Lose Your Focus... Lose the Tournament... Lose Your Keys!

What a weekend, conditions changed in a heartbeat, disaster after disaster put me into a hole that I never recovered from until waking up Saturday morning.

Centre County Bassmasters held our last tournament of the spring, opening day of trout season marks the start of catch and immediate release in PA until the opening of the bass season. What happend during that tournament on Friday can only be explained by my lack of focus.

6:00 am: I awoke to prepare to get ready to leave for the day to a pouring down rainstorm, this is the sixth time in a row I have taken off work with a favorable outlook on weather conditions to find rain, the last five being a week in a hurricane hunting. The cheap cover I had on my boat I wasnt sure if it would hold up to trailering, surprisingly it did!

8:30 am: I arrive at the launch, unhook the cover straps and it starts to pour again. I then decided to pull into the lot to wait it out. Rather than strapping the cover back down I threw the straps on top. As I rounded the corner the one strap caught on the wheel ripping the cover end to end directly down the center line.

9:00 am: I launch the boat with the help of another member, park the trailer, walk back and hop in the boat. I walk to the back to pump the primer bulb, turn around to sheer horror. Dog crap, one end of my boat too the other end. Who would let their dog do this without cleaning it up at a boat launch is beyond me but now I am furious.

9:30 am: Cleaned up the boat, sit down to crank it, it wont fire. Drop the trolling motor and fish for 15, it finally fires up.

10:00 am: Pull into a cove boiling with gizzard shad, not a bass in sight. Nothing caught.

11:00 am: Find some fish out deep, 100ft on the Lowrance, try to no avail to catch them.

12:00 pm: By now its been raining on and off all morning. Ive caught one GIANT perch on a PowerTeam Lures foodchain tube, not another bite. Ive thrown everything under the sun at the fish(a sure sign of losing focus)

5:00 pm: After 5 more hours of not finding the bite due to being in such a tailspin and forgetting to even consider other lures I pulled on to the trailer to wait for everyone at 6. I had new bunk slicks to install and figured I would just get that done.

The club weighed some decent fish, all caught on things I didnt even think about trying in my whirlwind of problems and lack of focus. You cant force a tube bite, a jig bite or an a-rig bite no matter how hard you try.

7:00 pm I pull in the driveway and begin to unhook the boat. In my shuffle of key rings I lost the keys to the trailer lock and had to cut them off with a dremel tool.

Ive read about the panic box situation and thought to myself, I will never need that. Its very apparent that I do need a panic box and maybe even a notebook. Those shad in the coves really threw me off because until I foul hooked one with a crankbait on accident I thought they were threadfins. They were big shad, gizzard shad, shad that a ten lb fish would have to choke down.

You can bet Ill be making myself a panic box for the next time I have a day on the water like Friday. I wanted to crawl in a hole and not fish for a week after that.

Open Bass Fishing Tournaments

Hello all!

We are getting ready to soon kick off this 2013 season. You will notice in the links that I have a new page listing the tournaments in PA. I myself found that while searching the net looking for information that I keep coming up empty. To remedy this, I have created a calendar of fishing events.

If you would like to have your event entered please contact me via email with the details. In order for this page to be a success I will need everyone's help finding events.

If you know of an event, please by all means let us all know. The more people who show up, the better the competition, the more money that everyone has a chance to win.

Now... please... for the love of god... STOP SNOWING!

Dreamweaver not connecting via SFTP

If youre not an administrator you might need to contact yours. If you are not a web developer or network admin, reading this article is likely a waste of your time, dont say I didnt warn you.

I normally wouldnt include such a post on this website but I am not signing up for additional sites just to tell that I found the solution to my problem on my linux server.

Theres a lot of buzz out there about this and that. Heres the steps I took to remedy the problem. This took place on Ubuntu Server.

1 - configure SSH
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SSH/OpenSSH/Configuring

Take note above to turn the log level warnings as high as they go "verbose"


2 - sudo restart ssh

3 - tail -f /var/log/auth.log - let this up and running, its going to show you whats going on, clear your screen with hiting the enter key

4 - attempt to connect via sftp through dreamweaver and it will likely throw an error as such

error: subsystem: cannot stat /usr/libexec/sftp-server: No such file or directory

5 - close the log with ctrl+c

6 - run the find command - find / -name sftp-server

7 - you will likely get something like usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server

8 - open the ssh config file and find the line - Subsystem sftp /usr/libexec/sftp-server

9 - replace the /usr/libexec/sftp-server with whatever your find command chucked out at you example:usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server

10 - sudo restart ssh

11 - try dreamweaver sftp and you will likely be in!

I would like to give credit to : http://linuxhostingsupport.net/blog/sftp-error-subsystem-request-for-sftp-failed-subsystem-not-found for helping me cure my problem. Note that their paths, my paths and your paths will likely all be different.

PA - Fishing Tournaments 2013

This year will be my inaugural season into fishing for money. Last year I purchased my boat way too late to get into any big events. I fished the local lunker tournament at Sayers Dam for two weeks. On week one I lost what I am almost certain was the winning bass at the boat on a jig.

