Zach Matthews
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Neal –
I’ve got an Ott Light or at least a natural daylight desk light with a magnifier built in (which doesn’t work well because you can’t get it horizontal without imbalancing the light).
I have never tied with a clip on light; do you find they get in the way?
Mike, you’re in the enviable position of catching a hell of a lot of big fish in the course of a year.
Boga grips generally promote poor fish handling, it’s true. Hanging just about any fish by the lip for an extended period is a bad idea. I think you can do it for a moment but you need to immediately get the fish back level or you can screw up its internal organs.
Where Bogas win out for me is on larger fish like stripers that like to barrel roll in the net. I’ve seen big stripers just foam up a net with their mucous membrane thrashing around. The first thing I checked on Andrew’s knock off was to make sure it would still allow a fish to roll (it will but only when it’s got some weight on it; not sure if that’s necessarily good or not). A boga’ed striper can thrash all day and not do any more damage to itself, which is not true in just about any net.
To me the ideal way to use a boga to weigh a fish is with one of those net cradles, or even just a laundry-style mesh bag. Drop the fish in the bag, then clip the boga on and lift. The bag itself won’t weigh enough to matter (and you can always “tare” the scale later by weighing just the bag). For IGFA purposes this is probably not kosher but unless you’re going to turn in a world record, it’s better to protect the fish.
Zach
I’ve been switching from a pair of Costa 580 glass and Costa 580 plastic lenses; they are both light enough that I can’t tell a weight difference, although you might find that glass lenses are heavier in the larger frame sizes.
I think all of you guys are right, for your own particular waters. Dan Cone’s point about the Guadaloupe is very reasonable; I have seen the same behavior on Arkansas’ White River, with people just camping out on a particular spot literally all day long. Those folks should give others a chance after a reasonable amount of time (say, an hour) even if they were there first.
Mike Cline is also right, however. As a Western fisherman, he is entitled to expect that he’ll be able to move a lot during a day of fishing. There is too much water out West for any one person to clog up the works by camping out and then copping an attitude if someone moves through. Most of the time I believe it is Easterners on vacation who make this mistake.
I personally fish a lot more like Mike, moving a bunch during a day, whenever possible. I will respectfully move around anglers in places like the White River. At the same time, I am never happy to see someone show up behind me on one of my tiny mountain streams; if they come in behind me I expect them to *stay* behind me. Mountain angling is basically hiking with a fly rod for the chance to shoot at one fish in a fresh pool; someone cutting ahead of you would really be acting rudely there.
I think some tempers may have flared a bit in this thread but I don’t think anyone is actually wrong; we all just need to keep in mind that different rivers really do have different rules. Especially when switching your location, you need to be aware of these different systems and not expect the one you’re most comfortable with to necessarily apply.
Zach
I grow as big a garden as I can get away with every summer and I make a lot of homemade salsa. Typically I’ll do diced tomatoes, garlic, onion, cilantro and red chili peppers. Habaneros taste better but I can’t handle more than one of them mixed in with the chilis in a whole thing of salsa.
Here’s a hot tip I figured out this year, too: if you don’t make your salsa just blazing hot, and you do wind up with a lot of extra salsa you’ll never eat because another batch of tomatoes is coming ripe, you can just dump the whole thing in the food processor or blender, blend it, and then boil it all down in a stock pot. After a couple hours of simmering you’ll have the most delicious pizza sauce. Scratch pizza is super easy: I made myself a huge tub of pizza sauce from leftover salsa and a bunch of added ingredients and then ate fresh pizza all the way through July and August this year.
Zach
Adam –
I think price is an issue, and maybe the perception that the guides don’t make much difference.
I haven’t thrown one yet either but that is a very nice looking rod. Those weights are also very very similar (actually better than) a lot of the high end competitors. For example, both the Scott 9′ 5-weight G2 and the TFO 9′ 5-weight BVK weigh 2.9 ounces. That says a lot about what TFO has going on “under the hood,” because you can’t hide weight. Meanwhile, and this really surprised me, but the Sage TCX 9′ 5-weight weighs 3 and 5/16ths ounces, which in percentage terms is quite a bit more.
Zach