Reel Weather visit NYPENN Girl Scouts of America Amahami Festival.

Never let anyone tell you that our future is in jeopardy when referencing our youth.

This weekend I had the absolute privilege of attending the NYPENN Girl Scouts of America's Amahami Festival as a presenter on weather, fishing, and environmental stewardship.  Despite the cooler weather and early rain showers, over 200 people turned out to participate, making it the largest attended in the history of Amahami.  Being that this was my first time ever attending an event with the Girl Scouts, I had no idea what to expect.  Thankfully I had the help of fellow anglers John Malzahn and his son Michael, Dan Drake, and Dominic Sergi.  Together, these guys all did an amazing job of helping me bring Reel Weather to Deposit NY.

Who loves Weather Underground?

We began with one group of about 15 young girls.  To start we spoke about the importance of taking care of our environment, keeping our lakes, rivers, and forests free from pollution.  Then I talked about the most basic ways that weather impacts fishing, and why that's valuable, while showing my personal weather station.  I then moved to our lure selection for the day, which consisted of wacky hooks from Lazer Trokar, and Gary Yamamoto Senkos, with a demonstration on how to use this application and why it works.  After that we broke into four groups, and Dominic, Dan, John, Michael, and myself spread out across the lake to apply what we had just learned.

In no time the girls were catching fish, and all across the lake you could hear the sound of them screaming for joy.  For many, these are the first fish they've ever caught, and the first wild fish they've ever seen.  They're learning how to touch them properly, how to release them, how old they are, and why it's important to practice catch and release.  For example, a largemouth bass in NY that weighs over 5 pounds will get people's attention.  It's what's considered by those who fish a lot to be a "good fish".  That fish would be over 10 years old.  Being that bass aren't generally considered to be a delicacy, there are more reasons to keep them alive than to harvest them.

When we got back to our station and said farewell to our first group, we learned we had three more groups waiting.  By 2 we had over 50 kids fishing on the shore at once, having spent all day with over 150 young girls.  These wonderful kids were the most respective, attentive, and polite I'd ever worked with.  They were all environmentally conscious before we even began, and it was so refreshing to see and hear so many kids understand the importance of protecting our resources.  It was a testament to the NYPENN Girl Scouts of America, and to the parents of those kids, who are largely responsible for having raised such wonderful girls.  By all accounts, we were a huge hit there, and I hope that they invite us back.  Thanks again to all my friends for helping, and to Trokar, Dobyns, Fishidy, and Weather Underground.

 

The Pressure Anglers Thrive On!

The Pressure Anglers Thrive On!

Understanding Barometric pressure key to patterning big bass
Recently I was having a discussion with my friends Gary Dobyns, Mike Barone, and Goodyear Pro John McGoey about the significance, or lack thereof, in the relationship between barometric pressure and bass fishing. In 2004 I began journaling my fishing trips, and trying to gather as much data from the internet as I could find. Frontal systems, wind direction, moon phase, etc. Among those conditions I found research that suggested that the ideal barometric pressure for bass was roughly 28.5-30.1. In the ten years of data that I’ve collected, the most significant correlation that I could see between feeding activity and weather was when the barometer was falling from 30-29. That’s hard evidence, from over 150 total entries, with all data from that period provided by Weather Underground.

Pretty indisputable if you ask me…

At first I was amazed. The amount of fish I caught during those sweet spots was too significant to deny. Not to mention the size of the fish was just incredible. The more I began to study that and understand it, the more I could start to manipulate my tactics to support the conditions that I was in. Let me explain: barometric rises and falls with the presence of high or low pressure systems. How fast it falls and how much tends to vary from one system to another. Now for the past 10 years, there was not a single weather website I could find that was trying to predict this condition. That would leave me to have to use the hourly forecast to predict when the storm would arrive, and monitor the current conditions at wunderground.com (I’m going back to the days of pre-smartphone apps). While the pressure was high I would finesse fish: shaky heads, drop shot, small spinnerbaits, Texas-rigged soft plastics, etc. As soon as I saw the pressure start to fall I’d switch to reaction baits, and target big bites. I can’t tell you how often this allowed me to do well all day, rather than wondering why my fish “shut down” or stopped eating what had seemed to work all day long.

There are a lot of people, especially when you’re referencing deep water fishing (25 feet and deeper), that will tell you bp plays absolutely no part what you catch. While I won’t agree on that, I will say that the fish that are located deeper than 20 feet, in my experience, have proven to be impacted by pressure less than fish in 5 feet or less, but that comparison is really skewed from the very beginning for several reasons. For the most part, largemouth bass don’t typically live in water over 20 feet for prolonged periods of time in the summer months. Any fish that’s caught 20 feet or deeper is already subjected to pressure far greater than shallow fish of the same species. From my own experience, smallmouth are the fish that I’m catching in water deeper than 20 feet, and they’re always better about eating than largemouth anyhow. So naturally you might not see trends as significant in those brown fish in comparison to their green cousins.

As I said, for the past 10 years nobody was predicting barometric pressure. Was being the key word in that sentence. With the conversion to their new website platform, Weather Underground now has a completely customizable graph that will show you the 10 day or hourly forecast that includes chance of precipitation, wind direction and speed, humidity, cloud cover, dew point, and…barometric pressure. So now I can make a note to myself that I’ll expect my best fishing times to be between this time and that time, and allow myself to have a really solid game plan before I launch. Now to be fair, I’m not saying this will make you the next KVD. But it has certainly helped me catch more and bigger bass.

Introduction to Reel Weather YouTube Channel!

I just uploaded a video that I put together after returning from my two-day trip to Bass Pro Shops in Harrisburg, PA.  Special thanks to the Weather Underground, the Sim Redmond Band, Dobyns Rods, Zach Meadows, Bass Attacker Lures, the whole team at Bass Pro Shops who were incredible to work with, and to the staff where I stayed at the Candlewood Suites who treated me like family for 3 days.  Hope you like it!

Frigid Temperatures in NY yield HOT results!

My buddy Paul Mueller (my Dobyns Teammate from CT) posted some pictures of some HUGE smallies he caught through the ice in this awful cold spell we're in.  After he told me a little bit about how he got them I decided to call Josh Sheldon, local guide and frequent fishing partner of mine, to see if we could have a day like that of our own at Chenango Lake.  

It's cold.  Let me clarify that for you by saying I've lived in Upstate NY nearly my entire life and I'm one of the few people I know who actually likes winter.  But today it's even cold for me; single digits when we reach the lake, and that's not counting any windchill.  But we're here and the lure of huge fish has us going places we otherwise wouldn't...

To read the rest of what we caught and how, click here!