Innholdsfortegnelse for December/January/February 2024 i In-Fisherman

Comfort and Mobility Convenience, comfort, and mobility are standard Yetti fare in their Single-Axle 17-foot Hydraulic Lift Houses, offering spacious comfort in a design that’s easy to tow, settle into position, and maintain. Check floorplans and details, plus pricing for three 17-foot models and a new 21-footer at yettioutdoors.com Nessie The Berkley PowerBait Nessie, voted Best New Softbai t at the most recent ICAST show, is a soft-bodied glider, at 5, 7, an d 9 inches, providing a bigger profile to start the visual process that attracts big bass, pike, and walleyes. Stabilizing fins keep the bait running true. The hinged body provides realis tic action, and a range of colors allows anglers to match the h atch. Nessie is a slow sinker—$7.99, $9.99, and $12.99, for 5-, 7-, and…

Fishing seems to be in a constant state of evolution, especially in recent years. Being experimental with innovative minds, ice anglers have found ways to take modern technology mostly used on open water and apply it to ice fishing with impressive results. As graph screens get bigger and more complex, which certainly provides an abundance of information, demand for adequate power to run all the latest and greatest technology increases. Without going back to the origins of ice-fishing electronics, not too long ago, flashers were critical for determining depth and identifying structure and the presence of fish. Compared to modern technology like Humminbird’s Mega 360, Mega Live, Garmin’s Livescope and others, flashers still hold a viable place in an ice angler’s arsenal. As the need for information increases, many anglers…

Does Catch and Release of Bass Work? Research Insights—Live release of captured bass was actively promoted beginning in the late 1970s and well ensconced among bass anglers by the mid-1980s. Marketed by several slogans—for example “Let a Lunker Live” and “Don’t Kill Your Catch”—catch and release (C&R) seems to be the term that endured. Live release of captured fish has always been practiced by anglers, sometimes willingly, sometimes as mandated by length and creel harvest restrictions. Ray Scott and B.A.S.S. are given the credit for bringing the C&R concept to the bass world in 1972. What’s surprising, considering the historically consumptive culture of anglers (bass anglers included) is how quickly and thoroughly bass anglers embraced the concept. By the mid-1980s, virtually all bass tournaments were live-release formats and most bass…

For many years, Joe Balog was a force to be reckoned with when it came to tournaments on the Great Lakes. His skill at finding and catching big deep-water smallmouths and being able to handle the nastiest of conditions encountered on these vast lakes made him a threat to win at any competition. In addition, he’s been a freelance writer and industry insider for several decades. As such, he’s been a frequent In-Fisherman contributor. It came as a surprise to many of his friends and competitors when in 2015 he moved from Harrison Township on the shores of Lake St. Clair to DeLand, Florida, to the banks of the St. Johns River. He sold his big Ranger and his drop-shot gear and picked up an aluminum Ranger 178. The contrast…

For many, perhaps most, muskie anglers, it’s all about that shot at a giant fish. The dream is to have a freak-of-nature fish appear behind your lure—a fish with a head the size of a cinder block and a deep, thick frame longer than a fence post. The realization that dreams and reality rarely mesh typically happens somewhere between the boat ramp and cast number 4,000 for the day. Reality also diverges from location to location. The prospects of a world-record-caliber muskie exist around only a handful of fisheries that have previously produced fish in the 60-pound range. The rest of us are fishing for a different caliber of giants. This also begs the question of what do anglers recognize as the true world record? That question won’t be answered…

Each issue of In-Fisherman contains an Adventures column with timely picks on North America’s hottest fisheries. Taking this concept one step further, let’s look at some of the “best of the best” fisheries across a broad spectrum of fish species and locations near and far. While the international hotspots may seem aspirational at first glance, they are very much within the reach of anglers seeking to tangle with the world’s greatest sportfish. Uruguay River, Argentina, Dorado Dubbed golden dorado by non-Spanish speakers in the Northern Hemisphere, dorado are among the most incredible sportfish on the planet. They have the body-shape of a stout, muscular lake trout but possess the fighting attitude and leaping ability of a river small-mouth bass. With jaws as powerful as a hydraulic press and cutting teeth…

A Norman Little N, pitched parallel to shore along a sharp- breaking bank, cracks into rocks, ricochets, straightens out, and wobbles along. The bait is ripped, then slowed, then paused after contact, giving bass a chance to zero in on it. The 7-foot 6-inch graphite rod is swept from left to right, changing the lure’s direction. And it stops. Snag? The rod tip bounces—proof of life on the other end of the line. Back in the 1990s, I thought a Norman Little N (which is bigger than the Middle N—a longtime favorit e) was on the big side for smallmouths at 4.25 inches f rom the tip of the bill to the tail. But it’s surprising ly effective for smallmouths. Questions arose. Lik e how big is over the top?…

AS A SORT OF AN “In Case Of Emergency Break Glass” maneuver, just before ice formed each of the past 20 winters, the move has been to place a call to Vados Bait Express, purveyors of prime-grade livebait. Order a 1,000-pack of multicolored maggots, just in case. Keep ‘em nice and cozy inside a sawdust-equipped styro cooler, reaching for the meat section only if all else fails. Only twice last winter did I find myself using the maggots. The other 99 percent of the time, as usual, I’m hole-hopping with a simple tungsten ballhead jig, typically an Akara disco ball or, in the toughest bites, a Fiskas N24 Balance jig (aka Gill Getter). For bluegills, the go-to softbait is usually something such as a J&S Plastics Ice Mite Jr. It…

Not long ago, “warmth” and “ice-fishing” were diametrically opposed qualities that we aspired to bring together each time we hit the hard water. Making matters more difficult, ice fishing has always had some component of mobility—moving around the frozen tundra to find fish. It’s unsurprising then that when it comes to our heating units, we want the maximum benefit of both comfort and portability—heat without the hassle of dragging around coffee cans of charcoal, big tank-top sunflowers, or other old methods of just taking the chill off a bit. The old sunflowers are still around today, and despite the aged technology they still push heat at frozen fingers. The problem was always too much heat. Then, not enough. Fickle walleyes or big-eyed bluegills that require some teasing making the sport…