no rattles or weight transfer system. No mold-injected body or laser-engraved color schemes. No hard-wobbling action or even 3-D eyes. Nothing of any technological significance. It’s just balsa, wire, zinc, Lexan and a paint job. It’s simpler than a Kellogg’s Pop-Tart. And it will be catching fish long after we are all gone.

It’s a Rapala Shad Rap.

Compared to the newest crankbaits, which feature most of the above-mentioned features, Shad Raps are dinosaurs. Yet even the most quasi walleye angler owns at least a dozen Shad Raps, while most pros own two dozen in each color. Why? Because they still catch fish better than almost any crankbait out there, and they have been doing so from the moment they were designed more than 20 years ago. And I do mean from the very beginning. When the crankbait first came out in 1982, it was so popular, yet hard to find, bait shops on Mille Lacs Lake in Minnesota rented out individual Shad Raps for the day for $25 – with a $25 deposit.

The lure is quite a bit easier to find now, yet it hasn’t lost its mojo. So, being a lure nut, I wanted to know what makes this lure so incredible. Rapala Director of Field Promotions Mark Fisher filled me in.

“The No. 1 issue is it is made from balsa,” Fisher said. “Balsa gives the lure the most delicate and lively action. The lure almost slides through the water. No other material can do that. We have experimented with various plastics, but plastic just doesn’t have the ballast and buoyancy.”

Balsa has a density ranging from about 0.1 to 0.13 g/cm3 (water has a maximum density of 1 g/cm3), making it the lightest and most buoyant of all hardwoods. It is even more buoyant than cork. That unique property creates a sharp action when combined with the zinc ballast and the right shape, but we will get to that later. For now, know the balsa construction of a Shad Rap means it takes very little forward motion to get action out of it. That, combined with its subtle rolling action, is why it is the top lure in cold water for so many pros.

The shape of the body also plays a key role.

“If you look at the lure straight on, you’ll see it is in the shape of a compressed oval,” Fisher said. “That is what gives the tight, rolling action. The flatter and narrower the sides of a crankbait, the faster the action will snap back to vertical. The rounder the sides, the more it will want to roll.”

The Shad Rap combines the best of both actions with the buoyancy of balsa. No other lure can claim the same.

Anglers may also notice a Shad Rap swims on a level plane. This was also by design. The Shad Rap was originally created to be used for trout and northern pike in the shallow rivers and streams of Europe. In order to not get hung up, the lure had to swim level while still having the desired action. That is the reason the lip is on an angle instead of straight out. Of course, this is also why the lure is not the best at bumping cover. It wasn’t created for it.

Beyond that, there is not much more to the lure. I wish it was more complicated, but it is just that simple. However, the Shad Rap has spawned numerous more complicated lures. Though, the transformation wasn’t always easy.

In 2000, Rapala set out to make a jointed version of the Shad Rap from plastic. Knowing now what you do about the importance of balsa to this lure, the plastic lure gave the designers headaches.

“They knew they would be giving up some delicacy by going with plastic,” Fisher said. “But it was giving up a lot more than they wanted.”

Eventually, one of the designers realized that jointed lures have aggressive actions anyway, so there was little reason to keep trying to make the jointed model subtle. Instead, Rapala put in a rattle and created a lure that rivals many lipless crankbaits for noise – the Jointed Shad Rap.

Along with the jointed model, Rapala has taken the basic Shad Rap design and created lures like the Glass Shad Rap, X-Rap Shad and Minnow Rap, which is actually a combination of a Shad Rap and Original Floater.

“Including colors, sizes and variations, I’d say there are probably 2 million pieces that have come out of the Shad Rap,” Fisher said. “And of those 2 million, half the ones out there are the same six lures: No.5, No.7 and No. 9 Shad Raps and Shallow Shad Raps. And I bet the majority of those are in the same three colors: silver and black, gold and black, and firetiger. It is incredible when you think about it.”

Not bad for one of the simplest lures on the market.

Wet Shoes and Electricty

2009-11-25T09:06:00.000-06:00

By Sean Ostruszka

It was a night you praise the inventor of rain gear.

A couple weeks ago, Mike Steuck of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources invited me and FLW Walleye Tour pro Chris Burns of Davenport, Iowa, out to watch the Iowa DNR do its annual fall electrofishing – aka. shocking.

Having never watched this before, I was pretty excited. I mean, how often does an angler get a chance to watch walleyes suddenly float up all around the boat?

All and all, it was a great time. Steuck explained how the tool used for electrofishing works on the same principle as a police stun gun. Every electrofishing boat is equipped with a generator. In the case of the Iowa DNR, their boats’ generators pump out 220 volts, or enough to power some refrigerators. Attached to the generator is a dropper, which is lowered into the water and releases an electrical field. While water is a great conductor for electricity, the field given off by the dropper only reaches 5 to 6 feet in any direction.

For fish farther away from the dropper, the electricity will cause a slight tingle. However, for fish that swim into the field, it is instant incapacitation. When electricity comes in contact with the muscles of a fish, or any animal, it causes the muscles to contract. And if there is enough electricity, every muscle in the body will contract at the same time, completely incapacitating the fish. While the phenomenon isn’t the most pleasant of experiences, the contraction does no damage to the fish. It simply becomes rigid and, because of its air bladder, floats to the surface. From there, Burns and I got to net them up and drop them into a livewell.

Of course, not everything went smoothly. A weather front moved in the second I arrived in Davenport and didn’t leave until I left (something I found a little eerie). That weather system drenched us all night long. My rain gear took it like a champ. My boots, not so much.

Still, some wet feet were easily worth getting a chance to be on the boat. Here are a few pictures I managed to take that night while hunkered underneath a rain coat.

Pounders = Ouch

2009-11-24T08:51:00.000-06:00

I hate "pounders."

It's been five days since I took a trip with my dad to Cave Run Lake for some fall muskie fishing. I woke up this morning and parts of me still hurt. My hands are raw. My back aches. And my left tricep is still very upset. If today was the day after the trip I'd think nothing of it. Fall muskie fishing for me always involves giant lures that can make an angler sore. But this is five days later, and last I checked I'm not 60.

Hence why I hate "pounders."

To be more specific, "pounder" is the affectionate nickname given to the Musky Innovations Super Magnum Bulldawg. Basically, the lure is 16 ounces of pain. You read that right, 16 ounces. Launching a cast with one of those things requires physics I'm not smart enough to figure out. Forget loading up the rod. All you can do is swing the lure back, and when it starts swinging forward, use that momentum to get it airborne. Some 25 feet later, it will hit the surface of the water like a goat dropped from an airplane.

Why did I throw that monstrosity you ask? Partly because the guys I was fishing with, longtime friends and guides Tony Grant and Scott Salchli, wanted to see how long I would throw it, and partly because they catch fish… though not for me. I threw that thing around a fair amount over two days, resting often to check for hernias, and never moved a fish. Luckily, there are the "lighter" Magnum Bulldawgs (7.8 ounces) and Chaos Tackle Medussas (8.25 ounces). Now those lures did the trick. Over the weekend I had four bites and two follows between the two, along with boating a 37-incher on the Medussa.

There are three things I'll take away from the trip along with the pictures. The first was lure color. The first day, all the action on the giant soft plastics came on firetiger. However, on day two I never moved a fish on the bright lures and instead caught my fish on natural colors. The water temperatures didn't change. The sun was still shining both days. The locations were the same. Yet had I not switched between the two I may have never caught a fish.

No. 2 was watching the moon. Fall muskie action almost always comes in windows. And those windows often revolve around moonrise and moonset. Like clockwork both days, once we got within an hour of moonset the fish started showing up. Of the 14 fish my dad and I moved, eight came in two one-hour windows in the evenings around the moonsets.

However, the most important thing I took away was how to work the giant soft plastics over weeds. Salchli is one of, if not the best at working weeds with giant soft-plastic jerkbaits. And he showed me what he calls his "bunny hop." Instead of jerking or ripping the lures over the weeds, Salchi points his rod up and does a series of quick pulls to keep the lure just ticking the tops without getting fouled. It’s not easy and it takes some practice to feel the lure just ticking the tops, but once I got it down I caught fish.

Now it's time for more Advil. Man I love muskie fishing!

Slam the hooks!

Sean Ostruszka

A Crankbait “Dives-To” New Depths

2009-11-20T15:15:00.001-06:00

By Jason Sealock

For some reason, crankbaits overtook other lures this year in the speck of cyberspace inside my head that is my attention span. My wife gets annoyed that I can’t hear other words when I’m singularly focused on one task or noise. The problem is compounded when it involves something to do with fishing.

Back to my original train of thought, this year we’ve caught so many fish in so many different scenarios on so many different crankbaits that it started me on this quest to understand what it is about my favorite crankbaits that has made them … well, my favorite crankbaits.

Some crankbaits I’ve been throwing for years. Some I only started throwing this year (like the Jackall MC/60 I wrote about earlier).

What is it, though, that compels us as anglers to stock a box full of similar looking crankbaits, yet reach for the same ones day in and day out. Obviously catching fish has something to do with it. The depth you’re trying to hit has something to do with it. I think, however, as we become better anglers, we learn to quickly assess when a crankbait will catch bass or just cramp our arms all day in given scenarios. In fact, I’d argue, all of fishing really boils down to that single premise – assessing the best tool for the given situation or scenario.

Rapala DT Series Background

David Fritts didn’t invent crankbait fishing, but he’s certainly in the discussion as one of the forefathers of it. I recently caught up with Mark Fisher, Director of Field Promotions, for Rapala. Mark has been with Rapala for 9 years now and was a pro-staffer for 12 years before that. So his mind houses more than 20 years of experience with their wide-range of products. We got on the subject of the Dives-To (DT) Series, a subject dear to his heart.

“The DT Series is an evolution of Fritts’ many years of experience and his intense study of the properties of Balsa and what you could do with it,” Fisher said. “The Fritts system of cranking employs 10 pound line and snap casts to achieve specific depths. All the crankbaits in the DT line were designed along this system. That’s why we say an actual depth and not a range.”

Some crankbait companies look for a certain shape and then figure out the depth range it runs. Rapala attacks bait design from the standpoint that they want to be sure a bait does what they say it will do. If they say it will run 20 feet, then anything shy of that is a failure to them. Fritts worked painfully long hours with Jarmo Rapala to get the baits in the DT line perfect.

Building on Reputation

One interesting note is that Rapala has the technology to basically take an existing balsa bait, scale it down 70 percent and reproduce the bait again at the reduce size. But Fisher pointed out several drawbacks to sizing baits.

“We have a basic silhouette, but we also have the capabilities to shoot an element and take it like you would in a copy machine and reduce it 50 or 75 percent,” Fisher said. “We lose some of the action just straight reducing though. The dynamics of the baits change, so we have to play with lip angles, body widths and where the pull point is on the lip. All those aspects impact the action of the bait. All the baits maintain a family appearance but each one is slightly modified and presents refined actions and characteristics that differentiate it in the family.”

Rapala has a tongue and cheek statement around the office – no one ever returns a lure because it won’t catch fish. But for them it’s the standard by which their designs live. There is a mystique about Rapala. They know several folks who literally took their father’s favorite Rapala to the grave, and it became a family heirloom.

“We think about that when we’re building our crankbaits,” Fisher said. “If we’re building a DT4, then it’s critical to us that the bait does what we say it will do. Our engineers are as good as the world’s best Swiss clock makers.”

The early DT 20 didn’t hit 20 feet consistently and had some swimming issues. A lot of that was just getting the designers to understand terminology in terms of what a crankbait does like hunting or kicking out. Turns out it was simply a problem with the pull point on the lip and now the baits hit their mark.

“When we build a bait to hit a specific depth in the Dives To line, not only do we hit that depth but we learn through the process of testing and tweaking what action is the best action at that depth,” Fisher said. “I love to crank. I did before I ever came to Rapala. We don’t ever knock any other crankbaits because there are a lot of great crankbaits out there. But so many things have been incorporated into the DT series that give me such a confidence that when I tie it on I’m going to hit the depths I need to and it’s going to look appealing to the bass when it gets down there.”

One of the most impressive things to me has been how consistent the baits are. Now there are some anglers I talk with that believe one rattles a little different than the others and will go through 50 DT’s to find the right noise in one. The baits are designed with a baritone rattle but to me that is not the key. The key is that almost every one I’ve ever thrown runs true right out of the box. These are mass-produced lures, but they still fish like handmade lures.

“The balance, action and depths are incredibly consistent,” Fisher said. “We’re rolling hundreds of thousands of these baits out. Part of that goes to the consistency of the balsa we use to maintain that tolerance in every bait. And it shows in the success people have with them. Fritts said the DT 6 is the finest grass crankbait ever made. We get calls from guys all the time to thank us for making the baits that won them so much money.”

Common Misconception

One of the things Fritts taught Fisher in their work together is that most people will put down their crankbaits when the fishing is slow and pick up some other lures. Fritts learned that by changing the depth, action and profile on certain days, you can get the fish triggered again. So when others reach for a spinnerbait, topwater or a worm, Fritts just picks up a flat-sided crankbait or a round-belly bait or a deeper or shallower model and keeps “plugging” away at it.

Cool Trick

I like to learn how people very fluent with a crankbait’s capabilities, work it to achieve a desired response from the bass. Fisher offered a great trick for fishing around grass. When he’s cranking around grass, he’ll reel the bait like normal, but occasionally, he’ll pop the rod tip and then throw slack back toward the bait by dropping his rod tip, much like you would while walking the dog. The slack allows the bait to pivot 180 degrees on its axis while still in its downward facing position.

Next, he reels up his slack and sets the hook. Most of the time, he never feels the bite, so he sets the hook to be sure. Then if he doesn’t have a fish, he’ll start reeling again. Most of the time the bass will engulf the bait while it pivots, but if not, the change in direction afterward often triggers them. This technique works better with the bigger DT’s like the DT 16 and DT 20 but will work with the others as well.

