FishwithJD

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Underwater Video: Inside a Bait Ball!

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So, you see those bait ball on your depth finder…but have you ever wondered what it really looks like down there? Me too! That’s why I dropped a camera down in some Western reservoirs last summer and fall…to find out what’s going on beneath the surface. Unfortunately, the water clarity wasn’t the best but you still get the idea!

Nor Cal’s Eel River: Headed for 100,000 cfs+

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She's gonna get BIG!!


Nnorthern California’s gonna get dumped on this week, effectively washing out the great steelheading that was going on on rivers like the Eel. Check out where the guidance plots say she’s going to go — up over 100,000 cfs — later in the week!

Obviously, it’s going to be awhile before anybody gets back out on the creek!

Was this a World Record King Salmon??

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This huge king carcass measured 59 inches...without the tail!!


Holy crap! Get a look at this: Ray Fairfax sent in this photo of a giant Chinook salmon carcass he ran across earlier this winter while steelhead fishing on the Smith River in Northern California.

“We were fishing the Bailey Riffle and found a salmon carcass of amazing length,” says Fairfax. “All that was left was the jaws and backbone, but what a fish it must have been! I straightened the backbone out the best I could and laid my STR1025C Loomis down next to it. It measured 59 inches…minus, of course, the tail!!”

Fairfax says that the jaws looked almost as if the fish was a female, which is even more mind-blowing!

“If you add a conservative few inches for the tail, how big was this beast?” he asks.

Well, just for comparison’s sake: Les Anderson’s 97.3-pound All Tackle World Record Chinook was 58.5 inches long!! Of course, we’ll never know how big the King of the Smith was in his prime…but let’s just hope he spread a bunch of his genetic material around!

And here’s another one: The 50.7 incher found dead in a tributary of the Sacramento River a couple seasons back: GIANT SALMON CARCASS FOUND

Behind the Scenes: Buzz Ramsey’s secret lure laboratory

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Buzz's Workshop!


Hre’s a little glimpse into a world not many of us ever get a chance to see…This is Buzz Ramsey’s work bench where he tunes, tweaks, trashes and tinkers on lures for Yakima Bait.

While developing the new Hawg Nose Flatfish, he spent countless hours here, trying to perfect the lure. “This photo includes many of the handmade versions of the Hawg Nose FlatFish 5.5 I made up during the development of this product,” says Ramsey. “As you can tell, it took more than a little R&D to make it meet our criteria of swimming in water speeds up to 5MPH; to develop a random skip-beat (hunting) action at 2-to-2-1/2 MPH and maintain that strike producing action all the way to 5MPH.”