paul.

rock on avid!!! that's great man! definitely a day to remember. great pictures too. congratulations on your new pb.

for cold water - jig & chunk for warm water - 12" baby huey worm by luck-e-strike at least i can say i was tryin' for a biggun if i get whipped!

way to whack 'em guys.

i see you camoflaged your line...i do that too...did i reccomend that to you? not unless i knew you in one of your former lives. ;D i been doing it since i was in high school buddy. that was over 20 years ago. think i got it from a bassmaster article with doug hannon explaining how to do it.

i got such a kick out of chris' post on slang names for bigguns that i thought i'd give it a shot. what's y'all's favorite term for a good, hard, rock-solid hookset? my 3 faves are: 1. droppin' the hammer 2. puttin' the smack down 3. puttin' the steel to 'em let's hear 'em y'all. ;D

5/8 oz. standard size bass jig. skirt wasn't trimmed or anything. i was using a bigger chunk at first. strike king makes 3 sizes of the 3x denny brauer chunk i think. i was using the big one, but then i went to the medium size one after after the nips. my buddy tried several jigs. (he tends to switch baits and try to fine tune a little more than me) he used a 1/2 oz. denny brauer pro model, then tried an arkie matrix, then settled on a booyah. all those were 1/2 oz. he used a paca craw for a trailer on all of 'em.

i don't lie, i just don't get specific if i can help it. i can be pretty coy with some of my answers sometimes. honesty can actually work for ya sometimes though in a strange kind of way. most of the time, other fishermen ASSUME YOU ARE LYING when you tell them something (especially if you make the appropriate facial expressions) ;D and go somewhere else or do something else other than what you just told them. is that "reverse psychology" or what?

those are some good 'uns! great job man. live bait rocks imo!

that rocks man! great job.

hey y'all. well, i was able to get out a while today with my good buddy tony. cold front had settled in good and hard. i think it was the coldest day i've fished so far this year. temp barely above 40 and water temp not much more than that. water was clear and slick with hardly any wind at all. partly to mostly cloudy. started with the black and blue jig i'd been whackin' 'em on in this particular lake - not a touch in the deep wood - even on the sweetest humps, ledges, and points. switched then to my favorite jig - black, pumkin, and chartreuse (texas craw i think the color is called) with a green pumkin 3x trailer. thought that might work a little better since it looked a little more natural. but only got one keeper size on that. with those 2 options shot, i decided to go shallow, thinking the cloud cover might have moved 'em up. nothing slow rolling a spinnerbait. 2 more keepers for me on a bandit flat maxx i had doctored with some suspend strips. no more takers shallow so we moved back out to a deep hole - 17' surrounded by 12' with plenty of wood. even though this was a killer looking spot, my buddy only caught one fish, and missed another. then i missed one. it seemed they were just nipping at the jig like cold front fish tend to do sometimes. nothing else there so we went back to the shallows. i caught one more keeper on a smoke colored 4" tube rigged texas style fishing wood on a grassbed. according to my cuda, we were in the fish - both deep and shallow. so it became pretty obvious that the fish just weren't "on". i have learned from reading "fish chris" that sometimes it's all about the "when" with bass - not the just the "where" or the "what". i told tony we were just gonna have to wait 'em out and hope they turned on. about 4:30, with only a half hour left till dark, we went back to the deep wood. i told tony that i hadn't come out on a miserable day like this just to catch little 'uns, so i was swinging for the fence for the rest of the trip. for me, that means fishin' a jig and forgetting that the other rods are even in the boat. i noticed 2 things that encouraged me - some baitfish activity on a big grass flat adjacent to the deep wood we were fishin' AND a marked lack of fish showing up on the graph out deep where they had been before. i put these 2 things together and figured that finally the fish had "moved up" to feed on the flat. well fortunately i was right, and first cast on the flat in about 7-8 ft. of water i got the bite i had been lookin' for. no tick or thump, just saw the line twitch and lost contact with the jig. (she was moving toward me when she hit i think). cranked down on her and drove home the steel. after a short battle and a good net job by tony, we finally had a good fish in the boat. she was a thick and very healthy 8-11, and boy, was i happy to meet her after the cold tough day we had! ;D well, like my friend says, sometimes it only takes one to make the trip worthwhile. released her after a few pix. a few more casts with the jig, crankbait, and spinnerbait went untouched so we just decided to pack it in thaw out a little. at least we had finished well and salvaged a lunker out of a horrible cold front day. hope y'all are catchin' some too. details: shimano cardiff reel. berkley series one mh 6'6" rod. powerpro 50 lb. test "camoflaged" with black permanent marker. hoppy's "stroker" jig dressed with northland rattles (black, pumkin, and chartreuse). green pumkin strike king 3x chunk trailer. BANG attractant.

great job man. those cold front fish can be tough. nice catches.

awesome! if you weren't totally and hopelessly addicted before, you will be now. congrats big time!

