Nice perch

B-man wrote:

Let’s see the pictures

Big mouth buffalo was posted on ido.
Can’t say I’ve I’ve taken a trophy photo with a sauger but I’ve released plenty 26″ prespawners. Insert debate for saugeye here. And nobody cares about rock bass

Bearcat89 wrote:

He gets sick listening to his neighbors leaf blower.

You should hear his opinion on headlights fishing pool 4 after dark

I definitely only look at length in regard to whether a fish is a legal keeper or not. Beyond that if I want to know how big of a fish I caught I definitely go by weight.

Sturgeon probably have the biggest discrepancies in length to weight for all Minnesota species.
5 feet of fish can go 31# and can go 61#.
This is likely due to 5-7 year egg maturation periods, as well as fish health. But the weight length examples above are legit as measured and weighed by me.

I guess when you’ve caught 60 60″ fish you begin to recognize they’re not all created equal and only one of those was truly the biggest.

I personally do not care about records.
Have caught state record big mouth buffalo, white bass, likely sauger, and like everyone else, the state record rock bass all went back without giving a hoot.

Definitely put me in the camp of not caring how long your fish was, I want to know what it weighed. But will be equally happy if I don’t even know you caught a fish or if you don’t have any measurements and your happy with your fish!

I believe all competition brings drama, so I don’t partake in records or tournaments. Zero interest whatsoever.

Sorry not sorry dueces

I got a buddy down in Texas who is quite good catching crappie. 16′ Garmin screen. He’s QUITE good at keeping the FFS pointed at the fish. Learning to use the software isn’t too hard. Learning that boat control, or rather sonar control is what sets him apart from his peers… as his peers told me about him. I got 90% of what I wanted to know about FFS on that trip (I was hunting but we were in a boat to and from spots so i got the 6 minute tutorial) but what I learned is that the remaining 10% of info I don’t have is the most crucial to catch a fish. Sonar control, boat control… whatever is needed to USE the software successfully by presenting a bait to a single fish.

grubson wrote:

What do you guys think? Can a one trick pony that’s good at video games really be called the best fisherman?

I think they’re called tournament winner. It may be you deciding to call them best fisherman.

Play the game or don’t. Girls pretending to be boys want to compete with boys. Don’t have the required equipment to compete, and lose. Boys pretending to be girls want to compete with girls. They dominate.

Guy without FFS wants to compete with guys who have FFS… and lose. Seems similar to a girl wanting to be a boy playing in boys sports.

Don’t be fooled that technology hasn’t lead tournaments for many years. You want to compete… be competitive!

Thank you MOJO. Signed.

I was hunting on a 10k acre chuck right next to a 44k chunk. Albeit much of those acres is water. Public land is certainly managed with a focus on deer, turkey, doves and ducks. Minnesota may have just as many public acres as Texas, despite Texas being 3.3 times the size of MN.

Not griping. Just making folks aware.

Probably more spring than summer but I plan to knock out a bunch of river miles in the yak.
Only a few miles left until I’ve paddled the entire root river system.
Will continue to knock out the zumbro system. Got easily 45 miles of that done last year.
Really want to run upper iowa river start to finish.
Takes high water to cover some miles. We’ll see.

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Welcome back fella!

OG Net_Man wrote:

2 out of the 3 threads recently closed were started by me which I had no intentions of any thing but a constructive conversation or awareness of a subject.

Of the hundreds I’ve started. Zero closed.
Maybe talk about fishing

I didn’t mean to discourage the use of smaller budget screens, just to set expectations. A guy should be able to sit on a bucket and enjoy a day of fishing as much as the guy who has a 300′ scan area.

Something to consider.
Let’s say your scanning 200′ left and 200′ right.
Because the deeper you go the wider you must make your scan.
Now your trying to see 400 FEET of information on a screen not even a foot wide. Makes things pretty small.
Yes you’ll see terrain. Bottom changes, large objects. No you won’t have any real detail of fish as they’ll be the size of a single pixel on your screen.

Largest screen will benefit you here.
Though without some YouTube research I cannot say just how beneficial SI is in deep water.
I get into any 30′ of water and am typically widening my scan area to 100′. I’d imagine into 100′ depth you may be scanning up ward of 300′ each way. Lots of data on a little screen.

I wouldn’t even recommend a helix 7 for ..
Well, anything. Too much info on too small of a screen. Smaller screen less you should be scanning so you can actually see anything. I typically scan 70′ with my 1199 or helix 12 when in less than 20′. I’d suggest half that when screen is much smaller and the fact of the matter is that your depth demands larger scan area. So helix 7 would be worthless.