Colors

It’s not feasible to make every color for every angler, so good lure manufacturers have a base of proven colors. Rapala believes that base is not only good colors nationally but also the hot regional colors that are specific to an area of the country.

“We find out that regionally a certain color might be the hot ticket and we look at that every year to make sure we have a good solid nuts and bolts offering,” Fisher said. “But then we also want to make sure we have those regional hot tickets for further acceptance of the baits. It’s cool to see the trends in color not necessarily on what baits sell the most but what baits you always see in good anglers tackle boxes. And honestly with David Fritts, Larry Nixon, Dave Lefebre, Terry Bolton, Tom Mann Jr. and the other pros, we have the knowledge to build the best crankbaits, and we wouldn’t be able to otherwise.”

Running the new Yamaha SHO V Max 250 LA

2009-11-17T19:13:00.001-06:00

By Jason Sealock

Waking up to rain at 6:00 am didn’t dampen the excitement of testing the new Yamaha outboards. The air was cool but not cold, and the rain was spitting and misting on the 45-minute drive to the test facility in Bridgeport, Ala. A quick safety meeting got everyone on the same page, and then a run down of the SHO outboard came next.

SHO stands for Super High Output 4-stroke technology. The old 3.3L engine has been upgraded to a 4.2L engine. The outboard is 34 pounds lighter than the V MAX Series II 2-stroke engine it replaces in the Yamaha product line. No other outboard with the same horsepower is lighter in fact. At 505 pounds, the 250 purrs like a kitten at idle. Actually it sounds like the low rumble of a high performance sports car. But when it was time to hit the gas, the engine was surprisingly quiet, even without any muffler, a first for the Yamaha 4-strokes.

Many folks don’t realize that a 4-stroke means no oil reserve under the back deck. Owners can actually very easily change their own oil through a filter that is very easy to access. It is even tilted upward with a scoop under it to remove any of the drip problems (i.e. smoke from spilled oil) from the whole process.

I asked pro angler Dave Wolak how much oil he went through last season on tour with his 3.3L F225 4-stroke, and he changed his oil only twice. We’re talking maybe 12 quarts in a year of hardcore competitive fishing. That’s impressive and this engine is even better. That’s hundreds of dollars saved in oil if you fish and run your boat a lot, thousands over the life of the outboard.

You might hear the engine referred to as the VF250LA. The V is for VMAX, and F is for four-stroke. The LA stands for L shaft length which is the 20-inch model and A for the first generation of this outboard. But the thing to keep in mind here is we’re talking about a 4-stroke engine that has springs and cylinders and more parts than a 2-stroke. All these things add weight, yet these outboards are as light or lighter than 2-strokes.

Okay, the proof is in the pudding – namely how does it handle on the water in real life. Well two of us jumped in the boat. We idled past the no wake zone, and Wolak leaned over to ask, “Are you ready?” “Let it rip,” I said. In an instant we were on pad and rapidly approaching 60 mph. Then 65. Then 70, 71, 72, 73 and 74 mph. Wow. The Z520 is running 74 mph going up river against a heavy current. Unreal.

He came off pad for a second and then jumped back up on plane in an instant. Then back down to a low speed and we jump back into full speed. This was just a sick display of not only the incredible hole shot but also the mid-range power the outboard has.

One nice thing I noticed is there wasn’t that “clunk” when you went into and out of gear. I was also very impressed with the responsiveness of the motor. No hesitation and immediate power. It was smooth, quiet, and powerful, and it was a 4-stroke.

While coming back down the river, Wolak demonstrated a situation that any angler who has fished a shallow fishery has encountered at least once. You’re fishing a really shallow area or you have a problem while running and have to shutdown in shallow water. You can either idle for a long time to get to deep enough water again to get on pad or you can drive in a circle until you build up enough speed to get on plane.

In half a turn, the boat was buoyed up to the surface, and we were on plane. Unreal!

Anglers and boaters have a choice of 200, 225 and 250 hp models in the V MAX SHO line. All the technologies are the same just some different size and horsepower options.

The secret is in increased airflow, lighter weight and borrowed technology of plasma fused metals in the bored out cylinders. The result is increased displacement which means more power. But the other advantage is these metal powders are passed in front of a plasma arc and bonded to the cylinders to create an ultra thin layer on the actual cylinder that is 60% harder than steel.

A side effect is that microscopic pockets form in the metals. These pockets hold oil. The result is no more cylinder scrapes and greatly reduced friction, a natural thief of power. Also because the friction is down, the heat is down and the overall cooling in the engine is increased.

The thing is most folks won’t even see all the little things they fixed, lightened, redesigned, and designed from scratch to achieve this three-year-in-the-making motor. The overlying message I found while studying the engine is that there are so many things that make this engine a great investment and add to its performance that you can’t say it’s just one thing that makes it better.

Small things like retooled water intake to make sure the engine gets enough water pressure in all types of situations to the redesigned air intake and transfer system to make sure the air is not only cooler but more abundant. Engines run better on cooler mornings because the fuel and air are denser then. This is one thing that Yamaha can simulate to make the outboards perform better.

I think these engines will set a new bar. For those that don’t know, 2-strokes are going away. Manufacturers will stop producing 2-strokes very soon because of EPA regulations. In fact, Yamaha said only the 150 and 175 2-strokes will remain after January 1, 2010. The dealers who already have the other 2-strokes can continue to sell them, but no more are going to be manufactured.

I am seriously impressed with this 4-stroke outboard. I thoroughly enjoyed being able to test the motor on both a Ranger Z520 and the new Skeeter FX 21. The weather certainly won’t rain on this parade. Check the www.yamahagamechanger.com website later this week for a lot of technical information on all the new offerings from Yamaha for 2010. We’ll have more updates on the other products soon as well.

Hop over to our YouTube channel to see some videos from the outboard test this morning.

NEW YAMAHA VMAX SHO SNEAK PEAK

2009-11-16T20:50:00.001-06:00

By Jason Sealock

Game Changer? It's definitely going to be a drool inducer. We were invited to an early viewing of the new 4-stroke outboards from Yamaha. Today we were only privy to images of the new outboards and tomorrow we'll actually get to put them through their paces on several different boats.

Most notably in their introduction to bass anglers is the all new YAMAHA V MAX SHO line of 200, 225 and 250 horsepower outboards. These are 4-stroke outboards but they completely reinvent what a 4-stroke outboard "can be." Most notably, the engines are 34 pounds lighter than their counterpart V MAX 2-stroke cousins. According to Yamaha engineers, no other V6 bass outboard of equal horsepower is lighter including two-strokes.

The engines incorporate the first marine application of plasma-fused sleeveless cylinders. This is basically a high-tech aeronautical and performance automobile technology that has been ported over and applied to marine technology for the first time. They get a larger bore which results in much more displacement, in fact the largest displacement in its class.

The result for bass anglers and boat owners is more response, power and the fastest hole shot acceleration in its class, even more than the V MAX Series 2 two-stroke models.

Tomorrow morning we'll be testing these outboards along with a slick new 70-hp, four-stroke that will be a sweet option for a lot of aluminum model boats. Just like its big brothers, this outboard is lighter, faster and more fuel and oil effecient.

I'm actually very excited to run the boats tomorrow, and it will be interesting to see the new Skeeter boats being unveiled tomorrow as well. We'll hopefully have video from the test runs along with tweets from the event tomorrow. Check back to see more or follow us on Twitter.

Until then, here are a few photos compliments of the great folks at Yamaha. I'm already drooling and scheming on how to get a Ranger with the new outboard next year.

Do You Know What Your Jig is Doing?

2009-11-06T16:19:00.001-06:00

By Jason Sealock

I like to look at lures in the water. I constantly do this with new baits and we're going to be incorporating a "water-eye-view" into some of our product photography in future issues.

Today we took several jigs and dropped them into the tank along with a bunch of plastics to study their actions. It was pretty eye-opening.

Here are a few of our favorites:

A couple different football jigs

A flippin jig with a big Zoom Chunk

And our favorite of the day - The Talon Series Shibui Ookii Jig

Doesn't that look like a Venus Fly Trap or something. You should see it move in the water. Just unreal. We'll be doing a First Look on this jig soon! Very cool.

Tackle Storage is a System

2009-11-05T12:16:00.001-06:00

By Jason Sealock

My storage system for tackle is not complex, but it works really well. Being the editor for a fishing magazine means you fish a lot in “someone else’s boat.” That translates to me constantly being the “co-angler” and lugging tackle to and from different boats. Rods, reels, tackle, tools, and more have to get from my garage to some remote destination. And over the course of 25 years, I’ve collected what my wife terms a stupid amount of gear. I’m probably the worst about going to a tackle shop and buying something I already have because “I might run out.”

That leads to a lot more tackle than a person (or boat for that matter) can physically carry. So how does one keep it all organized yet have it readily accessible when heading out the door? Well obviously having some method to all this madness helps. Sure I’ve got unopened packages hanging on pegboard, and tubs full of plastics still in their bags. But that’s not very efficient to organize on the fly.

The key is being modular and organized from box to box. If you only have 20 crankbaits, put them all in a Plano StowAway® box labeled crankbaits. However, if you have 300 crankbaits, you might need to be a little more organized. I store all my crankbaits two different ways. I store them by brand (so I can easily grab all my Rapalas or all my Lucky Crafts if I want). But I also store them by running depths. I’ll have a Rapala box, a Bomber box and a Norman box. But I’ll also have a shallow box, a medium box, and a deep diver box. I even have a custom painted box.

I do the same for other lures like topwaters, spinnerbaits, swimbaits, jerkbaits and more.

The labeling can be something as simple as masking tape and black marker, or you can use a label maker to make them all easily legible. Certain boxes store baits better than others. I keep most of my big crankbaits in the staple Plano StowAway® ProLatchTM 2-3600 or a 2-3700. But recently the 2-3701 and 2-3601 have been even better for storing baits. They are the thin versions of the old standbys and neatly store baits in a low profile container. Of course you’ll need more but it saves having a tangled mess every time I reach for a shallow running crankbait.

I also really like the XL ProLatchTM StowAway®. It’s one big box perfect for storing tools, fishing line and bags of soft baits in bulk. I keep several under my work bench. One holds jumbo spools of line, one holds filler spools of line, one holds tools for making jigheads and skirts and others hold plastics in bulk. I can easily grab one and throw it in my truck when I head out the door.

But the key to the system is storing everything on shelves where they are easily seen. Plano’s Storage Shelving works perfectly in our tackle room at the office and took less than 10 minutes to put together. We use two of them as well as some standard shelves to store everything. One shelf holds six of the XL StowAways or a pile of the 3601 and 3701 StowAways.

Keep about six to eight empty StowAways on hand always. When we have a field assignment or just a fun trip where we want to put some new products through the paces, we load a few baits from several different boxes into the empty boxes and hit the road. Sometimes, however, like when we know there is a hot crankbait bite, we just grab whole boxes and go.

This system works the same for me at home. When I get ready to go, I generally do my research and know what I should take depending on season and fishery. So I load up what is needed and only end up most of the time needing one or two boxes and some plastics in my bag.

This is a modular system that has worked for me fishing all over the country and even locally. When it’s winter, I know the fish won’t be hitting my Spro Bronzeyes or Zoom Horny Toads. When I’m fishing muddy water I know I won’t need my Optimum swimbaits. So I travel with only what I need for the trip. That saves me from lugging whole boxes just because one or two baits from that box are needed.

Obviously it takes some time to build up to this system, but if you’re like me, asking me to throw out a pack of plastics is like asking me to throw out a tool I don’t use often. If there’s a chance that it may be the perfect tool for a certain situation, then I’m going to hang on to it.

The Fish that Indiana U Will Remember Forever

2009-11-03T11:30:00.001-06:00

By Jason Selaock

This one bass turned around their whole tournament. They had a meager 4 pounds after day one. Then on Day two they went with their gut instincts and hit a spot that yielded a 3 and this fish that weighed nearly 5 pounds. We were fortunate enough to be filming Jesse as he fought the bass and Dustin as he netted it.

It was great to see their reaction and the other anglers fishing on the bank and in their boats clapping and cheering for them. It was an awesome thing to witness because this was the exact moment that turned the tournament around for them.

See it unfold here in these photos taken by Sean Ostruszka
(click the photos to see a larger version).

Bass Fishing on the Today Show

2009-10-22T09:18:00.001-05:00

Bass Fishing doesn't get a lot of mainstream media coverage. Usually I'm okay with that because fishing is a source. It's much like surfing in the way it provides a lot of people with motivation and desire that would not otherwise have it. And trying to force that on people is somewhat counter-productive to helping balance and enrich lives.

But occasionally bass fishing gets thrust into the limelight for a moment or two. We can only hope that it's for positive reasons. So I was happy to see FLW Outdoors, the National Guard, Ranger, Evinrude and other companies as well as personalities like Justin Lucas, David Dudley, and more shown positively on the TODAY Show on NBC this morning (Oct 22, 8 a.m. hour).

While several of the facts and mentions were inaccurate, the gist of the piece was about how much bass fishing has grown from the days of our grandfathers and how much the sport of professional competitive fishing has grown. I thought Lucas did a great job in the piece and it was a lot of fun to watch I thought.

See what you think

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Cull-or Me Impressed

2009-10-19T09:41:00.000-05:00

In the perfect tournament, an angler would make five casts, catch five 8-pounders, slip all of them in the livewell and practice his winning smile the rest of the day. In other words, there would be no need to ever worry about culling fish.

Reality, however, means an angler will ideally have to cull early and often throughout a tournament. This lends itself to the possibility of an angler culling the wrong fish or forgetting to cull and having too many fish in the livewell – neither of which is a winning strategy. Plus, there is the wasted time of trying to find the smallest fish in the livewell so it can be replaced.

