It's not exactly champagne and Barry White, but the strategies employed by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission have certainly proven effective at putting largemouth bass in the mood. They call the objective "out-of-season" spawning and a new agency study on the recent round of fingerlings released into various Florida waterways between late March and early April seeks to validate the effort.

Since 2007, the Bass Conservation Center – the state's main fish hatchery in Webster – has manipulated light and temperature to trick bass into thinking the cool season has given way to the baby-makin' days of spring. The process starts with moving brood stock females to spawning raceways in June. After simulated winter conditions, increasing daylight and water temperature has the fish ready to go by October – well ahead of the usual February-March spawning period. Hatchery biologists introduce males to the raceways, add spawning mats and collect fertilized eggs about a week later. [ Read Full Post ]

Guide, author, film and video producer, not-so-amateur naturalist, inventor, entrepreneur, self-publicist, musician, runner, conservationist, diver, and more, Doug Hannon, widely known as The Bass Professor died at home in Keystone, Florida on March 28. He was 66.

It was Doug’s future wife Lynn who fired Hannon’s career in the world of bass when she took her beau—then a psychology major at Tulane University, New Orleans—fishing on her family’s Texas ranch. [ Read Full Post ]

For 19 years, Joe Humphreys was a professor of flyfishing and angling education at Pennsylvania State University in State College, teaching many thousands of college students about “the quiet sport.”

He started flyfishing in 1935, and is now a featured speaker at consumer flyfishing shows around the country. He has also worked with the U.S. angling team’s 14-to-18-year-old division, and fished on the U.S. team during international competitions in Wales, Italy, Ireland, and other locations.

Talking with Humphreys as he enters his 84th year (he retired from Penn State in 1989), it quickly becomes apparent that catching fish, and not simply the aesthetics of flyfishing, is paramount to his enjoyment of the sport. Here are his top four rules for fishing success. [ Read Full Post ]