great job man! 8-) if i was to try to wear shorts like that when i go tomorrow, i'd freeze my off! glad you still got some nice weather too.

temp here in the 50's. don't matter to me though if it's 100 or 30. i'm still down to do some lip piercings. hopefully i'm going thurs/fri to put the steel to 'em.

thanks y'all for the kind words. yeah, kinda seemed like that to me too. the fish was real fat and healthy. a lot of times their eyes seem to kinda bulge when they're like that. yep, you got it. i hope to go again at the end of the week. we'll see what happens. i'd gladly exchange those 2 6's for 1 double digit. yeah, right. :

hey guys. i was having some serious bassin' withdrawal sickness after being out of town and not able to go for a while. i was determined to fix that today and was able to get out to a little lake for a few minutes. it wouldn't have mattered if i had caught dinks or even none, i was just happy to be fishin' again. i figured it might be tough with bluebird skies and fairly cool water temps. but the fish must have felt sorry for me and realized how bad i needed to catch one. these 2 nice ones cooperated pretty quickly with me deadsticking a trick worm. one weighed 6-1 and the other ws 6-4. spinning gear and 10 pound test added to the thrill. even in the cool water, they were both pretty spunky and gave a good account of themselves, refreshing my memory of what drag sounds like. it's good to be back home. hope y'all are catchin' some too.

great job man. that's awesome.

nice fish man. congratulations.

hey guys i have a question. maybe someone can help cause i am kinda puzzled. a few days ago, i was fishin' in my favorite lake, just jiggin' along and stuck a pretty nice lm. i was kinda bummed, because this fish should have weighed over 9 pounds for sure, but could have easily been a 10+. instead it weighed 8 even. it was pretty long, with a big head, and big fins. however, the body of the fish was super skinny. even the "cheeks" of the fish were kinda sunk in like it was malnourished. here is the puzzling thing. i have caught several fish in various sizes from this lake that look like this. BUT, i have also caught several that are so fat and healthy that they look like they couldn't eat another bite. how could this be - such extremes in the same lake? i have heard of lakes where most of the bass are really healthy or lakes where most of the bass are really unhealthy. but both in the same lake? i don't think there is any kind of disease involved here, and i know the food supply is really good. i have a friend who suspects that there is a genetic flaw in some of the bass that makes 'em look super skinny like this that gets passed on from generation to generation. makes sense to me. has anyone else ever encountered such extemes within the same environment? have any other ideas as to what the culprit might be? thanks for any ideas y'all could offer. i am stumped. :-?

hey chris, that's just one of the trophies you released lookin' for a little payback. or maybe it's just that 23 pound world record lettin' ya know she's still in there.

real pretty fish. nice and dark colored. looks like you got some real good water to fish there.

excellent article. i definitely learned something. thanks for sharing.

i totally agree with everything that has been said here. GREAT ideas definitely. however you asked how to locate BASS offshore, not necessarily likely cover or structure areas. you can learn and fish offshore hotspots all day long, without necessarily locating or catching the fish as their location can be affected by a variety of things other than avilable cover or structure. granted, they will usually be around these hotspots, but not always (sometimes they forget to read "the book") ;D. even if the are, that guarantees nothing for the next time you are on the water as the fish may have totally changed. since it is a small body of water, fortunately there should not be a lot of searching to do. i have found the best way to locate offshore fish when you don't necessarily know where the humps, channels, ledges, etc. are is to mentally divide the lake into sections. fish each of these with a top, middle, bottom approach, covering the entire water colum with a variety of baits. repeat until you find the section of the lake/pond and aspect of the water column that the fish are using. hope that helps some.

the last thing i can thing of is using unconventional retrieves or "outside of the box" presentations - things like burning a plastic worm back in or carolina rigging a crank bait. these show the fish lures they are familiar with, but in a way they have never seen em. and by all means, i'd do what it took to be there when the spawn arrives. that is when the giants will be the most vulnerable. their motivation to strike is totally different then and with pressured fish, that can be one of the easiest times to catch 'em if you do things right. hope these ideas help and good luck.

first thing i'd try would be live bait - shiners, craws, worms. sounds like you have already tried downsizing, throwing presentations that are smaller than average. next i'd try upsizing with BIG baits - you might just be suprised. one of the things that might be a big fish killer in here is a giant STRAIGHT TAIL worm as the fish can probably quote the brand name of the curly tails when they see 'em comin'. another thing to try is bizarre colors or combinations of colors - things you'd never think of putting together. this sounds crazy but i've seen it work time and time again. i would also go weightless or use as little weight as possible on soft plastic presentations. another trick that works well on heavily pressured fish is burning baits back in at super high retrieve speeds. this does 2 things - it gives em something that they have not seen in terms of speed. also it does not give them time to consider a bait, they just have a split second to react, and often they will - violently! of course the other thing would be stuff like senkos, flukes and trickworms - real natural looking presentations, but i'm sure others have thought of this. one thing that might work real well too is to fish at different times than anyone else. night would be great if you could do it.