Luckily, a handful of manufacturers have devised products to aid anglers in keeping their best five bass in a day. Here’s a look at a limit’s worth of those products tournaments anglers have to choose from.

Ardent SmartCull Professional Culling System

Along with reels, Ardent makes a host of accessories for anglers, one of which being the SmartCull Professional Culling System. Basically, Ardent has taken a set of clips and attached a floating, colored ball to them – nothing new there. However, each ball has a set of numbered dials that allow the angler to show the pounds and ounces of each individual fish up to 15 pounds, 15 ounces. It’s a simple, “why didn’t I think of that” feature that ends the hassle of digging through fish to find the smallest one. The system comes with six clips and retails for $39.99. (ardentoutdoors.com)

Cull-Buddy

The beauty of the Cull-Buddy system is storage. The six colored buoys neatly hang in a holder, which can be mounted on any livewell or storage lid larger than 9 inches by 9 inches. The holder is made from a durable PVC-like material, and it’s easily installed with the included mounting hardware. Aside from convenience, the system also means no more loose clips rattling and tangling in storage compartments. The system retails for $34.99. (cull-buddy.com)

Berkley Tournament Culling System with 15lb Scale

For the technology buffs, the Tournament Culling System with 15lb Scale is as cutting edge as it gets when it comes to culling. Along with eight color-coded culling clips, the system includes a digital scale that stores and sorts fish as an angler weighs them. Not only does this help with quickly culling the smallest bass, it will also add up the weight so the angler knows roughly where they stand. Batteries are included for this system, which retails for $44.95. (berkley-fishing.com)

Accu-Cull Culling System

Similarly to the Ardent SmartCull, the Accu-Cull system utilizes dials to note the weight of each individual fish up to 9.99 pounds. Yes, you can actually note the hundredths of an ounce, which is great for tournaments where small fish rule the system. The system itself doesn’t actually come with clips, but it mounts to the lid of the livewell and works with clips you may already own thanks to both numbered and color-coded dials. The retail price is $35.99. (accucull.com)

XTools xCull Manual Cull Kit

Most buoys use a flexible cord, which can get tangled both in storage and when hooked to a fish. The floating xCull buoys are solid plastic, minimizing the problem. The xClips are also easy to use as they don’t have to be run through the gills. While a grease board and pencil do come in the kit, the system is perfectly complimented by the Accu-Cull system. xTools also make the gripNweigh Pro Series Automatic Culling System similar to the Berkley model. The retail price for the manual kit is $18.99. (xtools.us)

-- Sean Ostruszka

Learning Concentration through Skeet Shooting

2009-10-09T14:47:00.000-05:00

When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time in my grandmother’s backyard shooting trap with my dad. We used a simple thrower like is available from Walmart and shot only for fun. I did the same thing in high school with my friends, and eventually graduated to an actual trap range in college. After about a two-year hiatus, I recently got back into the shooting sports by joining a local skeet club. Most of the members compete across the state and even the country, and they are all talented and more experienced than me. But from them, my love of the shooting sports has fired back up to the point that I can’t keep clay pigeons and double-barrel shotguns out of my easily distracted head.

If you are not familiar with skeet, visit http://www.shotgunworld.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=49004 for way more information than you need and to introduce you to the complexities of what should be a simple game.

Skeet has helped me tremendously with developing mental strengths that I can apply to fishing or any task. In my writing, it is often difficult to relay the mental aspects of fishing that so many pros have mastered. While I can explain how to rig a weedless lure, skills like concentration, confidence, determination and discipline are best learned through experience. Those experiences, however, can come from any part of life, like I have learned through skeet.

For example, when I step up to the first and second stations on a skeet field to begin a round, I am focused on the steps I need to take to break the target and can usually hold the focus through the shot. By the time I reach stations three and four, however, I often find myself thinking about a missed shot, admiring another shooter’s shotgun or wondering if the clouds are going to bring rain. When I step up to shoot, lack of concentration causes me to miss as much as, if not more than, poor form and fundamentals.

The same is true in fishing. When I start out a day flipping, I am totally in tune with my casts and lure through the first hour or so. But as the day progresses, my mind starts to wander. I may begin making poor pitches and hang the lure or splash too much. I may miss a subtle bite that I should have felt. Or I end up overfishing each cast and wasting time.

As I progress as a shooter and an angler, I have learned that when distractions work their way into the scene, I can overcome them by slowing down and reviewing the fundamentals. I think about my lure scraping every rock and about the exact place where I want the cast to land. I don’t do it as well as the pros, but those skills come with time. Concentration at least makes my execution better and my reaction time faster.

Another lesson I have learned is one of confidence. When I step to the line to shoot skeet, I know that I will break the target. Of course, I don’t break every target, but before I shoot, I tell myself I will. I believe that I will. In fishing, I have to rely on my experiences and gut instincts and tell myself that if it feels right, it will be right, and I will catch fish.

If I miss a shot in skeet, I don’t dwell on it and take a hit to my confidence. I study the situation and try to determine what I did wrong. Back to fishing, if a lure or area doesn’t work, I think about why, but I don’t criticize myself, which would rob me of trust in my instincts. I try to grow my confidence by analyzing the situation and making a change. I have to believe that every move I make is the right one.

Don’t be afraid to look to other aspects of life to strengthen your mental skills and competitive abilities for fishing. You’ll be surprised where they show up.

-- Curt Niedermier

An Awful First Rule

2009-10-07T09:13:00.000-05:00

It was told to me by a friend and longtime musky guide, and I wish he never mentioned it.

Probably five years ago, I was fishing with Tony Grant when I hooked a giant. I'm talking 40-plus pounds of behemoth musky. And the best part about it: I had her hooked good. Then it happened. I felt her move beneath the water to attempt to jump, I leaned my rod a little to try and stop her, and then nothing. No weight, no jump, no anything. She was just gone. I will never forget that awful feeling, or what followed it.

After crumbling to my knees on the deck, I looked to Grant in hopes he would inform me of what went wrong. He just looked back and said, "Nothing. The first rule of musky fishing is muskies get off."

I wish he was wrong, but he's absolutely accurate. I have no idea how they are able to dislodge massive hooks like surgeons, but they do. And they were in rare form this past weekend.

Having scored pretty well on a fall trip to Kinkaid last November, and hearing of a hot bite, my co-worker, Alan, his friend and I again made the trek into southern Illinois to chase some slime. And just like last fall, we got the net wet. Little after 2 p.m. I had a 45 1/2-incher rush a nickel-and-black Shumway Flasher and get just enough of the hook to allow us to get some pictures.

A trophy like that should have made the trip an incredible success, and don't get me wrong, it was a successful trip. But the four other muskies we didn't get pictures of sure left us with sour tastes in our mouths.

For some reason – and I don't know a single person who knows why – muskies will sometimes get in the habit of nipping at lures. They will launch up to lures like hook-seeking torpedoes, looking like they're about to not just eat, but destroy what they see. Then right before they close their mouths, they slow down and daintily nip the back. On the frustration scale, it ranks right up there with the popcorn kernel stuck between your back two molars. Again, why they do this is unknown, but when they get in that mood there is little an angler can do to get them out of it. I have recently been told burning smaller lures will sometimes get them to commit, but that is the first I have heard of any remedy.

If you couldn't guess, the muskies at Kinkaid were severely in the nipping funk, and unfortunately it cost Alan the trophy of a lifetime. Prior to the giant, we had three muskies between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. that all hit our lures, but didn't grab hooks. Regardless, the action had us pretty optimistic. Then just before 2 p.m. we motored into a small cut I had fished previously and had success. Sure enough, about midway into it Alan made a cast back to an area with an orange-and-black Musky Mayhem Tackle Double Cowgirl and had a 50-plus-inch musky eat the lure no more than 10 feet from the boat. Unfortunately, like the previous three, she only got a taste. She thrashed her head one time and the Cowgirl was air born, with the fish sinking back to the depths, surely with a smirk.

Just thinking back on those two seconds still makes me sick. Luckily, I know where she lives, and maybe, just maybe, later this year we might get to see her again to break the rule.

Slam the hooks!

- Sean Ostruszka

Getting Schooled on the Wacky Rig

2009-10-05T14:25:00.000-05:00

By Sean Ostruszka

Up until last Saturday, a wacky rig ranked down there with 12-inch swimbaits and dough balls as a viable option for me to catch bass. To be fair, I'd never really given it a time to shine. Then again, I never really had a situation to use it. In fact, it was so low on my list of productive techniques that when one of the other editors here asked if he could have any packs of a particular brand of worm, I obliged.

Then Brian Lindberg, FLW Outdoors Magazine's creative director, went about whupping me Saturday with the same worms rigged wacky-style. Needless to say, I wish I had my worms back.

How he rigged the worm and other techniques regarding the wacky rig will be covered in-depth in some of the upcoming issues of FLW Outdoors Magazine, so I won't expound on them here. However, I did want to talk about one thing I found interesting while Brain went about throttling me.

Wacky rigs usually utilize a soft-plastic stick bait, and most stick baits have predominantly the same pen-like shape. However, the shape and flexibility of the worm can be much more important to the success of the rig than many may give credit. We both were using the same color, but different worms. Brian caught fish; I didn't. The second I switched to the other type of worm, my line started getting tugged on too. This wasn't just a fluke occurrence either. A few days after our trip, Brian went out again with a co-worker and experienced the same thing. What we noticed was how the different shapes produced different fluttering actions and different rates of fall. On a rig that doesn't have much action to begin with, those two aspects are very key. Remember that the next time you're not getting bit on a wacky rig. A simple switch to a different worm may be all that's necessary.

Slam the hooks!

Going Deep: Crankbaits

2009-09-29T20:21:00.001-05:00

Part One: Cranking Cover with the Jackall MC/60
By Jason Sealock

Reading FLW Outdoors Magazines on a regular basis, you’ve probably noticed numerous articles on crankbaits – choosing the right ones, where and when to fish them, what the differences are between different properties and more. For some great crankbait tips go back and check out our March 2009 issue, May 2009 issue and our July 2009 issue.

One particular subject of interest to us personally that we’ve not covered much has been cranking shallow cover. We ran a piece on shallow cranking in general a couple years ago, but we’ve been doing quite a bit of shallow cranking this year on stump flats, around laydowns and other various shallow cover with great success and we’ve familiarized ourselves with a few new baits since then.

I have several favorites when it comes to shallow cranking. A Bomber Flat A, a Lucky Craft RC 1.5, and a Rapala DT6 are staples in my tackle box, and I throw them often when I’m fishing shallow. I’ve found certain banks, areas and even lakes where the fish just seem to bite one better than the other, so none of them are indispensable.

But one new lure I’ve found a new appreciation for this year is a Jackall MC/60. I’ve thrown both the SR (shallow runner) and MR (medium runner) a lot this year, and I was able to pull David Swendseid, Product Specialist Manager at Jackall – someone who thoroughly understands the science behind bait design, aside at ICAST and in several interviews since then, and he broke down this particular bait.

The Basics of Design

Crankbaits are tools. They can plow deep grass beds or rattle the bark off shallow logs. They can be burned, slow rolled, ripped and waked. They range in size from a thumbnail up to the size of your hand. And color offerings between all the manufacturers run the spectrum. What separates one tool from another is functionality.

The MC/60 was designed to be an all-terrain crankbait by lure-design mastermind, Seiji Kato. “The desire in building this crankbait was three fold,” Swendseid said. “First, Kato had to create a crankbait with actions similar to a perfectly balanced wood crankbait. But next, it had to have displacement characteristics able to push a significant amount of water. And last, it had to be capable of instantly regaining trajectory after colliding with an object.”

If you know anything about design theory, making a “vehicle” with a perfectly balanced action that can collide into something and then return to that perfect balance the instant it collides is not an easy task. Put that difficulty underwater, and now the designers have to contend with hydrodynamics compounded by an already erratic action.

“Many crankbaits inherit a problem known as ‘sliding’ or ‘jogging’ when colliding with cover,” Swendseid said. “The impact hinders the bait’s swim motion, fouling the lures tracking and oftentimes causes it to roll over axis with no return.”

So what’s that mean in laymen’s terms? Anyone who has fished crankbaits around shallow wood has seen it. The bait hits something. It kicks over on it’s side, and scoots along sideways, even rolling over and coming to the surface before getting the train back on the rails so to speak. The reason is most crankbaits are made to swim straight in open water. Bumping the bottom is something we as anglers do because we’ve all heard that the erratic action is what triggers fish into biting.

But it’s not just erratic action that triggers fish into feeding and that thought process drove the design of MC/60.

The MC/60 has a certain and specific circumference in the first third of the head region. Internally, there is an incorporated ballast system that rests directly on the lower floor of the bait’s keel. When the bait impacts an object, the force changes its trajectory along the object. However, when it is in the free space beyond the object, the weighted keel forces the bait back down and tracking true. The missing “meat” in the tail also allows for better hydrodynamics and less drag against the form and improved obstacle resistance.”

Simply put the bait rolls with the “hard knocks.”

Hyper Swimming -vs. Erratic Action

Crankbaits are as different as species of fish. They can have different designs, materials, shapes and sizes. To gain performance in a crankbait, however many factors come into play. Ballasts, surface planes, wall thicknesses and bill shapes all factor heavily into how the crankbait will track, balance, vibrate and swim. Sometimes the design creates an erratic action. Sometimes the way anglers fish a crankbait creates erratic action. Most anglers have been taught that the erratic action or change in action triggers strikes. Swendseid believes otherwise.

“Erratic action may not be the most effective movement of a crankbait,” Swendseid said. “It is one quality that may attract fish to bite, but it’s certainly not the only one. If a bass discovers a school of crappie or shad or singles out a tiny red ear or a rainbow trout, those prey swim linearly although in a hyper state. It is not erratic action, but rather quick intense movement in which bass key.”

