FishDr

I’ve been using the Cold Tuna racks for about 19 years. I have them ceiling mounted but you can also wall-mount them. I’ve been very pleased with them.

Congrats on the new PB - I’m sure your grandpa would have approved.

It is definitely worth a shot, as others have mentioned. The regular 8” Hudds work when cast and retrieved or vertically jogged and I suspect other big soft plastics will too. I haven’t taken them on hard baits but I know of guys in CO that get them on glides and other sinking baits. Trolling big floating baits with a downrigger is another proven option. If you search the Flipside for videos by Swimbo, there’s a neat one from some years back where he gets some big lakers from a kayak.

That's one solid fish to add to an impressive line of solid fish over the years.

In. Now I hope the ice melts on my favorite lake.

A guy I know (Jesse Lepak) does really good wood-burnings of fish. A very good friend of mine had him do a custom walleye for me that had the same dimensions as my PB. I've got it hanging in the den/fishing room above the TV. You can find him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/NaturalWoodburning/about

Nicely done - consistently on the fish!

What a fish, and out of the pontoon too! I've got a soft spot for big fish caught from pontoons.

Glad you got it back - way to be patient and to improvise with the tools you had on hand.

My favorite 7” Slammer. It’s bigger 9” companion finally took terminal damage last summer.

Nice crappie!

Congratulations on a great fish and an awesome write-up! The fish is a beast, and out of a kayak to boot.

Very nice Florida bass. I’m glad you’re still getting into them.

Yup, still loitering in the weeds, still throwing Slammers, still trying to catch a Colorado DD bass and targeting walleye and northerns with big baits.

That’s an excellent incidental catch!

Definitely switch them out as needed - I try to check them before a trip but more often notice that one or more points are getting dull while fishing and I’ll make a mental note of it. I’ve found that when fish are quietly nudging or slurping wakebaits having very sharp hooks gets hookups while fuller hooks tend not to pin the fish. And I’m all about pinning the fish.

Any Slammer will catch fish. I prefer the 2-piece ones but have had some good sessions with the 3-piece as well. The 7” is a good “gateway” bait but the 9” is my go to swimbait of all kinds.

That's a great catch! Carp are such strong fish - when you hook one the end result is very much up in the air.

If you have or can find a copy of Southern Trout Eaters, there’s a segment where they’re fishing the Triple Trout with that fast burn-pause cadence. It works surprisingly well.

My wife would probably say that too many of my trips involve bad weather! I've done more night walleye trips than I care to admit where I start off the evening by scanning the ice looking for open pocket of water that reach the shoreline. Breaking ice out of the guides is something I end up doing every couple of casts on those trips and I learned the hard way not to use braid - it just ices up even faster. Air temps would be in the teens to twenties and the water would be right around 32. Sometimes I even catch a fish, but often not. The coldest fishing I've done was for work, where we were collecting burbot (a mostly nocturnal freshwater cod relative) through the ice on Flaming Gorge Res...at night. Daytime highs were in the single digits and it was below zero at night. I always hoped that the glow-in-the-dark tubes and grubs that were tipped with a little bit of sucker meat kept that bit of sucker meat on them, otherwise I had to take my gloves off to put a fresh piece on - got a mild case of frostbite doing that. We got our fish though! My only encounter with tornados happened while fishing two of my favorite CO spots. At the first spot I'd arrived in early afternoon with plans for a session into the wee hours. About an hour in I happened to glance up and noticed that the clouds overhead were rotating, kind of like water going down the drain. A beeline to boat ramp did I make in my pontoon! Foolishly, I then decided to run an hour north to a second spot, since I was already a couple of hours from home. Got there, skies were overcast, and Ithought about unloading the pontoon but instead decided to take a few casts and check things out. After about 10 casts I noticed that there was constant rumbling from thunder I could see no ground strokes. Popped in to the truck cab and flipped on the radio just in time to catch a tornado warning for the nearest town. I ran like a chicken and had to drive about 50 yards of tumbleweeds that were piled at least as high as the truck as the wind kicked up, and then the skies opened up. Huge hail, monster lightning flashes and somewhere in the gloom a funnel cloud as I went tearing down the highway. I didn't see that one but about 10 minutes later I passed a tornado on the ground about 3 miles away. Not fun.

Wanted to be a fish biologist since middle school, so I got a BS in fisheries management and learned along the way that I loved research and teaching. That led into a MS and doctorate in fisheries and then a job in Colorado teaching about fish and doing fish research - hence the FishDr. It’s been a great and rewarding career - where else do you get to play with fish and tell fish stories and call it work? (You definitely don’t want me prescribing anything for your fish).

That is a spectacular brace of bass!

That's one heck of a loss and recovery story! Glad you got the bait back - I hope you got your dad something super nice for his troubles - and his bleeding nose.

Big channel cat blow-ups are some of the most violent I've experienced. Nice catfish!

What a day!