By Dave Wolak

Over the years, I've fished with a lot of folks on my boat, and during those countless trips I've witnessed all kinds of common bass fishing brain lapses (and been the executor of said brain lapses, as well). The thread I've noticed that ties many of these common bass fishing foibles together is poor concentration-keeping practices during the mundane, monotonous times when the action isn't hot. It's easy to be on your A game when the bass are biting with regularity, but it's just as easy to lose focus when it's slow, which often causes you to screw up during those explosive moments peppered among the doldrums. These are the 5 mistakes I witness most often in descending order of criticality, and they're all easily fixable.

[ Read Full Post ]

By Dave Wolak

A few weeks ago, reader Deanlikes2fish commented with a question asking what I thought was the best age for a kid to get started in tournament fishing. This is actually a pretty hot topic right now, as a story recently popped up in the Boston Globe about a Missouri man fighting to make bass fishing a high school sport. It’s definitely worth a read. As for my take, I'd love to give a one-shot answer, but it's just a little more complicated than that. One of the first things you have to consider is the difference between a fun-loving fishing competition and fishing for money. If your aim is just to have some laughs, and make a fishing trip a little competitive to simply spice it up, then I say have the kids start as soon as they can, just like you would playing T-ball or skiing the bunny slope. If we’re talking competition with money on the line, hold your horses, because greenbacks change everything.

[ Read Full Post ]

By Dave Wolak

High, muddy water is probably the number one troublemaker for springtime bass fishermen. You know the drill: you daydream at work all week about that weekend outing, during which you’re sure a jerkbait flashing in the clear water will make for easy pickin’. Thursday night it pours rain while you're sleeping, but hey, it's sunny on Friday morning. All good, right? Then on Saturday morning you look down at the water at the boat ramp and it’s like a scene from Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. If you live in the Carolinas like I do, you get that even more disgusting red chocolate milk thanks to all the red clay in the Piedmont region. But I don't let it bother me, because there are ways to be successful in the mud.

[ Read Full Post ]

By David Draper

After more than a year of anticipation, I finally got my hands on an advance copy of the new "Remington Camp Cooking" cookbook. Chef Charlie Palmer first clued me into the project when I sat next to him at dinner during the 2012 SHOT Show.

As I mentioned in that post, Palmer is one of us, a hunter and all-around regular guy, despite the fact that he’s responsible for more than a dozen restaurants around the country, as well as a handful of wine shops and boutique hotels. You wouldn’t know it by sitting next to him as he relates stories of hunting with his boys. True to that everyman style, the recipes in Remington Camp Cooking aren’t out of reach for most home cooks. [ Read Full Post ]

By Dave Wolak

Across much of the country, it’s approaching spawning time. The water temps are right and during that first spring full moon, the ladies will move into the shallows to pair up with the fellas. These shallow bass are notoriously spooky, so it’s more important now than during the rest of the season to be stealthy.

I grew up sneaking around little smallmouth and trout creeks with fly and spinning gear, and I learned early that wearing muted earth tones increased my success. If I had been wearing a modern, vibrant bass tourney jersey back then, every minnow and nymph in the stream would have swam full speed in the opposite direction. That's why I don't wear a tourney jersey this time of year, even during tournaments. Yet I still see guys that look like Jeff Gordon in full race attire on the water during the spawn. This makes no sense.

[ Read Full Post ]

By Kirk Deeter

Aloha from the Garden Island of Kaua'i in the Hawaiian Islands. I'm on a much-anticipated family vacation, where my wife, Sarah, and son, Paul, and I are enjoying some spectacular scuba diving (along with my brother, Drew, who took this photograph of a sea turtle we encountered Saturday). When I'm not fishing, diving is my favorite pastime. I enjoy watching fish when I'm not actually casting at them, sometimes for reasons explained in one of last week's Fly Talk posts. I'll admit, however, that I much prefer the clear, warm tropical waters over the icy swirling currents of trout rivers.

Last night, I took my rod to cast off a point of lava rocks. I was casting a Clouser minnow at nothing in particular, and truth be told, I didn't catch anything. But I did see another giant green turtle swim up near the shoreline, poke its head above the surface to check me out for several minutes, then vanish under the foam.

[ Read Full Post ]