Swendseid calls the ideal replication of this action in a crankbait Psycho-motor Agitation. Evolved predators can easily detect nervous micro-movements in prey. Because the flicker rate is so much faster in a bass’s eye than in a human eye, they see frames of movement in a much more still life captures where we see everything as a blur of movement. So a crankbait that has a rapid tight vibration will attract fish without the erratic action. Add an excellent wobble and vibration along with an uncanny ability to re-align tracking after collision, and the combination resulted in the Jackall MC/60.

Real-world applications

The editors have been throwing the MC/60 for several months now, and as you can see from some of the photos and signs of wear, the baits have been producing. From fish on stump flats, to bass around rock piles, to bass on points and humps and especially around rip rap, the bait has produced. The key is definitely in having a tight subtle wiggle around cover. It just feels like the bait comes over and around cover with a steady track and the bass really responded to our presentations.

Our favorite episode happened just this past weekend. We located some fish schooling on the surface in one of the bays on Kentucky Lake. We went over immediately and started catching the fish on poppers, walking topwaters and even a soft jerkbait. But we were seeing ten times as many fish as we were catching both on the surface on our graph. I picked up the Jackall MC/60 MR which runs maybe 7 feet. The bottom was 11 feet where we were and dropped off into 20 feet. What I noticed, however, is all the bass were streaking up into clouds of bait on the depth finder. I figured if I could run it by the bass just over their heads it might produce.

That proved to be a dramatic understatement when we boated our 50th fish. Three of us fishing, we literally argued over who got the one pair of pliers next. It was a race to get your bait back out there because we had three MC/60s going at once, and we caught them nearly every cast. While we did cull through a lot of short fish, we managed some nice 3- and 4-pound bass.

We experimented with other crankbaits but this one crankbait in this one depth was the ticket to consistent catches on that spot on that day. That’s not to say another crankbait wouldn’t work in another situation similar to that on another day. That’s the point to be made about crankbaits. They are tools. No one tool does every job and no one tool works everyday.

Just like tools, crankbaits are made very differently. Some tools work better than others. Some don’t work at all. And some work in places where there really hasn’t been a tool designed yet for that very specific task. It’s all about having the toolbox full of the “right tools” so that when the situation presents itself, we’re prepared.

I'm Loving ... the Yellow Magic Popper

2009-09-28T09:35:00.000-05:00

By Sean Ostruszka

Having recently cleaned off the lure shelf in my office, I thought it might be about time I start a new series of blogs -- one that hopefully will keep my office a little cleaner. So I give you the "I'm Loving the ..." series. Basically, if there's a lure, reel, rod, etc that is really helping me leave the lake with my hands smelling fishy, I'm calling it out here.

Which brings me to my first contestant: the Yellow Magic Popper. After the 2009 Forrest Wood Cup, I was tracking down lures the top finishers used so we could showcase them in the magazine. One of those anglers was Folgers pro Scott Suggs of Bryant, Ark. And one of those lures he was using was the Yellow Magic Popper.

Having heard some good rumblings about this little topwater, I asked him what made it so special. His response was simple: the "BLOOP!" He wasn't lying. That little lure creates the deepest and loudest "bloop" I've heard. I've watched how bass react to it, and they don't know what to do. It freaks them out for a second before they crush it. Suggs also told me his trick of increasing the size of the belly hook to make it even louder. It's incredible. You can hear the noise from the very start of the cast, and better yet, it doesn't take much of a rod twitch to make the lure mouth off. The noisy action does hurt the lure's walking ability, even when using a loop knot, but it still walks a little. However, around cover it's lights out. The lure comes with a long, feathered trailer hook that, when combined with one or two pops next to a piece of cover, bass love. I've had bass hit the lure so violently they shot themselves completely out of the water. And that's just fun!

Slam the hooks!

College Fishing

2009-09-24T15:18:00.000-05:00

By Curt Niedermier

For the past few weeks I have been working on a feature story about the top colleges for bass anglers. Through a survey, hours on the phone and quite a bit more research on top of that, I have developed a list of the top 25 colleges in the country where a bass angler will feel right at home.

For the results, you’ll have to wait until the January/February 2010 issue of FLW Outdoors Magazine comes out, and when it does I hope you’ll take the time to send us your thoughts on schools that should have made the list, those that shouldn’t have and any other comments you may want to share. After all, college rankings are as much about debate and bragging rights as anything.

Right now, I want to share a few things I have learned while putting all this together. First off, it is a great time to be a college angler. Most clubs fish anywhere from three to six club qualifiers each semester, as well as traveling to invitational events held by nearby schools and the major national events. From those I have talked to, there is so much interest that clubs that are only a year or two old have doubled, tripled or increased their membership even more in the last year to the point that there aren’t enough boaters to carry along co-anglers. I’ll get to that point in a second.

Much of the increase in interest is thanks to National Guard FLW College Fishing. No, I am not trying to toot the horn of FLW Outdoors. Rather, the format that FLW and the National Guard have put together is simply the best and most convenient for college anglers due to the two biggest hindrances club members face, as relayed to me in their interviews: lack of boats and lack of money. College anglers have neither. Sure, there are schools out there with a dozen anglers with boats, including some impressive rigs owned by anglers who also fish BFL and local team tournament series, but many are simple johnboats or older bass boast, which are perfect for fishing locally but not the best for national tournaments.

Thanks to National Guard FLW College Fishing, no one needs to own a boat. Anglers don’t even need a wad of cash. FLW provides a travel allowance and puts student competitors in Stren Series pros' boats for tournaments. Many northern schools were especially thrilled with the system. There hadn’t been many opportunities to compete on the national collegiate level for them in the past because of the distance of travel and boat requirements. With divisions closer to home and boats provided, some of that pain has been alleviated.

Another thing I learned is that many of these college anglers are highly skilled, and all are highly motivated. As mentioned, some club anglers across the country are both collegiate competitors and BFL competitors. Most who fit that mold grew up around tournament fishing, and they have fished events with their parents in the past. For those who grew up simply loving the outdoors and fishing, that’s where the motivation comes in. They raise money, volunteer for charities and beat the banks of any water near campus, just happy to be wetting a line.

For those of us in the fishing industry, especially those of us closely linked to bass tournaments, their enthusiasm is reassuring. Enthusiasm is contagious, and college fishing is growing, which means in the next 10 years there will be a wave of recent college graduates hooked on fishing who now have time and money to put back into fishing.

So, if for some reason the economy and current state of bass fishing has you down, go visit a college campus, talk to college anglers or take in a National Guard FLW College Fishing weigh-in, because the future is looking good.

Pond Perfect

2009-09-21T14:12:00.000-05:00

By Sean Ostruszka

If you’re like me, you didn’t make your first cast from a $50,000 bass boat on a trophy lake. No, if you’re like me, you made your first cast standing on the bank of some dinky pond while trying not to hook any trees behind you. Ahh, memories.

For the vast majority of my life I lived on a pond. So, invariably, most of my firsts in fishing have come from the tiny waters. I caught my first fish from a pond, I tested my first lures in a pond and I even lost my first rod in a pond (luckily I was able to snag it and get it back, with the fish still on the line no less. That will teach carp to try and steal my stuff).

So while I’ve since graduated to fishing from nice boats and better waters, there is still a part of me that loves fishing a pond. Don’t get me wrong, if I had my choice I’m taking the boat and the big lake over fishing a pond 99 times out of 100. But after work, when I just want to get away and not have to put too much effort into my fishing, a pond works perfectly. Better yet, I’ve caught some pretty big fish from ponds no bigger than public pools.

That brings me to my point: I realized the other day when heading to a new pond that there are roughly six lures that I take with me any time I go to a pond. I take hundreds when I head to a lake. Yet if I bring the same six lures to any pond I’m beyond confident I’ll catch fish. Obviously pond fish are generally easier to catch, but it’s still pretty amazing how most ponds can be effectively attacked with just six lures that easily fit in a small container that I can put in my pocket.

The first is a small, shallow crankbait, my favorite being a Mann’s Baby 1-Minus. It covers water and runs shallow enough to avoid snags or weeds. Better yet, it’s just the right size that any bass can eat it. This choice can be substituted for a small spinnerbait if the pond is overly weedy, not that most ponds are scummy or anything …

No. 2 on the list is a small, mid-depth crankbait. A Rapala DT6 or Norman Deep Baby N can get down deep enough to effectively fish most ponds. However, be aware that it’s much harder to free a snagged crankbait from shore than in a boat. I usually bring two of these.

The third choice is a topwater, and no, not just because they’re fun. OK, so it mainly is. A small popper or a tiny hollow frog is a blast with pond fish. Better yet, the majority of my bigger pond bass have come on topwaters.

Numero cuatro is a soft-plastic jerkbait. I’m pretty sure I caught every bass inhabiting a particular pond one evening on a 3-inch Bass Assassin Freshwater Shad Assassin. Then I did it again the next night. Now that’s just fun.

For the thumb, I have to bring a small jerkbait. No matter the pond, I know I can take a perch-colored 3 1/2-inch Rapala Original Floater there and catch fish. Try twitching it and letting it rise back up to the surface, then twitching it again. Bass love this around cover.

And finally, when all else fails I break out the Reaction Innovations Smallie Beaver. Hopped or dragged, it's awesome. And like the rest of the lures on this list, it's just the right size to help me get that fish smell on my hands.

Feel free to comment below if you’ve got a favorite pond lure that you feel needs to be called out. I’d love to hear what other anglers are using on their local ponds.

Slam the hooks!

Down to One

2009-09-18T15:31:00.000-05:00

By Jason Sealock

Fishing is about mindsets, and mental fortitude often exceeds equipment in terms of importance. One of the biggest “psych-outs” in fishing occurs when an angler runs out of a lure that the fish are readily annihilating at that moment. Get the fish going, catching one after the other, and then it happens. Frantically reach into the tackle bag, flip open the tackle box full of plastics, and it’s not there. You start pulling out bags and bags of plastics. None left. This can’t be happening. The one thing the bass would eat, and there aren’t any more of them.

You make the switch to another lure but you’re second guessing yourself the whole time and your confidence starts to waiver. That leads to fishing faster, running spots and an overall anxiousness that derails your focus.

That happened to me this year, and the day on the water was a nightmare. I later realized that was because my jig fishing had become so simplified, that missing one component left me empty handed. The whole system boiled down to one football jig and one simple trailer – a 3-inch Berkley PowerBait Chigger Craw. I’m quite certain, worms not withstanding, that I could live with just that trailer. Now don’t get me wrong; I still love a Zoom Super Chunk Jr. on my finesse jigs in cold water or a Yum Craw Papi threaded on my flipping jigs on occasion when I need to mix and match a skirt and trailer better. But if I can only have one bag in my pocket, nine times out of ten it’s going to be a pack of green pumpkin 3-inch PowerBait Chigger Craws.

The reason is simple. After hundreds, more likely into the thousands, of bass caught on this trailer, I don’t see the point in changing a good thing. As some anglers can relate, I’ve fostered paranoia in thinking about a jig without that trailer. Now, if I’m not getting bit on the jig with a different trailer, the first thing I switch is the trailer. It does not matter what color jig or what color the water is. The first thing I do is revert back to my confidence trailer.

Big bass were eating the PowerBait Chigger Craw so good in the spring, I was catching 20 to 40 bass on a ragged nub of a trailer – no claws or tentacles, just the tattered mass threaded up the hook shank. By the time it finally fell off it was impossible to lace a hook through it.

I’ve tried various jigs and trailers over the years, but I’ve never caught so many fish on any one trailer as I’ve now caught on the PowerBait Chigger Craw. So now I’ve spent the year stock piling my supply. When the bite is really on at Kentucky Lake, it’s nothing to go through 6 to 10 packs of trailers between me and my partner. That’s a lot of PowerBait Chigger Craws when you’re jig fishing. I wish I had a mold of one so I could melt all this PowerBait back down and mold it again!

Now, some guys like the PowerBait Chigger Chunks and other guys like the 4-inch PowerBait Crazy Legs Chigger Craw, but I’ve settled on the 3-inch PowerBait Chigger Craw for several reasons. It’s not too bulky on a lighter jig. I can spider cut my skirts and thread the trailer up the shank of my jig hook and have a real small profile. I can bite (or cut because PowerBait doesn’t taste as good as garlic) the end off a trailer and run the hook through the middle like a chunk and give it a longer profile. When the fish bite one of the paddle arms off, I will unthread it, turn it so that one paddle is more like a keel on my jig and use just the one until another fish pulls that one off.

Sometimes when I’m casting big worms or other plastics, I’ll swap them out for the PowerBait Chigger Craw and pick up another keeper on a spot where they had been biting bigger plastics. It’s been a limit getter for me on occasion.

It can be a great punch bait for flipping heavy cover because of it’s small profile. I’ve caught countless bass out of the buck brush on them.

So you can say I’m officially a PowerBait Chigger Craw convert. My affliction is so bad now, that I feel naked when I can’t recall exactly where I have a pack of them. It’s that same feeling you have when you slam your locked car door shut, and you can’t feel your keys in your pocket.

So the question is why that bait. I know the PowerBait has something to do with it. I know the shape has something to do with it. And I know the action has something to do with it. But honestly it’s my personality more than anything. After using literally thousands of soft baits over the years, the choices got dizzying. So a few years ago, I started to simplify my choices – partly for my own sanity and partly because we fish in so many other people’s boats that packing a 40-gallon tub of soft baits wasn’t practical.

In fact, I’ve simplified the art of tackle storage, but I’ll save that for another blog this month. But basically now I have two boxes called boat boxes. One has the worms, trailers, and creatures I use most on my home waters in the colors I’ve proven work over the years. And one of those compartments is always completely full of PowerBait Chigger Craws.