Yeah the archery pig was on core of engineering land. Permit. Archery only. No night hunting. Orange. Plenty of hogs but ain’t easy getting into areas where they hang out during the day. Drew plenty of blood having the success I did in the thorns. Can be 10yds away and not have a shot.
No didn’t do anything with Bob. She took a .308 to the face from 20yds

Yeah good eating. Have one of those hogs in the cooler. Big male we left for the yotes.

Boar with 308. Probably 175# though the Texas Boys I was hunting with were saying 250#.
The bow sow was same size.
Good cutters. Doing a euro of the archery kill. That was some close range entertainment for sure.

Big Bob for this area. That was 20yds.
Archery hog was 30yds.
Thermal hog 75yds.

Appreciate it nick!

Glad it isn’t my boat

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Got in close for this one.
Man they’re hard on broadheads!
Public land

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Bobcat and hog with 308 thermal hunting.

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In fairness to the farmer/rancher your hunting near their livestock and on their property. Some risks involved and apprehensive to allowing strangers with powerful calibers to hunt to be expected.
Then toss in night hunting on top of it all.
Certainly true with prairie dogs.

In watching YouTube I’m amazed at some of the shots people take with livestock in the background.

Charlie W wrote:

I did not chime in on this a couple weeks ago but I disagree with cutting the front hook off. Will it change the action? Hardly.

I understand some similar style baits don’t have them and I also understand the frustration of losing too many around rocks if you don’t cut them off.

However, I have caught a pile of fish that are ONLY hooked with the front hook. Without it, those fish get away. I would say 2 or 3 out of every 10 <strong class=”ido-tag-strong”>walleyes come on the front hook for me – I am talking summer <em class=”ido-tag-em”>walleyes on natural lakes here. Smaller fish (eaters) I tend to hook with the treble, larger ones seem to have it completely eaten or I barely get them with the front or rear single hook.

I was on Winnipeg yesterday and caught a big fat 28” and change that only had the front hook in her.

Edit: I only use 7s and 9s

I’m confused.
Eaters eat the treble and bigger ones eat the whole thing. So your worried about catching the dinks?
Yeah, bigger fish eat the whole thing…. why I cut off front and rears.
I won’t use stinger hooks either on any bait… because all your doing by adding that is trying to catch the dinks you aren’t catching. Meh.

Won’t be me this time but you’d be amazed how many acres of ice you can break up per hour. If your itching… go get it

I’m going to Texas Friday.
Bringing:
Larue ar10 chambered in 308 with thermal scope.
Crossbow with redlight
Shotgun with redlight
Larue ar15 chambered in 223 with normal scope.

Hogs will be most day active in cooler months (now) deer season over so woods largely barren of people.

Will also do some hunting with dogs.

I traded a sturgeon trip for a hog trip many years ago and it’s time for me to cash in.

Be my first time soooooo plenty to learn. Not expecting YouTube quality wide open territory with 30 hogs and smoking hot AR’s. Am going to put in the work to get it done. Have a few bait piles with regulars showing up for the xbow.

I’ll tell ya why I cut them off.
I only use the biggest size rap first off.

Too often walleyes will eat the entire bait. This is not typically a bad thing, but in the case of the jigging rap with opposing hooks and center tremble it is.
Set the hook. One of them hooks catches something in the mouth. Now with the line pulling from center and fish opening mouth and thrashing I think what often happens is a second hook catches some flesh and then they work against each other resulting in loosing fish half way to the boat (in my case, I don’t ice fish with them). Once I cut the front and rear hooks I quit dropping fish half way to boat.
Concerned that I would suffer with less hookups I didn’t cut every bait I owned until experimenting extensively. I was immediately quite amazed that there was no lack of catch rate happening. Even accidental catches like perch and small drum who could barely fit the big treble in their mouths did so. Seems like target center mass when hitting the bait. Anyway I do make my own jigging raps now and still buy some also but the first thing I do is cut them hooks off and never look back.

My 2c take it or leave it. Caught hundreds upon hundreds of eyes with largest sized rap and never felt I was missing any fish because of cutting off hooks but I did find that I was loosing significantly LESS fish.

I’ve been cutting the front and rear hooks off for the better part of 10 years.
Zero negatives.

BigWerm wrote:

I know quite a few people said it’d be a cold day in hell before Pool 4 froze over or BK gave up SPAM

I’ve been on pool 4 with -5 air temp and a 20 mph wind. It was frozen. But not so much to keep me off… 30 minutes at a landing breaking ice to launch and do a 180 with boat to plow through the floating sheet in the main channel. Caught a few eyes and that was enough… brr

BTW, never seen so many eagles any other day than that day. Only open water was in the lock area and every eagle for 60 miles was present. Looked like blackbirds in the trees.

CaptainMusky wrote:

FBRM, if you werent such a big dude those fish would look huge! LOL Nice fish!

two 10’s and an 8. Nothing huge but nice fish. I don’t take many pictures anymore.