ICAST DAY TWO

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

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

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

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!"

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

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

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