I caught my personal best largemouth this year on a homemade football jig and PowerBait Chigger Craw. So maybe that’s why I’m stuck on just one trailer for now. The point being that we all get indecisive when we aren’t catching fish. Part of fighting through that is picking up something you have proven works and just plowing through those fishless periods.

It doesn’t mean we should quit experimenting with other soft baits and presentations. But I’ll continue to experiment with PowerBait Chigger Craws as well because they fit my fishing style and produce in a lot of situations. Perhaps I have yet to unlock their true potential, but I also know I won’t get psyched out with just that one trailer like I can with 50 trailers.

On Hooking ... Not Fish!

2009-09-08T16:30:00.000-05:00

By Curt Niedermier

For the most part, square-bill crankbaits are snag-free. They bounce and clang off stumps and laydowns and continue right through on their path, assuming I give them a little guidance if they get into thick cover. But my last time on the water, it seemed I was finding all kinds of intersting bottom content, most of which I wish wasn't there, with square-bill crankbait.

I hauled in a 3-ounce bank sinker with about 15 yards of thick braided line, I'm guessing somewhere around 100-pound test. I also hooked what I think was a sandbag made of thick plastic material somewhat like a tarp. That one was fun because I ended up shoulder-deep in the water trying not to hook myself or break off a $15 lure to get it back.

A few weeks ago I was fishing a ledge that was about 10 feet deep on top in the middle of Kentucky Lake. I was dragging a junebug 10-inch worm, which is essentially a purple worm. With it, I snagged a 10-inch purple worm and a few feet of line. The worm sat in my boat for a few days, and after it dried out, it became clear it was most definitely a junebug worm. Apparently I had not found a secret lure or area.

Once at Pickwick, I reeled in a pair of boxer shorts. Seriously. As if I couldn't get enough ribbing from my fishing partners for catching the fewest fish, I had to find a pair of boxers. They were, not surprisingly, in the water beneath a rope swing. My guess is an unlucky rope swinger didn't have his shorts tied on very well.

My favorite experience with hooking strange underwater objects was while riding along with Castrol pro David Dudley during practice for the 2007 Forrest Wood Cup at Lake Ouachita. Dudley was cranking with a Norman Lures DD22 he had used to win about $200,000 throughout his career. He had hung it a couple of times but managed to get it back easily. He told me that day that if he won the tournament -- he had a school of fish pegged that would bite the crankbait every time in a spot he dubbed the "million-dollar hole" -- he was going to retire the lure for good. Of course, he had to make it through the tournament without losing it. About midway through the day, he stuck something solid. His lure knocker failed to get it lose, and all forms of wiggling, jiggling and snapping of the rod did little to knock it free. Finally, Dudley shed his shirt and jumped overboard.

It turns out David Dudley is either a fantastic swimmer with a track-star set of lungs, or he was really attached to that crankbait. He stayed underwater forever, following the line down to the bottom in about 16 feet of water. When he finally emerged, all I saw was a potato sack, rocks, Dudley's face and that crankbait, hooked smack in the middle of the sack. His nephew, who was with him at the time, grabbed an armful of his uncle and another armful of potato sack while I scrambled for the camera -- don't worry, the pro was in no real danger.

Afterward, I found out this was the third time Dudley had been forced to dive to the bottom for his favorite crankbait during practice for that one tournament. At cabelas.com, a DD22 sells for $4.99. Dudley has earned more than $2.4 million in his FLW Outdoors career. He could have afforded another one (or used one of the many others he had in the boat), but some crankbaits are special. And as long as there are random things in the bottom of lakes across the country to snag, it's likely Dudley will be bringing along the swim trunks while on tour.

By the way, one of the photos I took ran in the November-December 2007 Bass Edition of FLW Outdoors Magazine in the Fishing Exposed department.

GIANT FACTORY!

2009-09-08T14:34:00.000-05:00

By Sean Ostruszka

Some lakes produce giant bass. Others, giant walleyes. And still others pump out jaw-dropping muskies. But not many produce all three. And there may not be another lake on the planet that does it like MilleLacsLake in Minnesota. For the third time in my life, my dad and I ventured north to Viking land to fish the mini ocean. And for the third time in my life, I left with pictures of giants.

Walmart FLW Walleye Tour Presented by Berkley pro Paul Meleen had invited me to come fish with him for the chance to “catch a 6-pound smallie and a 50-inch muskie in the same trip." Would you believe it, we came very close. And that's despite Mother Nature toying with us. Instead of giving us the traditional 90-degree dog days of August, we woke up to 43 degrees the second morning. You read that correctly, 43 frigid degrees! Oh, and 30 mph winds on top of that. Thanks nature ...

Dressed in more layers than we thought would be necessary, we started off for muskies, but quickly changed to chasing smallies. Mille Lacs' reefs and shallow flats are loaded with plump smallmouths that can't resist a snap-jigged Zoom Fluke on a 1/8-ounce jighead. However, the wind made casting an issue. Mille Lacs is around 20 miles long and 15 miles wide. So when the wind gusts, like it was during our trip, the lake's surface turns into a mountain range. Obviously, boat control gets tough in those conditions. No joke, my body was still going up and down days after our trip.

However, Meleen decided that instead of fighting the waves, he'd let them help us. Setting the boat up in front of the reef or flat, Meleen positioned the boat parallel to the waves and let them drift the boat over the structure, controlling the boat with bursts from the trolling motor. When the drift was over, he then pointed the boat into the waves and, holding the rods in our hands in order to snap the jigs, we trolled back to the front of the structure.

It was simple fishing, and it was incredibly effective. All told, we put roughly 20 smallies in the boat in a couple of hours. Better yet, my dad and I each caught our personal bests as we both caught fish more than 5 pounds.

Part one of Meleen's goal was almost accomplished. Now we just needed part two: the 50-incher.

After the waves got too strong and we decided to make a run across the lake to protected waters, a run that could basically turns bones into bruised calcium, we went about fishing a shallow reef we had tried earlier in the day for smallmouths. Problem was, just like earlier that day, the smallies weren't home.

So as we rounded the back tip and prepared to make a move to another spot, I picked up my muskie rod, which had one of my homemade topwater lures on it, and started making casts toward the reef. One cast. Two cast. Three cast. BAM! Forty-eight inches of muskie drilled the lure, and after an all-too-eventful net job, Paul's goal was complete, at least in my book.

The scary thing is, this is what the lake can produce during a down year and bad conditions. I can’t wait to hit it again when it’s running on all cylinders.

Ranger Extends Partnership with Industry-Leading Lowrance Electronics

2009-08-19T08:56:00.000-05:00

Multi-year agreement offers consumers “ultimate fishing experience”

FLIPPIN, Ark. – Ranger Boats, manufacturers of the world’s most sought-after fishing boats, recently announced the continuation of a long-standing partnership with Lowrance Electronics/NAVICO. The announcement keeps industry leaders together to provide anglers with the ultimate in innovation and performance on the water.

The news follows the recent introduction of Ranger’s 2010 models – confirming Lowrance Electronics as standard equipment on many of the company’s 40-plus models, including a number of designs with factory-installed, full-color HDS units.

“Lowrance has a strong name and great brand awareness in the marine electronics category,” said Ranger Boats President Randy Hopper. “We continually strive to provide our customers with the ultimate fishing experience and the advantages Lowrance offers – whether it’s the new high-definition sonar, broadband radar or GPS – allow us to do just that.”

Ranger customers will have premium access to the award-winning technology and features available from Lowrance/NAVICO. The new HDS (high-definition system) has been praised by anglers and industry insiders as “the most exceptional electronics system ever unveiled.” Combine this with superior networking features, available radar and weather monitoring capabilities and the highly anticipated introduction of “structure scan technology,” and the result is a perfect match for the world’s most discerning fisherman and boat owners.

“We’re extremely excited to continue our partnership with Ranger Boats,” said Sean Hatherley, Lowrance Director of OEM Sales. “Their commitment to quality and product innovation is a passion we share at Lowrance and we look forward to providing anglers with the tools necessary to maximize their time on the water.”

Ranger’s new 2010 model lineup includes introductions designed around the ability to flush-mount popular large-screen electronics like the HDS-8 and HDS-10 from Lowrance. The all-new Z521 Comanche features a totally redesigned console with room to center mount an HDS-8, while the new 621VS Fisherman – also sporting a new console – provides room to flush mount the HDS-10. Both options were driven by input and feedback from anglers across the country.

For more information, visit www.rangerboats.com or stop by your nearest Ranger dealer today.

About Ranger Boats
Ranger Boats, headquartered in Flippin, Ark., is the nation's largest manufacturer of premium fiberglass fishing boats, including a series of bass, multi-species, fish 'n play and saltwater boats. Founded in 1968 by Forrest L. Wood, Ranger Boats continues its commitment to building the highest-quality, strongest-performing boats on the water.

About Lowrance
The Lowrance® brand is wholly owned by Navico, Inc., a privately held, international marine electronics company. Navico is currently the world’s largest marine electronics company, and is the parent company to five well-established marine electronics brands: B&G®, Eagle®, Lowrance, Northstar and Simrad®. www.navico.com

Forrest, Nina Wood Enshrined in Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame

2009-08-17T15:26:00.000-05:00

Iconic Arkansas couple recognized for outstanding achievement

FLIPPIN, Ark. – Forrest and Nina Wood, legendary founders of Ranger Boats, have long been an integral part of the fishing and boating community – both in the Natural State and beyond. Their lifetime of accomplishments and contributions to a host of worthwhile organizations personify those of a true American success story: pioneers of industry who never forget their Arkansas roots.

Recently, the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame enshrined the couple – the highest honor bestowed by the institution. Awarded at last month’s Forrest Wood Cup in Pittsburgh, Pa., the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame reserves the honor of enshrinement for individuals whose lasting efforts have benefited freshwater sportfishing.

“Forrest and Nina are recognized as pioneers in the world of freshwater fishing,” said Emmett Brown, executive director of the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame. “The impact they’ve made continues to raise the awareness of the sport of fishing while also reinforcing the importance of conservation and the positive experience fishing affords to families and individuals alike.”

Forrest and Nina Wood join the founders of the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, Bob and Fannie Kutz, as the only couples enshrined together. The Hall recognizes individuals and organizations for outstanding achievements in fishing, science, education, conservation, communications, technology, or other areas related to freshwater sportfishing with five different categories of recognition: Enshrinement, Legendary Angler, Legendary Communicator, Legendary Guide, Organizational/Governmental Agency or Special Recognition.

ICAST DAY TWO

2009-07-26T21:46:00.000-05:00

Well, travel and a few days of R&R sidetracked the ICAST blogs but we have a lot more from our second day of ICAST 2009. It was more of a whirlwind day for us. On day one we spent a lot of time in a few booths and on day two we had to spend a little time in a lot of booths.
Even with the tornadic pace, There are so many new rods, reels, hard baits, soft baits, electronics, lines, apparel, tackle and other items I want to incorporate into our fishing next year.

Someone asked me what my favorite thing at ICAST was. That’s always a tough question to qualify with a single answer. I had probably two or three favorite reels two or three favorite rods and two or three favorite baits in every category of baits from frogs to swimbaits and beyond. We’ll save my favorites for the Editor’s Choice edition of FLW Outdoors Magazine (Nov-Dec issue).

What I can say is I’ll be buying a lot of the products I saw at the show, starting with …

Wright McGill

Skeet Reese Signature Tessera rods were impressive. The most impressive aspect was the price. I just felt there was more packed into a lower price, and apparently Skeet was the driving force behind that. It was also interesting to note that if Skeet breaks one of his rods, he’ll go to a local tackle shop and replace it. Not just because the rods have a Lifetime Warranty, but because Skeet uses the exact rods that the consumer buys. Many pro staffers use custom built rods with signature series designs but they aren’t the same specs the consumer gets. The designer assured us that Skeet uses the exact rods the consumer buys.

The rods feature an S-Curve technology that is part blending of Tessera glass and graphite and other composites along with two new resins that are much lighter than common resins. The T-glass was borrowed from the extremely strong saltwater jigging rods WM makes, and because of the blending and resins, they were made to be light but extremely powerful rods.

The last components of the rods are the accessories like guides, reel seats and grips. The grip is a very comfortable, the reel seat features the feel-through blank design and the guides are increased in number over conventional rods because Reese doesn’t like any line slap as the line shoots through on a cast. Some of the guides were downright tiny some I’m excited to test them.
I think these rods will be around for a long time. Now if we can get them to change the color from Reese’s signature yellow color then maybe we can perfect an already great product!

Eagle Claw

Lazer Trokar hooks hinted at something special and created a buzz leading up to the event. And not to disappoint the hooks were incredibly sharp, very strong and with some interesting designs. I don’t mean like “normal-hook” sharp I mean like “be-careful-to-avoid-a-trip-to-the-ER” sharp. They are surgically sharpened borrowing innovations from the medical profession. The hooks will supposedly take as little as a third of the effort to hook fish. That’s good news for anglers. The hook comes in several shapes and sizes including extra-wide-gap, straight shank flipping, offset worm, swimbait, oversized wide gap, drop shot and more.

The advertising materials for this brand were very intriguing. The HDR photography and burned effects were very cool. Kudos to Eagle Claw for making some strong, sharp and what I think will be widely appealing hooks for avid anglers. These aren’t going to be cheap hooks but these are going to be hooks made to last.

Rapala/Storm/VMC

Honestly Rapala releases too many great baits every year. I don’t even know where to begin here from Trolls-to baits to new Max Rap jerkbaits, Trigger X soft baits, Sufix stretch braid line, DT Thug crankbaits, etc. It was a lot of information to process. Then you throw in some cool new swimbaits from Storm and the new VMC treble hooks with the spark points and it’s enough to keep fishermen like us scheming on what to buy first.