Since that time I have been looking to join a club and settled on Centre County Bassmasters. Another member and myself are currently building the club a new website. The club will have me fishing a club tournament weekly up until late October.

Other than those tournaments I will be fishing some open tournaments as well as a singles trail at Lake Raystown known as "Fish for Five". This tournament is a singles tournament with no co-anglers aloud in the boat.

I am likely going to add a calendar of events to this website soon. If you have an open tournament you would like listed please contact me with the dates and details such as contact information for the tournament. Once I get some other open events I will post the calendar. With only knowing the club events which are not public other than lunker and fish for five the information is easy enough to obtain without one. Centre County Bassmasters Lunker tournaments are held Wednesday nights in July on Sayers Dam at the Howard Launch. You must be there prior to the 6pm launch. The fish for five series link is included above.

Tight Lines!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Fed Up With Pa Deer Management 2012-2013

Where do I begin here folks. If you cant tell simply by the title of this blog, I live, eat, breath and work to be outside. What I am seeing first hand around me is simply pitiful. How can any organization formed to look out for the interests of hunters have taken this as far as they have.

Sure, I can get with that we may have had too many deer in the 90's. I often hear of people speaking of seeing groups of deer near 100, in my 20 years of the whitetail woods I have never seen a group of deer that large. Now it seems we are headed to the exact opposite end of the spectrum in some areas, if we havent reached that point already.

Many will tell you that youre a lazy hunter, who puts no effort into what you claim to love. What they do not see is the hours of post season scouting in february when its 20 degrees outside. The hours sitting behind a spotting scope, the gallons of gas used spotlighting, the packs upon packs of batteries running trailcams that all tell the same story.

Sure, I believe that some areas may be ok, especially those fortunate enough to have privately held land in which they can somewhat control the harvest. The public land however is a totally different story. I have many contacts who hunt and the story from north to south on the public land is pretty much the same.

What is it going to take for change, is it going to take a drastic decline in hunters? I really dont know what the wakeup call will be however, I personally refuse to continue to support a system which just wants to kill more and more deer to the point that hunting is not enjoyable. Do you know what the next step is when hunters are not needed to keep the population in check? The next step is the end of hunting!

We must be thought of as the ultimate fools to the state of PA. Here, within a couple hours drive of any location in this state you can be in a neighboring state and enjoy your time much more. I personally have started traveling to hunt and although I may be alone I will eventually call it quits in PA. How does one explain to their family the expense and hours of time spent away participating in an activity which shows no reward. How many times will your wife or girlfriend let you walk out that door and come home empty handed before even they question your sanity.

Hunters, we must come together or this is all coming to a crashing halt here in the very near future. Stand up for what you believe, tell those guys who feel the need to endlessly fill tags that you feel enough is enough. Call your state representatives, write the newspapers, speak out against what is going on in PA if you hope to have a future of hunting.

Budget Bass Boat

Ever since I sold my last bass boat I have been itching to get another. It just so happened that I was able to pay off my motorcycle this summer and get back into the bass boat world.

I knew what I wanted from my last project. My previous boat was a 1979 14' Terry Jon Boat with a 5hp tiller briggs and stratton motor. Not the ideal setup but I paid $800 for it, with some decks and carpet it turned into a nice fishing rig.

This time my list of wants was as follows:

No deck work, that took too much time and I have a family now.
Console steering, reaching back all the time sucks!
Rod lockers
Pre Wired electronics
NO NO NO BAD TRANSOMS!

On the subject of transoms the last boats was rotted out when I bought it. I had to drill out the rivets, replace the wood and since I couldnt get rivets replace those with stainless bolts. $200 later and 60 hours of time I was done and I swore the entire time. Its possible with simple tools but again with a young family I dont have time.

I looked at 3 different boats, two sold out from under me and the third had a rotten transom before I found the boat I was looking for.

What I ended up with was a 1992 Tracker Pro 17 with a 92' Evinrude 25hp motor. It needed a few things such as a new trolling motor battery, on board charger and simple maintenance. I bought the boat for $3000 and had another $1000 to dump into it to get it up to how I wanted.

If all goes right it should see its first bass tournament this month. This boat is also going to double as a back way into public land for deer and turkeys. The days of hunting over pressured areas have pretty much come to an end.

Knock off Sitka Shooter Gloves

Ive shared this little secret with a group of close nit internet guys who share similar ideas in regards to hunting. Today, I share this bit of advice with you all.

Recently I ordered a pair of pants from a well known hunting retailer. I bought them for the lightweight qualities. Well, sizing was way off and initially I was going to return them for a bigger size. To my surprise, this pattern stopped at a 33" waist. What to do with this $50 credit? Ive been eying up the Sitka Shooter Gloves online for a long time, no where to see them locally. I bit the bullet and spent the credit.

Let me say, anything I have bought from Sitka has been nothing short of amazing gear but this item right here can be had much cheaper. This glove in my mind screams... DIRT BIKE GLOVES tailored to hunting. Almost identical features and quality.

Head down to your local dirt bike shop and see if you dont agree. Similar gloves can be had for $10-$20!