adolson

Nice fish! But what's with the glow around everyone and everything? That looks really odd.

I met up with Rod Caster this afternoon to try catching a lake trout, and managed to do so shortly after I gave up and stopped really trying. Caught it on a spinner, casually casting to open water while drifting. It was a gorgeous day, not too hot, not too cool, sun wasn't blaring. It was just nice to get out with someone, as my trips this year have been much more limited than last year, and quite lonely as my son doesn't yet share my love for the Sportspal. Soon...

That's definitely a nice first pike. I wouldn't start targetting them now, though... They're not all like that. At least not up where I live. My biggest was 35" (in a trout lake), but most of the time I get smaller ones, and even tiny ones like this: Mind you, that's only when I'm forced to fish in a lake without any trout in it.

Speechless..

Yep, you never know. I was fishing for aurora trout on 2011 opener with my cousin. We trolled around for hours and the only thing we caught all day was some guy's Little Cleo which had lunch meat on the hook... and was still attached to an ultralight Ugly Stik with a Shimano Sedona reel. We found the owner and brought him our catch.

WHY YOU LITTLE

After some "education" here a while back, I tossed my scales in the trash and now only measure the length of my fish if they look close to my PBs or if they're trout big enough to keep. Most of my rods have Rod Rule decals on them for this purpose. It never fails that people ask me how much my fish weigh, and I answer them in inches, usually to a puzzled look. Truth is, they're probably not more than a couple pounds usually, if that, and it doesn't really matter to me. I know people who catch a little 1-2lb bass and they're so excited, they put it on their 50lb scale because they are excited about it and think it's gotta be huge. I dunno, I used to be like that. I can understand the mentality. Funny thing is, I had a guy embelish FOR ME once.. That was odd. I told him about some decent trout I caught at this one lake we both fish. Ran into him and his friend a few weeks later, and he starts telling the guy, "this is Dana, he's caught a six-pound speck up at Blank Lake!" And I'm like, uh... no? I wish. Haha.

Bear Grylls is a tool. I won't buy gear with his name on it out of principle. I have some old machete at the moment, inherited from my father-in-law, but I am interested in one of the new Schrade machetes, as I rather like their SCHF9 knife I picked up recently.

Palomar is practically the only knot I use, for all line types. If I find a knot slips on a particlar line, I will do a double palomar instead.

I've been a fan of women's MMA ever since the first fight I watched (Erika Montoya first-round win by flying armbar). As such, I have watched some Invicta, yes. But I really haven't been too much in the loop with MMA ever since Zuffa started shutting down / taking over all the [better] competition. I really miss the likes of PrideFC, Strikeforce, Affliction, etc., and - most of all - IFL (especially before they ditched the team aspect). And now that Dana White has changed his mind about gender equality and added a women's division to the UFC, it's just a matter of time before Invicta is absorbed. Hope I'm wrong on that...

Very nice!

I was just wondering if you had got the place mentioned not long ago, and now I saw this post.. I'm a bit behind the times, I apologize... Congrats to you two! The speck water sounds like the best part, no matter what you paid for the property.

I've also never flipped a boat of any kind, yet I've considered adding these for the security/peace of mind when standing (for example, when learning to fly cast), and also for windier days on larger lakes.. But then again, I use a Sportspal, and that alone excludes me from any elitist crowd.

I use a Lowrance X-4 Portable sonar, which I picked up at Canadian Tire last year when it was on sale. I don't really use it often, but I like it. It does what I need - depth, basic structure, and surface temperature. I believe you can get some kind of adaptor to clamp the transducer to your trolling motor (couldn't be too hard to make one, either), but I just use the suction cup that came with it, though I took it off the plastic piece and bolted the transducer directly to the cup, and I just stick it on the side of my Sportspal. It's not angled entirely correct when I do this, but whatever, it works well enough. Some day I'll rig up a better mount with a proper angle. It's not fancy, but I'm happy with it, and it's way better than the first sonar I had.

He has the Oregon 450, but yeah. I expect you can do it with that too.

That would be me. Ibycus is legally free, and I just took the data and pulled out only Ontario into one IMG file. If you want anything outside of Ontario, you can grab Ibycus and do it yourself (I probably can't help you much with that, as I only run Linux and the software is different than Windows and Mac software). I can't really compare it to anything but the crappy base map that came on my Dakota 20, which it is far, far better than. If you want my Ibycus Ontario map file, shoot me a PM.

Welp, I'm jealous.. Nice fish!

I love posts like this.