All I can say is I was very impressed with the Trigger X craw trailer, the new DT Thug crankbait, the Trolls-Totrolling baits, the Max Rap jerkbait and the Storm swimbaits. Probably my favorite was the Storm swimbait but we’ll save a blog on that for our on the water testing.

More to come…

ICAST 2009 - Day One Recap

2009-07-16T00:04:00.000-05:00

I had many scheduled meetings on the first day of ICAST 2009 and that makes for a lot of time in only a few booths. Tomorrow I will spend a little time in a lot of booths. I've found more than anything at ICAST, that I have too many friends in this business. Great for the personal enjoyment of a great job, but horrible if you want to see 300 booths of 20 products each. You hate to cut anyone off, but it takes so much time just to move from booth to booth and get some meaningful information from each.

So here is recap of just some of the things I saw and found interesting at ICAST 2009 on Day One of the show.

Pure Fishing

Of course people will assume we started with Pure Fishing because of their sponsorship but the truth is this company is a monster in the sport fishing industry. They have a lot of great brands with a lot of new products, so it was the most logical place to start our ICAST show.

The Ripple Shad is a great new finesse swimbait. It's got an ultra-tight wiggle and a rapid vibrating tail. The ridges make for more surface area to expose PowerBait to the fish. They come in several great looking colors for both Fresh and Saltwater applications. I've been fishing this bait for a few months (thanks to a great partnership I have with Berkley where I get to test products long before they come to market and provide them with feedback and tweaks to the products to make them better). I like it on a standard swimbait hook. I've been adding some treble stingers for schooling fish. Trust me this is a great clearwater subtle bait and walleye anglers have been tearing the walleyes up with these 3-inch versions on jigheads. They have been a killer.

Berkley Trilene TransOptic is an extension of their Vanish Transition technology in the Monofilament market. The line is a bright goldish orange color above the water and turns translucent in the water. The line handles really well, seems very durable, casts beautifully and is really easy to see when trying to watch for subtle bites.

Abu Garcia Reels - The Revo S, SX and STX all got retooled and the most notable aspect I found is what they did with the braking systems. The STX has both a centrifugal braking system and the linear drag system. The great thing about this is you can set your pins and then fine tune it even further with the dial. This should make this reel one unbelievably tunable casting machine. The S and SX got a new system for the centrifugal brakes that will be copied through the entire line of Abu baitcasters. The new system has three pinch drag pins and three spring loaded pins. You can set your spring pins when you have to cast a light bait. The brakes will engage at first when you rare back and sling it as hard as you can. At the beginning of the cast the spool spins super fast. Then as the spool slows and the bait gets further out there the brakes spring back away allowing more free spool. This results in fewer backlashes and further casts.

The Pinch drags are your standard pins that you pop out permanently. These are good when you need that constant braking tension like when casting in high wind.

The Toro and Winch were combined to create a wide spool reel with a ton of low gear-ratio torque. It will be a high power reel for cranking and trolling with a lot of applications.

My favorite reel in the line-up is the Revo Orra. I got to test one of these in the prototype stages and was literally floored at how well it cast and handled for a mid-range reel. I loved that reel for everything from spinnerbaits, jigs, worms, flipping, jerkbaits, etc. It comes in at the $99 price point and offers an Aluminum frame with graphite components as well. The reel is low profile, light and a great performer at a great price.

The Revo Premiere looks awesome. We didn't get to take it apart and play with it at the show because of some issues with products being lost in transit - twice! But we're promised a close-up look tomorrow with Andrew the Australian reel guru for the Pure Fishing brands.

Vendetta and Vengeance rods. The Vendetta rods are slick looking in black, grey and red and matchup nicely to the redesigned Revo SX reels. The rod actions seemed very stiff to us. These are some powerful light rods at a good price point - $79-$89. Stetson Blaylock already has a tour level win on the rods at the National Guard Open on Lake Norman. The flipping stick was sweet and I really liked the 6'9" Jig worm rod.

Vengeance rods are a little lower price point $49-$59 and also powerful actions. The rods come in 10 spinning and 12 baitcasting models from L to H actions and lengths from 6 foot to 7 foot, 6 inch lengths.

Pflueger reels - I was most excited about the new wide/narrow spool on the Arbor SP reel. This reel looks awesome and Andrew reported this is the best handling reel he's ever used for fluorocarbon fishing line. Said the reel is ready for braid with a rubber braid strip on the spool and the wide spool lends itself to great casting and handling. We're excited about fishing with this new spinning reel and it comes in at $79.95. This reel will be a hot item for shaky heads and drop shot anglers all over the world.

Minn Kota

One of the coolest technologies we saw at the show today was the Minn Kota iPilot. This is an add-on system for electric controlled trolling motors. A replacement head and remote will give anglers the first gps driven control of their trolling motor. With this system you can tell it to track your path for 2 mile segments (up to 3 times) and then you can go back along your exact route. Even better is the Spot Lock feature that if you start to drift off your waypoint the trolling motor will engage when you're outside of a 5-foot circle from the waypoint and get you back on the spot. This will be invaluable to anglers fishing big water or fisheries commonly with a lot of wind.

Okuma

I like this company. They are real low key, but make great products at a real affordable price. We're very intrigued by their two baitcasters the Serrano and the Cayenne. The Serrano features a cool green color, is super light and has an unbelievable free spool. The reel is as low a profile as we've seen on a reel. It has 10 ball bearings including 5 ABEC Japanese bearings on the spool to make it a super free casting reel. It's got an aluminum frame and aluminum side housing the DuraBrass gears and a graphite side plate on the other side with easy access to the braking system.

We're definitely going to put this reel through the paces at we think will be around a $169 price point. The Cayenne is similar at 8 ball bearings and what they believe might be a $139 price point. Also features the aluminum frame and side plate housing the gears.

We also really liked the C3 and EVX b rods from Okuma. Great actions, great cosmetics, very low key Okuma branding on all makes for sharp looking high quality packages at moderate $149-159 and lower prices respectively.

SEBILE

We watched Patrick Sebile demonstrate his baits in the test tank. Sometimes I think shows like ICAST were invented for people like Patrick. He seems totally at home up there talking about fishing, situations and of course his creations.

The Magic Swimmer Soft Pro and Spin Shad baits were both impressive looking in the tank. I was most impressed with the slide on soft weights for the Soft Pro swimbait. You will basically get 3 baits, two hooks and like 5 weights. You slide the weights onto the hook in different increments to control the depth. The bait looked great in the tank, especially on the pause. The turn on a dime just like the hard version.

The Spin Shad is an interesting take on lead tail spinner bait. The spinner looks like another shad but has a treble hook back there. The bait has the same great details and concepts as the other hardbaits in Sebile's line. There are some interesting applications that come to mind for this bait like schooling fish, drop baits on ledges and bluff walls, etc.

Lowrance

The much anticipated and long awaited announcement was finally here. Lowrance introduced us to Structure Scan today. Quite frankly it's amazing. My favorite part of the announcement today was the captured stills of things they have looked at underwater. This thing saw a bus underwater and you could make out all the windows, the rear view mirrors and even the stripes down the sides because of the indentions where those were. There was a demo of a sunken ship where they showed what the ship looked like when it was in operation above the water. It was unreal how well you could make out every part of the ship.

They even showed Tarpon under docks where you could make out the fins on the fish with the structure scan technology. IT was crazy good detail. The most intriguing aspects to me were the add-on ability of the unit. You add a separate transducer on a flex-away bracket, you add the module that will attach to up to three graphs on your boat and then you connect with your Ethernet cables. So basically a guy can turn two or three units into structure scan units with one purchase now.

The other cool thing was the down scan. This unit looks left and right but it also looks straight down. IT was cool to split the screen and go over something with your graph and see what it looked like via sonar and then see the same thing via structure scan. This unit is going to educate a lot of anglers to become better sonar operators. Can't wait to use this on Kentucky Lake!!!

We saw a lot more, but quite frankly it's 1 am. I've got to get up in about 6 hours, so I'm going to call it a night and post more tomorrow. I'll apologize now for any typos. I'm whipped but wanted you to have a bunch of info from the first day!

Good Fishing to you all!

-Jason Sealock

FROM THE WATER - Tru-Tungsten Mad Maxx Frog

2009-06-30T10:50:00.000-05:00

Is it the anticipation or the calm before the storm? Is it the abruptly violent eruption from under the water? Is it the closeness of powerful hooksets and gut-wrenching fights through matted vegetation? I found myself asking these questions about the appeal of frog fishing. My best guess is all of the above.

Thousands of strikes later, my heart still skips a beat when a big fish blows up on a frog. It just takes you back for a second and you struggle to get coherent again and take up your slack for a jarring hookset. You know the one I’m talking about. Where it hurts your rib cage and your wrist so bad because the fish you set on didn’t budge.

Do I have your attention yet? Okay let’s talk about the newest player to the hollow-bodied frog market, the Tru-Tungsten Mad Maxx frog. Its design is not revolutionary, but it’s easy to tell a lot of thought went into the frog. Armed with a super sharp Mihatchi double hook, TT designed the frog with a sleek profile and angry 3D eyes. The frog is shaped so that it sits in the water low enough to get a good nose slap but can still walk the dog well. I do recommend a loop knot or split ring on the frog to help with walking the frog in smaller moves. If straight slapping is frog fishing to you, then connect directly to the line-tie and snap the wrist.

The stand out feature on the frog is the pro drain hole. This unique aspect allows water to escape out the back of the frog when it’s pulled from the water and cast again. No more squeezing the frog to get the water out (an annoying habit with other frogs on the market). With this design you never have to touch the frog until a bruiser bass gets a hold of it.

The plastic is more rigid than the rest of the hollow bodied frogs on the market. It appears it will withstand a lot of abuse. But time will tell with that as the “frog bite” isn’t the hot bite in most parts of the country yet so not a lot of feedback has come in yet on the durability aspect. But it does appear it will handle some abuse.

The frogs come equipped with tungsten rattles, a great feature for those of us that insert rattles into our frogs for added enticement.

The designers at Tru-Tungsten applied some phenomenal paint schemes to the frogs including the bottoms of the frogs, a spot often overlooked by frog makers.

Ridges and grooves are carved all along the frog giving it unique body and depth in design.
The pricing seems a little more competitive than other frogs of this quality. If you’re a serious frog fisherman, they are worth the price to check them out for yourself.

I took the frogs to Kentucky Lake the last week in June. Our grass was slow to start growing this year due to high waters this spring, so there isn’t much matted grass to throw the frogs around yet. However, I saw a nice opening under two overhanging bushes and skipped my frog way up underneath the limbs. On about the third nose slap of the frog, the water erupted and a nice bass rolled up on the frog.

Of course, as is common with frog fishing, I couldn’t control my reflexes on the first strike and jerked the frog away before the bass loaded up. In all honesty, I didn’t believe a bass would be up that shallow in 93-degree water without more grass or substantial cover there. So the blame on that missed opportunity is on my shoulders, not the Mad Maxx.

So far my favorite color is Gremlin. The frogs were introduced in seven colors. However, I’ve begged and pleaded for more colors, and apparently a few other professional anglers have as well. TT sources told me last week there are a few new colors coming as well including white and/or maybe yellow.

Seriously, get some of these frogs and go to your best matted vegetation lake and let me know how you do. I want to know and see some pictures of your results.

Good Fishing,

Jason Sealock

A Fresh and Useful Application for iPhone Anglers

2009-06-25T14:35:00.000-05:00

In the 80s, we lived in a material world. Now we live in the micro-technical world. It seems more applications hit the market by the hour for our smart phones, PDAs and other micro personal gadgets. While social networking has exploded in the last six months, none of the hot new items have seemed particularly appealing to anglers.

However, I finally found an application for the smart phone specifically geared towards anglers. Navionics has become synonymous with finding fish offshore and improving the overall functionality of the best electronic GPS units. Now they’ve brought their expertise to personal devices with the first mobile application, currently only available for the iPhone, for charting contour maps of your favorite fisheries.

I’ve had time to experiment with and learn the application on the water for about three weeks now. I used it while chasing pros on Kentucky Lake during the Walmart FLW Tour to understand exactly what type of spot or area they were fishing. It gave me a visual cue as to what was beneath the surface as well.

The applications (basically the same maps you buy for your GPS units) are large, some more than 500 MB, and take a few seconds to load initially. But the great thing about the iPhone that some people forget is that no cell signal does NOT mean no GPS signal. I found the application to be very responsive on the water, even in the remote no-cell areas of the lake.
Basically the application offers six functions and some general settings.

GPS is the first function. By pressing this button, you are whisked through your map to your current location – invaluable when running from spot to spot without leaving the iPhone out and active the whole time.

The powerful application next offers a Search function. This function enables you to find specific elements on a map, including your saved favorite fishing spots. Things like marinas, boat dealers, outdoor shops, etc. are searchable. I found that most places I consider a marina are not listed in the search categories. However it was nice to be able to search for one of my saved spots and go right to it on the map.

That brings up the next function – Favorites. This function isn’t listed on the bottom bar, but is probably the most invaluable function of the application. By merely touching a spot on your map, a menu will load that allows you to name and store your fishing location for future use. This is the function most depth finder/GPS units on a boat would call waypoint. However on this application the waypoint function is actually for planning a route on your phone.

But the favorites accept more characters than you’re probably used to with your GPS unit. And the GPS coordinates are easily displayed as well. You even have the option to email your Favorite to your fishing partner if necessary.

One thing I found useful was to come up with a good naming scheme for your favorites. I’ve already got 20 or 30 in my phone and it’s hard to figure out which ones I should use. So I’ve gone back and dated when I found schools on those spots or denoted when I found a big fish on a spot. For example, I might mark a big fish spot with 6LB-0609. If I find multiples I might do Sch-0609a. Something I can search easily by date, whether it was a school, or maybe even by a piece of cover like grassbed, stump, brushpile or some other feature.

