Iowa Sportsman
The Bad Ice Angler
The Bad Ice Angler By Rod Woten Throughout my years in the ice fishing industry, I’ve fished more lakes than I can count from one end of the ice belt to the other. During this time, I’ve noticed several things that ice anglers do or don’t do that causes them to struggle. These things don’t […]
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Navigating Big Ice
Navigating Big Ice By Rod Woten Why does it always seem that the bigger a body of water you want to fish, the harder the fish are to find? If you think about it from a statistical standpoint, the bigger lakes have more water you have to sort through in order to find fish, which […]
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Whitetails 365: Buying Recreational Land, Part I
Whitetails 365: Buying Recreational Land, Part I By Tom Peplinski Owning your own recreational land to use and manage can be one of if not the most rewarding experiences you could ever have. For me, managing my own farm is almost more rewarding than the actual hunt itself. It extends the season outside the traditional […]
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Best Crappie Baits
Best Crappie Baits Crappie…animals that forage for discrete, isolated resources are often characterized as either “ambush” (sit-and-wait) or “cruise” (active) searchers. Juvenile white crappie, Pomix annularis, search for zooplankton prey using a salutatory search (SS) strategy. Unlike ambush and cruise, SS involves… Had you readers going there for a moment didn’t I… Well lucky […]
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Buying Recreational Hunting Land: Part III
Buying Recreational Hunting Land: Part III When you are buying any investment, the most important part about the “buy” is not letting your emotions get the best of you. It is the same idea when buying recreational hunting land. Our emotions can get us to think we need something we really don’t. They can get […]
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What it is like to be a Tournament Bass Angler
What it is like to be a Tournament Bass Angler By Todd Reed Bass tournaments are the ultimate fishing thrill. The feeling that you get at 5am as you hop in your boat and face your competitors for the day is like no other. I have been fishing tournaments for twenty-five years and there is […]
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Ice Fishing 2024 Predictions
Ice Fishing 2024 Predictions By Rod Woten As I sit here at my keyboard, the Dakotas are getting their first snowfall of the ‘24-25 season. Local temperatures have dropped from the seventies to the 50’s and overnight temps will be teasing the freezing mark. If this is truly the arrival of winter, then it has […]
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Different Strokes for All Folks
Different Strokes for All Folks By Rod Woten I am a huge proponent of tournament ice angling. Much like any other competitive sport, tournament ice anglers are constantly looking for an advantage over their competition. This relentless drive often leads to innovative new products, outside-the-box-patterns and torture-testing of longstanding equipment and patterns. Tournament ice angling […]
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Common Errors Made by Pheasant Hunters
Common Errors Made by Pheasant Hunters By Kent Boucher One of my favorite experiences is the sudden machine gun-like cadence of an eruption of flapping wings, accompanied by the appearance of a long streamer of tail feathers and the beautiful cola colored outline of a rooster pheasant. In the age of digital media overstimulation it’s […]
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Raising an Outdoors Child
Train Up A Child When I was a child I had my life, and my parents had theirs; they did not try to weave their lives into my life; we were not best friends. I did what was normal for a nine-year-old boy, while my parents worked, mowed the yard, went to church suppers, […]
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