Sk8man

By the way Stan I have never seen one of those rods before. Someone must have stayed up all night thinking that one up

Most of them.

Love those knobs Bob

The Twin Minnow is meant to resemble the Freshwater Sculpin (Stonecat) and has a little different shape and action than the Flatfish

This is what Twin Minnows look like. They originally cam with a small treble which was too light and often snagged up on bottom so it helped to change the hooks to single stainless siwash hooks positioned upright with the point facing upward to help minimize snags on bottom The black back white bottom one with the red lip was always a top performer. There was also a slightly larger version of the Twin Minnow that was jointed.

Good going Stan

Foam from zebra activity?

Yes Ray globilization, cheap labor in China and other places and the Kmarts and Walmarts and Runnings and so on did a job on all those great tackle places and here in Canandaigua Fishing Tackle where I bought everything from sinkers to my first downriggers. Now even the big stores are struggling against Amazon and the online enterprises. What the lampreys have done to Seneca and the trout these behemoths have done the same to the mom and pop enterprises; sucked the life blood out of them. It is a shame.

Hop's dad taught him many trolling ins and outs and Hop shared some of them with me back in the late 70's and eighties and it was instrumental in us developing our own techniques and I haven't forgotten it. Many good times on the water together.

For folks not familiar with this stuff here are a couple of the old standard reels used for Seth Green fishing. I still use several Penn 309's as my rig fishing reels. The Penn 49 M (Super Mariner) on the left and the Penn 309 with power handle on the right. The 309 came with thj level wind guide but I always took mine off because the stranded wire chewed them up and then guided the wire on by hand

And the A and S automatic reel

Fat trout has it dead on

Brings back memories Ray. Old school was the best school back then I started out with the old Vexilar flasher about the same era as the Lowrance Greenbox Then a Heathkit paper graph in the early eighties that my dad assembled for me which all the parts including hundreds of diodes had to be soldered to the motherboard and all parts assembles...probably at least700 or 800 parts). Thank God he was an electronics technician or I would have been screwed Scale went to 100 ft but it actually would go to about 250 if you kept track of the light going around and basically knew where you were in the lake.

Before overreacting to it you might want to follow Hank's (LandM) advice and go from there. Might save you money all the way around.

What do you do with the stuff you pump out to dispose of it?

He was looking for the ones with the little wire clevises Ray. Don't seem to be available anymore commercially.

Yeah I don't fish the day before the Seneca lake derby the Friday before it for that reason. I have caught ones bigger than some of the winners either then or a week or so after the derby in the past and now I'm superstitious (or perhaps even more than I was before)

Would have been nice to have gotten that one in the derby Anthony but this year winning it was out of the question for everyone except one

That one sure looks like a contender Bill

Each of the Finger lakes has its problems and they are each complex in nature. Keuka has been in severe decline for a number of years and again the reasons are complex and not singular as some folks may wish to believe. Bulletbob makes some good points. One of the things that gets in the way of understanding the magnitude of the problems with the lakes is related to age of the folks viewing the situation as the younger you are the less you have of a baseline of information and direct experience from which to view the changes that have occurred and this fact has been evident in many past threads regarding the issues. What I am referring to is that there have been massive changes in these ecosystems since the mid to late eighties and they no longer resemble the lake or fishing conditions present in the past. I had uncles with cottages on Keuka, Cayuga and Seneca lakes when I was a kid and we had many reunions and get togethers etc. and I stayed sometimes weeks during the summers there fishing off the dock or rowing out in a a little deeper water to fish. The lakes were teeming with life back in the 50's through 70's and early eighties. There were fish of many different species along the shorelines and under docks or boathouses that could be caught from shore. There were minnows and young of various species all along the shorelines of these lakes. panfish could be caught at will as well as bass both smallmouth and largemouth and the occasional pike or pickerel mixed in all right from docks. During the Spring there were massive runs of Rainbow Smelt and al little later sawbellies in many of the streams on each of these lakes with runs of a few rainbow trout and large amounts of redfin and black suckers mixed in that we were allowed to spear at the time. The cottages along these lakes were quite conservative and just that "cottages" not mult-million dollar monstrosities with huge manicured lawns and multiple boat hoists etc. There was available land separating between the cottages. Contrast this picture with the present conditions on these lakes after all the development of residential properties, commercial enterprises such as vineyards, and farming etc. coupled with massive changes in the type and distribution of weed growth, vegetative invasives, zoological invasives, increased rates of photosynthesis from increased water clarity combined with increased introduction of bio-limiting factors from road salt deposits, to lawn chemicals, to sewage spills and many other factors too numerous to catalog. One of the main things the Zebra and Quagga mussels have done is to strain out an essential microscopic links in the food chain directly affecting minnows on upward in the food chain. Their shells encrust much of the traditional spawning areas for both bait and fish. When you take out a basic element early in the food chain things above it start to disappear some of it is gradual and some is relatively quick to happen. The process is ever burgeoning and Waterfleas and Gobies and who knows what else have been added to the complexity of the situation. When you put all of this together in an increasingly complex web large bodies of water such as these can take just so much and over time the sum total of these processes overcomes the natural ability of the lakes to counteract or recover. For Seneca and Cayuga the additional threat posed by Lamprey propagation is a huge burden to the already taxed ecosystem. The predator to prey balance appears to be significantly better at present in Cayuga as I think the lamprey control may be better than that on Seneca right now. The baitfish collapse on Keuka, disappearance of formerly available species such as landlocks, rainbows and browns, stunted growth of the Lake trout, and the rapidly disappearing perch and panfish population due to being ingested out of desperation by lakers is disturbing; and just stocking a few Cisco's doesn't seem to be the answer either.