Also keep in mind you can only save 99 spots, photos and markers collectively at this time. Hopefully that number will increase, although each map section is its own application so you’ll have 99 with each. But I’ve marked more than 100 beds for a tournament before so more will be necessary for serious anglers.

The next function is Track. This function is similar to a trail so you can follow where you’ve been. I haven’t used this as much because I don’t like to leave my phone out and on while I’m running down the lake.

Following that, the Distance function allows you to plot how far in a straight line it is from your current location to another location. Again I haven’t used this much either as most lakes aren’t shaped in a straight line. But that leads to the final function, WP (or Waypoint).

With WP, anglers can plot the distance and route from one location on a map to another. This can be invaluable, if you want to hit one spot way down the lake and make it back before weigh-in. Figure out how far it is by tracking points along the way that you will take by water. Most people who are familiar with GPS units on their boats will mistake WP for Favorites. WP is a routing function, while Favorites is a fishing spot logging function.

One recent advance with the 2.1 upgrade is a Camera option. Now you can snap a photo at a location from your map program and use it in conjunction with your spots. This could be invaluable if you go to locations and shoot photos of them at low water where you can see the cover and structure. Then come back and fish them later at full pool. You be able to pull the photo up and look at it for reference to remember what is under the water there. Very slick!

The best part of this application is that you can get the maps for $4.99 right now if you hurry. Just go to your Apple iTunes store or your iPhone App Store and search for Navionics. Then download the maps for your area. Simple as that. Other smart phone owners will have to wait for versions to be released for their phone. Navionics website can help with more details (navionics.com\mobile.asp).

Good Fishing!

Jason Sealock

"I'm Freaking Out!"

2009-06-15T09:00:00.000-05:00

Forget all the “wows,” “unreals,” and “best place in the world to fish” quotes. No quote from last weekend’s Walmart FLW Tour event on Kentucky and Barkley lakes summed up the event like the one in the title.

The originator of the line was Kellogg’s Rice Krispies Treats pro Jim Tutt of Longview, Texas, about an hour into the first morning. He told us he had been catching them in practice, so we decided to follow him to try and get some good photos. Yeah, “catching them” was a ridiculous understatement! By the time we had the camera gear ready he already had two keepers in the livewell and his co-angler was landing a 4-pounder. It seemed like every cast the two made ended with a net job. I can still picture him hunched over his livewell, his body trembling with excitement as he raised his head at our camera boat and stammered, “I’m freaking out.” All we could do was laugh and yell back, “This is what fishing is supposed to be like.”

Yes, last weekend, mere minutes from the FLW Outdoors office, we watched exactly what every angler dreams about. We watched pros catch bass almost nonstop on crankbaits, worms, jigs, spoons and swimbaits. I’m pretty sure most the pros had the fish so dialed in they could have tossed rocks with hooks on them and still landed fish. There are so many 10- to 14-inch bass in the lakes right now it almost got boring watching pros set the hook. But there are plenty of giants, which is why most pros’ hands looked like they’d gotten into accidents with 10-grit belt sanders.

I’ve seen some pretty impressive lakes throughout my life, but Kentucky and Barkley lakes are some of the most bass-infested waters I’ve been around. And after watching the pros for a couple days, I can’t wait till it’s my turn to “freak out.”

Here are a few shots from my days on the water:

Jim Tutt's day-one co-angler Lynn Baciuska Jr. of Afton, N.Y., battles a giant during Tutt's "freaking out" morning.

Day two, Tutt continued to share the wealth with his new co-angler. However, his spot didn't produce like it did the first day.

Keebler pro Dave Lefebre of Union City, Pa., swings in a keeper that began schooling behind his boat.

IAMS pro Koby Kreiger of Okeechobee, Fla., wrenching on the fish. If I had a nickle for every time I watched this happen last weekend I could pay someone to write this blog for me. But what fun would that be.

Kevin Snider of Elizabethtown, Ky., gave us almost as good a show on day two as Tutt did on day one.

Slam the Hooks!

Sean Ostruszka

The Tackle Shelf - ARDENT XS 1000.5

2009-06-09T13:09:00.000-05:00

wish I could tell you the reason my blog hasn’t been updated in a while is because I’ve spent the past two months doing nothing but fishing. Sadly, that would be a blatant lie. However, I have gotten out on the water a fair amount and wanted to start sharing my tales, tips and thoughts (ahh, alliteration). And what better way to get back in gear than with a good, old Lure Shelf product review.

About a month ago, I was able to pair up my favorite e21 Carrot Stix rod with a new Ardent XS1000.5 reel to create (cue cool announcer’s voice) the ultimate cranking setup. While the original XS1000.6 featured a 6.3:1 gear ratio, the new XS1000.5 has a slower 5.0:1 ratio built for tussling with crankbaits. Seeing as, at the time, I was on a great crankbait bite with Rapala DT6s, you could say I was a little excited.

Sure enough, my excitement fit the bill. Spooled with 10-pound Berkley Trilene XL, the reel performed better than I could have hoped that first trip out and every trip since. I can bomb and burn DT6s and middepth crankbaits without any fatigue. Beefing up to a deep-diving, forearm-straining, how-in-the-world-do-guys-throw-these-things-all-day crankbait will make your forearms hate you after an entire day. But they won’t hate you after five casts like with faster reels. That no-nonsense gear ratio also means you have the torque to wrangle in any bass, regardless of size.

However, the drool factor on this reel, like all Ardents, is casting distance. When casting with the wind, there are times when I feel like I’m going to spool the reel. If you’re trying to get a crankbait 15-plus feet deep, being able to cast like John Daly tees off is a wonderful ability. Against the wind, the reel was equally as impressive. Although, I warn you, showing off by casting with the wind with your magnets open and then turning and casting into the wind can result in a nasty bird’s nest and a deflation of ego. If such an instance occurs, simply pick out the backlash, put your back to the wind, let one fly and smile. Your ego will quickly restore itself when you out-cast your buddy by 15 yards. Not feet, yards.

Slam the Hooks!

Sean Ostruszka

Lessons Learned

2009-05-28T12:20:00.000-05:00

Success at fishing comes from continuous learning. Multiple variables from weather to water quality affect a fish’s behavior and feeding patterns. Knowing how to target the fish in ever-changing matrices of conditions bellies the best anglers to the top of the sport.

Wanting to learn more about catching bass on Table Rock Lake, I signed up to fish as a co-angler in a tournament back in 2004. This was a tour-level event, and I was excited about the possibility of drawing a great angler who could teach me some new tricks on a lake I’d fished for a few years.

The first day of the event, it poured down rain, long enough to push takeoff back an hour. My pro partner and I both blanked. The next day, I drew a legend in the sport – someone I’d always wanted to fish with for a day. His name wasn’t as important as what I learned.

We started the morning cranking and throwing spinnerbaits. As the day progressed, he learned to target bass in very shallow water, and I was left to fish out deep or back behind the boat. I was stumped as to how I should approach this because the boat was sitting in shallow water. He was bombing long casts straight ahead with a spinnerbait and fishing shallow water along the bank. The cove was muddy and the water was cold and I figured a deep bottom bite should still be decent.

After a few hours, not one bass bit my offerings, but the pro had three quality keepers. He was sitting in the boat retying and offered what I took as a casual observation at the time.

“Prespawn bass on this lake will rise up out of the middle of the coves that are 30 or 40 feet deep,” he said, “and they will hide in the top 1 or 2 feet of muddy water and ambush bait next to standing timber after a big rain.”

I don’t know if the rain and cold had my brain a little numb, but I failed to realize he was suggesting that I target the timber in the middle of the cove just under the surface while he fished the shallows from the front. I was stubborn and kept fishing the bottom out deep.
We left that cove and fished another spot before returning about 30 minutes later. This time, the pro headed right down the middle. I was elated to be able to cast toward the bank and fish shallow for a while. Meanwhile, he was casting to the standing trees in 30 to 40 feet of water with a spinnerbait, targeting bass in that 1-foot horizontal band of muddy water on the surface.
About that time, his rod loaded up and an awful commotion erupted on the surface. Before I gathered my senses, he’d flopped down on the deck and wrestled what looked to be a 7- or 8-pound bass into the boat.

Could that have just happened? Did he just catch an 8-pound bass from the very area where he had casually mentioned bass liked to hide, and that I opted earlier to ignore?

This sport offers a lot of humble pie, and it wasn’t my first time learning a hard lesson. But it taught me to always pay attention to changes on the water and more importantly, heed the advice of good anglers when they offer it with sincerity, like FLW Outdoors pros and co-anglers do in this magazine.

Good Fishing,

Jason Sealock

Ah, Spring

2009-03-24T11:27:00.000-05:00

Ask what's on the mind of a fan of the outdoors today and he or she will likely say something about gobbling birds or biting fish. It happens every year when spring arrives, and this year is setting up to be one of my favorites. Balmy weather in western Kentucky has found me on the water pretty often lately. And I've caught a few bass on jerkbaits, jigs, crankbaits and lipless crankbaits, which are all mighty fun to throw. Crappie anglers are spread across the lake, and although I haven't taken much time to fish for them, I've watched many boats pull up slabs for the cooler.

I love crappie fishing and got started fishing by chasing specs, but my focus this spring seems to be on bass. I'm not sure why, but I am more excited about this season than any in the past. And I am ready to pound away at them the next few months. With that in mind, here is a list of what I want to accomplish, experiment with and learn more about this season while fishing on Kentucky Lake:

1. Big Spoons: I want to get on a bite with big spoons and toss one into a school of aggressive, competitive bass so they can thrash it a few times.

2. Frogs: I threw frogs quite a bit last summer but never really got into any big-uns. This year I am setting a goal to catch a 6-pounder on a frog.

3. Deep Cranking: This year I want to go off David Fritts style on Kentucky Lake. I want to find a ledge full of bass and ignite them with a crankbait and, hopefully, catch a few fish back-to-back-to-back-to...you get the point.

4. Swimming Jigs: This is a two-part goal: shallow and deep. I want to catch fish burning a swimming jig over submerged grass beds sometime this year on Kentucky Lake just to experience it. I also want to learn more about swimming or slow-rolling a jig on offshore structure. I think it's a technique that isn't far too common and could get hot.

5. Shaky Head: I will throw a shaky head this year. Not just once. I will throw it all season.

6. Skipping: I want to learn to skip docks with a baitcaster. I also want to get better at roll casting under and around docks with crankbaits, spinnerbaits and other lures. Essentially, I want to strenghten my casting accuracy.

7. 25 Pounds: I want to catch a 25-pound limit. I don't care how. I don't care when. I just want to catch a 25-pound limit on Kentucky Lake.

- Curt Niedermier

Checklists and Border Crossings

2009-03-05T09:16:00.000-06:00

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a checklist guy. I make checklists for everything from life-experience goals to “honey-dos” for the weekend. In the magazine business, editorial checklists drive the timeliness of magazines going to print and to your mailboxes and newsstands. It’s the same approach we take to provide you with all the great information from our pros to help you reach your own fishing goals.

Having most of my checklist done early last December, an offer to go to Mexico came. For someone who lives in a climate where snow and ice was common that month, a trip to Mexico sounded like heaven on earth. And quite frankly, a trip to El Salto had been on my “bass fishing goals checklist” for a while.

I was offered an opportunity to participate in product demonstrations with my friends at Tru-Tungsten (Fish Harder Companies), Shimano, Wave Worms, Rat-L-Trap, Biosonix and Laser Lure. Many other outdoor journalists were in attendance as well. Writers I respect greatly, like Ed Harp, whose articles I’ve read with great interest and who probably influenced my own style, couldn’t pass up this unique opportunity.

The trip was booked through Ron Speed’s Adventures (ronspeedadventures.com). A short flight from Houston to Mazatlan, Mexico had us loading gear in the back of shuttles before 1 p.m. The scenery on the drive was awesome with coastal washes out one window and arid, rugged landscapes and jagged mountains out the other. We ate a fine meal our first evening at the lodge, got to meet and visit with some great folks and began preparations for the next morning’s battle.

I shared a boat with professional angler Marty Stone that first morning. He and I stumbled onto a deeper-than-usual pattern revolving around deep rock and Carolina rigs and Zoom Mag Finesse Worms, Zoom 8-inch lizards and Berkley Power Worms. We managed to communicate with broken Spanish to our guide that we wanted to fish some deep rocks. He took us to a spot that fit our weak translation, and to say it was the right choice was a horrendous understatement. We boated 50 bass between 4 and 7 pounds in very short order.

When we got back to the lodge for lunch, word had spread about our 50-fish morning, when most of the others struggled to boat a few fish. Our guide shared the location of the spot with the other guides, and the rest will be something of future fishing lore.

Over the course of three days, that one spot in 30 feet of water with scattered standing timber and big rocks yielded hundreds upon hundreds of bass. You could catch them on jigs, topwaters, swimbaits, plastics and crankbaits. It didn’t matter. The last morning of fishing there were seven boats with two anglers each fishing the small area. Michael Iaconelli and I whacked them on Picasso jigs, Yamamoto Senkos and Berkley Power Worms with the new Youvella hooks. But the other boats caught a lot of bass too.

There aren’t many places in this or any other country where you and six other boats can sit on a small spot for three days and crank out hundreds of bass averaging 4 pounds. All told, that spot gave up six bass weighing more than 8 pounds and countless quantities between 4 and 8 pounds.

That one spot literally produced a ton of bass.

And now I’m one line item closer to mastering my own bass fishing goals!

Good Fishing!

Jason Sealock

Editor

To see more photos from this trip, click here. Expect a full destinations story on the fine fishing on El Salto in an upcoming issue of FLW Outdoors Magazine.

