Canuck2fan

No carp die off anywhere around here. Lots and lots of the big smelly beasts so come to the Thames anywhere from London to Stratford and fish until your arms fall off. Take them home to do whatever with too please eat em mount no danger around here of them going extinct. So if any rich European fishermen are reading this any of the towns between London and Stratford welcome your tourist dollars and we have the carp too. Heck bring your wife let her take in a play in either London or Stratford it seems no one else is going to them anymore and you just fish fish fish!!!!.

I had fun, fished from 8:30 till 11:30 it was raining most of the time. Jesus had stopped taking pictures just before I got there thankfully. Landed 10 smallies, 2 largies, 6 WGSF and one HUGE sunfish..... pretty good considering I COULD NOT get anyway near where the good fishing usually is this early. The banks were just too slippery to get a toe hold on and I wasn't interested in swimming. OH well it is open and had a good if not great start.

4 smallies on the first 6 casts made the rain all but disappear LOL.

Yep stay safe everyone a few fish aren't worth getting zapped. The radar looks good where I am going though just about the time I get there it should be clear of the lightning..... I sure hope so anyhow LOL

Hello!!!! LIVE leeches under a float and hang ON!!! Any of the bait stores around Lake H tribs should have leeches.

I am going to my spot and I like the fact that most likely I will be the only one stupid enough to be out there LOL. Lightning will stop me but a little rain and it is fish ON!!!!

I grabbed one of the mini gerber multi-tools from Crappy Tire when they had them on for half price. It was a revelation that something so small could work so well. I was really thinking about ordering the one in the link above when I got the email from Cabelas, but like motv8tr I came to my senses when I saw the final price. YIKES, I guess I will have to wait for a better deal from a Canadian dealer. The price might be half of what it is here but in the last year I had lost or had stolen 3 different multi tools while fishing so cheap is a priority over quality. That or I have to stop fishing with people who never bring their own knives, screwdrivers or pliers.

There is no way to get around the significant profits private health care companies need to survive. Regardless, the US will soon be forced to change it's system in a major way due to ever balloning costs and more importantly deficits that will bankrupt the country unless changes are made.

Here is an interesting read about U.S. for profit HMO's vs non profit HMO's and who gets the better care. It is about eight years old so things might have changed but I couldn't find another study comparing the two systems.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...754C0A96F958260

I've been self employed since 1976 and purchased health insurance for my family. In July 1999 I turned 65 and went on medicare. I pay nothing for part A, but I pay for medicare part B, a supplemental plan and a drug plan. I'm also still paying 2.9% of my earned income into medicare as a payroll tax. I've never considered myself to be entitled to receive free medical coverage. If I did, where should the free stuff stop? Should I also receive free government housing, a free automobile, free food and free fishing tackle? If I did I'd be hard pressed to have self respect and incentive to fare for myself.

Our system isn't free..... We pay for it through our taxes which are quite high by American standards. However our Universal system costs less per capita than yours. I think the later part of your post describes why that is. Your own doctors went from having 4 support staff for 3 doctors to having 12 for two? Holy, no wonder your system is under seize just like ours. I have spoken with various people who work in the American system whose sole job it was to be a liason between the doctor and the HMO. The stories they tell me are very different from yours. Just having insurance in the U.S. does not insure getting the best or prompt treatment either from what they say. One woman who worked for an OBY/GN spent 9 hrs a day on the phone checking up on what was covered and what wasn't by a particular patients "plan". How could a UNIVERSAL system not be more efficient if you multiply that waste of time by the number of doctors in the U.S.?

I think you are the type of person that your current President, drug company CEO and HMO CEO just love. A hard working independant minded fella from the old school who thinks that taking anything like a "socialized" medical plan with one payer (you since you are a tax payer) would turn the country you love into a "commie" like state. The funny thing is I bet if your neighbour needed anything and you had it you would give it up in a second without a thought. Am I right? If so then what is different about having the same for medical treatment? Everybody shares the pain and the good. The only difference is, if everyone in the U.S. decided that health was a fundamental human right, you could with the political will cut out the fat not only for the lawyers but the CEO's of the HMO's and drug companies making 10,000,000 dollars PLUS a year...... Think if how many drugs and MRI's that could buy.

From King of the Hill a couple of classics.

Hank "Bobby if you weren't my son I would hug you...."

Hank "Boddy don't do that people will think you are not right..."

There is no cure for STUPID!!!! You can "solve" it by shooting them and putting them out of their and your misery but you can't cure it.

Muhammed Dhiani a very esteemed and learned friend of mine.....

Truer words have never been spoken either.

I installed it and just don't get the hype.... Same speed as my IE loading pages with about 5 different pages being times with no cache. Then it took me about a half hour of tweaking to find out that I just couldn't get it look the way I wanted it. I like having enlarged text so I don't have to go blind reading posts LOL. I eventually got the text the right size but by that time the width of window meant I had to scroll over all the time. The tab feature is good but I just tend to open 5 or 6 windows with IE and am used to that.

I think I will stay with IE 6.0 until I have to upgrade that then see what FF is like then.

Voted for Joey twice.... pays to have two email addresses I guess LOL

Sounds like a good hole you got there!

