Off Season Tackle Chaos
We finally hit that last fishing show of the season. Weekends are for fishing now (and turkeys). We saved the best for last as always and ended on the D&R Sports Spring show. Always on the Friday and Saturday before Easter and once again it had lots of pro’s, deals on tackle, and fun. In between all that is has been fun to speak to some of the high school bass teams. I always feel guilty for not running a boat in the high school events. But if I’m being honest it is a priority for me utilize my time for taking the girls on trips so it feels good to contribute in some way. I’ve definitely had a lot of time to talk bass fishing with lots of my local friends as well as spending some time with the guys who do it for a living. It is always interesting to hear their perspective on things and try and learn something. I’m officially thinking about entering bass mode for the season.
The big story if you are a bass fisherman is the COIKE! If you are into tournaments and haven’t heard of it you are even further behind than I am. It is a strange concept that looks like an urchin and is made of TPE plastic. There are knock offs everywhere and the original Coike is about impossible to find. The imitations are into 2 categories from what I see. Those made from TPE plastic and a lot being poured with regular plastic. From what I understand there is a lot of advantage to the TPE both from a durability and an effectiveness standpoint. However until I try a few I won’t know what works for me. I picked up a few of the Skinny Bear knock offs at the Grand Rapids show and am excited to try them. I feel like my learning curve on rigging and fishing them is shortened a little bit after listening to some of the pros talk.
Plenty of other things caught my eye too. I’m ever intrigued by the glide bait craze. They had some of the Clutch swimbaits there which cost far more than I am willing to pay. If I understood exactly what I was doing with it, maybe that would be different. The new Strike King one did look solid although I didn’t pick one up. I’m going to keep rolling with my Spro version of the Chad Shad until I get a better understanding of it. We did have Chris Zaldain hanging out and talking TFO for the weekend and it was cool to see his recommendations for a Glide Rod. I have a feeling there will be some stuff coming in the future but for now a 766 TFO Taction is the one. Chris also let the cat out of the bag on the Bass Mafia Daingerous swimbaits and a lot of those were finding their way into peoples baskets.
The tackle industry right now is legit overwhelming. Between all the different forward facing sonar techniques and traditional tackle that gets increasingly more detail oriented and technical. It’s like a dang arms race out there with all the new and innovative stuff. I don’t get to fish enough or have enough tackle money laying around to keep up. Luckily finding bass is still the biggest piece of the puzzle. I do have some stuff on my list that I’m going to try though. It would be nice to have some new tricks.
I got to spend some more time with the Bates Fishing EDC reel (and the Hundo/Hundo 50). I’m anxiously awaiting for mine to show up so I can pass along an on the water test.
The weather has just been brutal to get my boat home and things swapped. It drives me crazy to not have the duck boat and bass boat home at the same time. It crushes my motivation way more than all this crappy weather we’ve had. I actually don’t mind that bass fishing because I often have the lake to myself. The wind has been absolutely relentless and has crushed my trolling dreams. Hopefully some fishing reports are coming in the near future though.