Pounds and Inches

2009-03-01T08:48:00.000-06:00

Spring is at the door, and those anglers who took a month or two sabbatical from fishing during the colder months of the year are now chomping at the bit for trophy time. This is the time of year when some of the biggest walleyes and bass are caught. That late season of ice fishing and early ice-out in the North, and migrating bass in the South all make trophies a little more attainable this time of year.

Big fish feed increasingly as the water temperatures rise a degree or two every week. Truth of the matter, they are better about adding and losing pounds and inches when they need to than we are. But that brings up a good point for discussion. Is it inches or pounds that indicates a trophy?

By my standards, it’s pounds and ounces. Inches mean nothing to me. No one cares that I’m 72 inches tall, but for some reason it seems to matter that I’m 250 pounds. Same is true for fishing in the South.

A 10-pound, 1-ounce fish is much larger than a 9-pound, 15-ounce fish. Anglers down South are sticklers about an ounce or 2. Tell your buddy you caught a 5-pounder, and when that fish only pulls the spring on the scale down to 4 pounds, 14 ounces, your buddy will immediately start ribbing you about having a case of the “big eye” (where your eyes seem to see things larger than they really are – somewhat the opposite of a rearview mirror).

However, if you told that same buddy down South you caught a 21-inch smallmouth up North, he’ll say his 20-inch smallmouth was “pretty much the same size.” I think I just heard a few Northerners groan at that remark.

Yet I can’t really tell. So if I tell someone I caught a 20-inch smallmouth, guys up North are patting me on the back. Guys down South are still wondering if that’s a big fish. Then I tell them it weighed 6 pounds and they pat me on the back too.

Fishing is the only language I’ve found that is universal and foreign at the same time. It’s all in the details. If you fish a national tournament trail, you probably speak the universally foreign language fluently. Here at FLW Outdoors, we speak it fluently as well.

Telling someone you can catch bass on lizards in the spring isn’t speaking clearly. But explaining what type of hideouts and feeding areas to seek, and describing some different ways to rig and retrieve lures to entice strikes from pressured fish is where the language becomes clearer.

The separation between great anglers and sporadically good anglers is in the details. We all want to consider ourselves great anglers. The truth is we need to pay more attention to the details to truly become great anglers.

At FLW Outdoors Magazine, we’re focusing on putting more detailed information on locations, retrieves, sizes, colors and more into every article we put in the magazine. We realize our goal is to get anglers speaking a universal language of catching fish. Fishing is fun … but catching is way more fun.

We tried to cover a lot of bases in this issue, from throwback lures, to new crazy finesse rigs, to different approaches for old standbys. If variety is the spice of life, then consider this edition the salsa of early spring fishing.

Good Fishing,

Jason Sealock

Custom Crankbaits

2009-02-19T08:59:00.000-06:00

There's something sweet about custom crankbaits. Every time I see one I imagine someone sitting at a workbench sanding, whittling, shaving, gluing and all the other work that goes into making one. I sometimes wonder how they can part with them after all that effort, but not for too long. Money is quite persuasive.

Honestly, I haven't fished many custom cranks, but everytime I see one I start in on a thorough examination. I look at the hook eyes or wire to see what gauge was used. I imagine how it will swim based on the bill shape, size and angle. I wonder how it might swim differently with a slightly thicker body or shorter tail.

I blogged about this subject in the past, and I have been writing about it often lately. But I keep coming back to crankbait design when I think about fishing. I even have a pile of sawdust in my bedroom/workshop where I started tinkering with my own custom creations. They are all yet to swim, because I am currently working out some of the construction processes. But soon I will seal them and toss them in a pond. That's when I will really learn about crankbaits and how each detail affects its performance. And when I tweak the designs, I'll learn even more, until, I hope, I can work in reverse. Rather than build it, test it and see the result, I can decide what result I want to achieve, and design accordingly.

I doubt I will ever sell any of these crankbaits. But again, money is persuasive. I just don't think I can part with any of them yet. Considering the time I put into them, I think they are all wonderful, despite what anyone else may say when they offer a critique. Plus, if they don't swim worth a hoot I will have some very cool Christmas ornaments.

- Curt Niedermier

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed and Something Blue

2009-01-05T16:09:00.000-06:00

Weddings signify the start of a new chapter in the lives of two people. The birth of a child is a new chapter in a family’s life. And adults’ efforts to share the outdoors with young ones open up new chapters in children’s lives.

There is such a challenge for our attention today, when it seems there is an overload of outlets racing to provide us with the next round of bad news. When faced with information overload, disconnecting from the troubles in life becomes increasingly difficult.

The best advice I ever received when faced with an overload of depressing news was to focus on my passions. For me, that has always been fishing. Here at FLW Outdoors Magazine, we’re refocusing our efforts to provide more for anglers.

We want more people to get out and enjoy the intrinsic values of fishing and competition. As a result, FLW Outdoors is going through multiple upgrades to its Web sites, to the magazine, to our tournaments with new circuits like National Guard FLW College Fishing, and to our company philosophy as a whole. To that end, we’re trying to get more content to anyone who loves fishing through many different outlets.

Speaking specifically about the magazine, readers will find more quick, concise content that’s easier to read in our new Front Deck sections, such as the Livewell. We added more tournament content based on strategies winning anglers used in our Back Deck sections, such as Tournament Tested, On Tour and Tournament Highlights. And our overall redesign gives the magazine a quality not found in many publications. We want our readers to have the very best-looking magazine in the industry for their hard-earned dollars.

On the Web, the editors are blogging and participating in the new flwoutdoors.com online community. We also hope to soon add on-the-water videos to further explain and demonstrate techniques and strategies discussed in the magazine.

We still have much of the same great content as before. From showcasing and rigidly testing the hot, new products in the market, to featuring the best destinations for fishing-related travel planning around the country and beyond, we’re keeping those same columns and features anglers have come to love. And, of course, the departments and features will still focus on finding golden nuggets of information from successful anglers that open up new opportunities for catching fish.

The magazine will still feature award-winning photography, and our well-read stable of award-winning writers will continue to write some of the best features in the business. Plus, we’ll borrow some of our magazine content to expand on topics at flwoutdoors.com that were once confined to paper.

As for something blue, well, it’s all about being on the blue waters of the top reservoirs, lakes and rivers with great anglers to bring their wealth of knowledge to the masses.

Our staff sometimes feels married to this magazine, but it’s because we have a true passion for this sport and for people who share our passion. It’s your magazine, and we want to bring as many of you the fishing information you want, however you want it.

Good Fishing,

Jason Sealock

How to Get Spots Out

2008-11-05T11:59:00.000-06:00

The great thing about my job is that I meet a lot of people who are great, and often relatively unknown fishermen who share my same passion for the sport. I've made some very close friends over the years through fishing and writing about fishing. The great thing about our friendship is that at any given moment we might call each other and say the bite is on at our local lake and invite the other over for some great fishing. Great fishing when I was a kid was all about catching a lot. Then it got to be catching a lot of big ones. Now it's more about catching some fish and having a good time with your friends and family.

So my buddy Ricky calls me and says the spotted bass are gorging themselves on shad and I needed to get down there.

"What should I bring?" I asked.

"Bring jerkbaits, shakey heads, some deep crankbaits and maybe a few spinnerbaits," he said.
I've been getting a lot of new tackle in the office so I wanted to bring some of it to the lake. I brought Optimum and Berkley swimbaits, Damiki spinnerbaits, drop shot and shakey head worms from Berkley and Roboworm, Lucky Craft jerkbaits and a few Lucky Craft DB20 crankbaits. I took three baitcasters and a spinning rod.

I hit the road around 4 a.m. on Friday morning and we were on the lake by 8 a.m. We fished maybe 20 minutes before Ricky had a keeper spot on a Lucky Craft jerkbait. We boated several on jerkbaits. Ricky caught a nice pair of 3 1/2 pounders on Headshaker jigheads with Wave Worm finesse worms. I caught a couple as well on shakey head Berkley PowerBait Hand Pour worms.

As the day progressed the fish got more active. We started fishing spinnerbaits and swimbaits off some shallow points in the howling wind and a giant spot nearly took the rod away from me. It hit a Berkley Hollow Belly swimbait. On the scale it measured 4.42 pounds, one of my biggest spotted bass ever. Not even 2 minutes later, Ricky hit an even bigger fish with a jerkbait. The fish tipped the scale at 5.12 pounds. By this time we had now boated a 20-pound limit of spotted bass. Unbelievable.

The next morning I was chomping at the bit to get on the water. It was 27 degrees when we launched from the ramp. The jerkbait bite we soon learned, was over. We managed one 3-pound spot on it early and that was all we could muster. We started fishing Optimum double diamonds and Berkley Hollow Bellies around deeper wood cover. Ricky was getting some jarring strikes on one retrieve when the fish got hooked up about 10 feet from the boat and broke his line on the hookset. They are so powerful and they hit those swimbaits like a ton of bricks.

I opted to fish a drop shot for a while as the water temperatures had gone from 58 to 52 degrees over night. And I focused on fishing a little deeper than we had been. I almost immediately hooked up with a nice 3 1/2 pound spot. Then moments later another nice one and then another.

Ricky put down the swimbait and grabbed a shakey head and went to schooling me. HE must have gone 10 casts in a row catching a bass on every one before he got his bait back unbitten.
We worked back up to where he broke that big spot off earlier and didn't do much. So I spun the boat around and fired a cast back to the deep spot we had been catching them. I picked up on the drop shot and it was tight. I set the hook and had that sensation that I was stuck. Then a powerful surge pulled the rod tip down into the water and I told Ricky to get the net because this was a big fish. After a lot of back reeling and playing of the fish, we netted it.

My biggest spot ever - a 5.28 pound behemoth. So fat she looked deformed. And all at once, my world was right again. Any of the negative talk about economies and retirement plans was all but a faint memory that day. And I was sporting a smile you couldn't knock off with a stick.

Another 18 pound limit of spots for our five best fish and for two days of nearly freezing temperatures and high winds, we managed to boat roughly 35 spotted bass with three over 4-pounds. You don't catch many bass weighing more than 4 pounds. And even less weighing more than 5 pounds.

If you compare it to the world records, catching a 5-pound spot is like catching an 11 1/2-pound largemouth or a 6-pound smallmouth. Three goals I've set for myself and two of which I can now say I've accomplished. All that is left is an 11 1/2 pound largemouth and my quest will be complete!

Here's hoping you get out and catch them. And remember it's not too cold yet. Bass still need to eat and they eat more than you think when the water cools.

Good Fishing!

Jason Sealock
Editor

Why I'm Not David Fritts!

2008-11-04T09:05:00.000-06:00

I had the privilege of being on assignment during the Wal-Mart FLW Series BP Eastern Division event on Clarks Hill Reservoir in Georgia last month when cranking legend, David Fritts won the tournament on a series of Rapala DT crankbaits. To say he won was about as much of an understatement as you can make. He literally decimated the field by more than 10 pounds. Not many people can do what Fritts can with a crankbait. And I spent several hours photographing and watching him work his crankbaits in an area.

From the surface, it doesn't appear as Fritts is doing much different than you or I would do with a crankbait. Even his casts didn't seem that far to me. But the proof is in the pudding, and there is definitely a method to his madness. He looked so relaxed out there -- the first thing I noticed. He casts effortlessly, he sits leaned forward slightly in the chair on the front deck of his Ranger bass boat and his casts jettison his crankbait from the tip of a slow-reacting glass rod like a medieval catapult.

He matches a BPS David Fritts Signature Series reel on an American Rodsmith David Fritts Signature Series Crankin' rod. The fact that he uses a David Fritts reel with a David Fritts rod overstates his unassuming demeanor on the water but understates his beaming confidence off the water when talking about crankbait fishing. They guy knows his stuff. The only reason he has rods and reels named for him is because he knew the exact action of a perfect rod for casting distance and sensitivity requirements as well as the fact that a dual-pawl anti-reverse allowed for more feel of his crankbaits in the water. They didn't have exactly what he needed on the market at the time, so he got some good folks to make them for him.

But again it’s the man as much as the equipment that wins tournaments of this magnitude. I'm pretty sure David could have caught bass on a kid's Snoopy pole; it would have just been harder.
We have some great information about how he found the fish, fished for them during the tournament, and won the event in an upcoming issue of FLW Outdoors Magazine. We got the nitty gritty details about bumping the stumps and standing timber and when not to bump. So we'll save the juicy details for then.

But watching Fritts for a couple days yanking on 4- and 5-pound bass got me itching to go crankbait fishing on Kentucky Lake. Mistake number one: you don't tell the bass what they'll bite, they tell you. But sometimes I get stubborn after I see an angler who I've admired for many years just whack the fish on certain lure. Let's face it. That's why we watch fishing shows and read magazines, to figure out maybe a better way or a new toy that catches bass. We're all about the toys, aren't we?

Well after about 8 hours and 2,000 casts with a DT16, DD22, DT 20, Fat Free Shad, and a Hot Lips Express, I had nothing to show for it but two small dinky bass. Now I had heard the fishing was tough, that the weather had messed up the water temperatures and every local club having its year-end championships was putting a lot of pressure on the obvious places, but still I should have caught them better than two short fish. Then it dawned on me --- I'm not David Fritts. While I love to catch them on a crankbait, it's naive for me to think I will go catch them as well as he does everywhere he goes if the conditions aren't right on my own lake.

I guess we live and learn. Maybe next week, I'll pretend I'm Mark Rose and go catch them on a big spoon. Or I'll go pretend I'm George Cochran and fish ultra shallow way up the river. Maybe I'm better off just picking up my homemade jig and fishing slower and not pretending to be a pro. I seem to always do better fishing when I have no pre-conceived notions about how I should catch them or where I should catch them. Just put the trolling motor down and go to work.

Good Fishing!

Jason Sealock
Editor