I am probably being a little optimistic only on account of being restricted from using smallie candy there this year. Not being able to use their favorite bait is going to put a lot more largies into play. So I might wind up having to work for smallies this year. Last year on the opener I had 4 fish in 5 casts... and the only reason I didn't have to walk home was I drove and had the keys my buddy got skunked that will teach him to stand on shore smoking while I was gathering the smallie candy LOL. It was a beautiful start to the year.

Wow I am ever in the minority here. I tried all the FF's before and they all quite frankly weren't any good. Sure they had lots of bells and whistles but I like my IE 6.0 it is fast stable and I never have any hassles or viruses. The earlier FF's were slow and ungainly to me.... But then again I spent a lot of time setting IE up to do what I want and haven't made the mistake of going up to 7.0 with Xp because it is just a nightmare, because it was really designed to work with vista.

Practice is definitely the key. Watching videos gives you some ideas but not the feel of the blade running along the back, skin, or ribs.

 

Which youtube guys did you watch? There are 2 who are excellent, one seems to work for a commercial fish processor, or possibly a trawler outfit.

 

Most of the youtube guys are mediocre at best but think they're amazing, and a few are just awful and have no place calling their video educational. The youtube videos are the first things I thought of after somebody made a comment to the effect that a lot of people think they're rapala's gift to cleaning fish in the fillet knife thread. ...I laughed out loud at one youtube guy showing us how good he is with his electric knife technique. I think it was a big crappie and he made crooked shallow cuts that left 1/2 the meat along the spine. it was hilarious.

You have to be "careful" though having an attitude like yours means you might just wind up cleaing all the fish..... I know I do wind up filleting everything myself because I can't stand seeing someone waste even a milligram of perch LOL

that might be the greatest idea i've read on this board... just gotta sort me out some kids

I gotta tell you I was so happy that I was finally ALLOWED the privilege of being able to fillet instead of skinning that I never even saw it coming. That was like 30 yrs ago and to this day my father has never cleaned a fish LOL.... So it does work!!!!

I want to go perching but if it rains one more time between now and then I can't see the water being anything but chocolate milk so I will bide my time till my favorite bass spot opens next Saturday... and it don't matter how rainy it gets that spot is always crystal clear.

I am getting better....Youtube has helped in that regard.

You have to take your wife and kids out and all catch about 20 perch each... Then you will have enough fish to practice on. You get the least squeamish of the children to play the game by telling them how much fun it is to take the skin off....

Then after 50 times of doing this when you will NOT LET them do them the filleting part they will be begging you to do it Saying they can do it so much better than you. You let them and agree right then and there that they are so much better at it than you. Suddenly they are doing all the work and you as the dad never really have to learn how to fillet them properly. That is how it worked at my house anyhow. LOL

Someone beat me too it... as my dad who has been an auto mechanic for 56 years has always said..... CHECK THE GROUND first it is the fastest, cheapest test and will usually solve your problem.

What used to be really funny though was watching my uncle (electrician) and my dad arguing about that.... My uncle who was used to AC just couldn't grasp the need for a good ground on a car all the time for some reason.

OK so why would they do that? Maybe because waders generally have them? You might be able to find old stock of the ones that do have a warmer pocket though if that is a deal breaker. Just call and ask before you order, and write in any order you make on the web in the comments or special instruction window that most websites have.

I found it funny that someone had a walleye boat in Florida..... Maybe they fish for walleye there but it doesn't strike me as walleye country..... Now if he had of said bass boat my cheque would have been in the mail. (not saying it wouldn't have bounced though)

For 300 dollars.... I could by a 13ft STREAMSIDE float rod, with an okuma Sheffield float reel and probably 2 rapala cheapies that I could lose or someone could toss in the sink, or borrow to clean a fish for a shore lunch on a rock or pier without me losing my mind LOL.

I am not so much worried about the rain as it falls. I have have really great pike fishing in the pouring rain but the water wasn't chocolate milk because it had just rained that day and only for about an hour. What is starting to tick me off is that we can't seem to string 3 days of no rain together to let the rivers clear so water around the piers isn't too muddy to fish perch. Everytime for the last 3 weeks I have able to get away it is thunder ligthing and pouring (

I see this weekend is also 40% Saturday and 80% Sunday chance of rain. Hopefully there are wrong but I doubt they will be.

I do the same thing with every trout or salmon I am keeping I find it makes the cleaning a lot easier and the meat tastier. My one uncle who managed trout ponds always insisted leaving a trout alive ruined the meat because the trout would release toxins in the blood due to stress..... so kill it right away by bleeding it out.

I also started scaling and killing a smallie if I was going to eat it too right away and no more muddy bass taste either.

BTW I caught a number of pike there myself this year and that is the average size all right. I only got one that was over 4lbs. The funny thing this year was the bigger the minnow the smaller the pike LOL.

If you have a really small spinner of any kind and let the current do the work you can have a blast. If you can find a spot where just holding the spinner in the current allows it to turn you might be surprised at how far from the edge or from under a log a speck will dart to nail it after a couple of minutes.... If you can get to such a spot without spooking the fish first you really will have earned what you catch.