little_stephen

i was wondering if anyone had any interesting ideas on how they use beaver style baits as trailers on jigs. i love flipping jigs to the holes in the lily pad fields i fish. since thats a prome hideout for bluegill ive had some success with using beaver baits as trailers to semi mimic that look. but i cant find a good way to rig them so they one. stay put on the jig where i want them. or two..... finding a creative way to change up the entire look of the presentation.... any ideas?

hola from your brethern to the north. sometimes feels like theres about a dozen people from ohio who bass fish and thats it. welcome. ;D

*and the sarcastic guy says..........* be grateful u can fish in the winter.

Ya! theres TONS of little lakes here. like the ones ive learned to fish on. but the portage lakes are a little larger (still small by comparison to the local resvrs.) but theyre packed with all sorts of good fish! they have a big gambler no entry fee tourney there basically every year! I havent had a chance to fish them yet. but theres miles of shore line to cover! Ill keep u posted.

my biggest so far too.... sorry for the crappy picture quality. I shore fish. so i reeled this girl in..... standing on a half sunken log in a field of 5inch deep mud & silt muck..... got ahold of her, tossed my rod to solid ground. pulled out my phone and snapped a pitcure while nearly falling off my log. Got her a few weeks after ice out. on a fliping jig with a big beaver bait trailer. she was up shallow on a brutal day chasing bluegill & shinners i guess. found her holding tight next to a thick post in a series of support stakes up shallow. my best attempt to measure her figgured about 18inches. she was fat & B-E-A-Utiful! cold day.... only in the upper 40s. bluebird sky. cold front. windy! with chop so bad i almost got knocked off my log a few times. and the sun was just setting behind the tree line when she bit!

Ive got a couple of easy ones...... 1. find a goto bait for my new home lake (there are lilypads 100 yards from my front door) 2. teach my best friend to fish lily pads..... (hes never even used artificial baits before.... im in for a treat) 3. find time to fish the Portage Lakes. (north east ohio hidden gem!) all pretty simple........

so, i moved. into me and my fiances first appartment! sure enough after much effort. i convinced her to get the one with the lake 100yards from my front door ;D But im unsure how to approach it. I only got about 8 hours on the lake so far before it froze over. and mind you, i shore fish! Theres lilypad beds near what looks like the most promising spot. (A semi protected cove with a storm drain pipe at the back. slow slope into the lake. with an obvious channel where the pads dont grow which im thinking is the path the drain digs out it rains. splits two pad beds with a fallen tree in the smaller of the two beds) ive basically got that spot figured out! but what im not sure how to approach is the other two main elements i can get tofrom shore. 1. Sand/gravel mix bottom. (the bottom of the lakes im used to are all mud and silt with alot of dead leaves/sticks and some weeds mixed in. this things alot of sand for almost as far as i can cast) 2. Drop off ledges. (from what i could feel with my heaviest football jig.... the longest stretch of straight shoreline is a series of drop off ledges..... like small steps) Im not sure how to approach the last two aspects of the lake yet. because i can only shore fish the ledges seem kind of difficult to fish. and the sand is so choked with debris (could have been because it was sooo late in the fall) that my football jig drug up more junk than fish! Help..........

simple. become poor. i know its sad but its the truth! I dug myself into a DEEP DEEP DEEP credit hole by using credit cards for a number of things. the most fun was submitting to the bait monkey and racking up a nice bill along the way. now im slowly on my way out of debt. and ive found that being broke.... i mean dead broke. like only eating ramen and pork & beans and scraping together the money for a fishing liscense poor for about a year fixed the issue all together! I know its sad. but its true. now, i still splurge once and a while. new line! a new bag of worms here & there...... and my favorite.... new jigs to replace all the ones i keep losing. but that sure enough is the best cure. starve the bait monkey to death! ;D

I just felt like posting that it feels sooooo good to be back. after months and months of not having internet access..... at all...... and before that, months upon months of rarely having internet access. I now have full time internet again! IT IS SO GOOD TO BE BACK! ;D ~good fishing~

Hey, it just occured to me..... if any of you guys are going to be in the Canton, Ohio region for the Pro Football Hall Of Fame festival, let me know. bring your gear.... and if u happen to be bringing your boat to maybe fish the portage lakes, lake erie, whereever..... TELL ME! Ive lived by the HOF all my life and could care one bit about the festival, but if itll bring anyone into my area Id be happy to be a host and show you around. let me know. the festival starts next weekend..... ;D

just wondering how many musicians are members of the forums..... myself, Im a percussionist. (drummer for the non-band geeks) prefer mostly marching percussion. played snare for 7 years. dabbled in tenors and bass (not the fish the drum). just wondering.

heck i wish we could just keep bass in a body of water with a max depth of 6 feet. those winter kill up here. my local lakes just deep enough to not kill over.... ive done ok by hitting the edges of the pads that grow off the shoreline. jigs (fished what seems to me like too slowly), worms, the occasional texas rig craw. i just cant stand how slow I have to work it after a storm rolls through. but in 6 feet of water, I cant imagine ur looking at the bass having the chance to go very far..... just keep slinging baits, theyll bite eventually. ;D

combo fishing. I make the most of my casts (because i shore fish in limited structure situations) by fliping & pitching a ton of different baits to obvious targets, then swiming, jiging, ect what ever im fishing back through mulitiple secondary target opportunities.... so its breaking traditional rules about each kind of fishing, but it gets the job done. Im now a HUGE jig fishing fan. but i dont think anyone can deny that a topwater bite is the most fun of all when its hot! ;D

I love horny toads, but the pads are starting to get to tall to fish it effectively. lately, Ive been sticking to swim and fliping jigs instead. enough wait to punch through the tall pads and get to the wholes underneath them. But my real concern is this, I fish from the bank, and the lake i fish is bowl shaped, slow tapered sides.... so once the rain got heavy, Im thinking the fish backed off to the deepest points on the pads and got low to the lake bed...... eventually it got so bad I couldn't keep fishing, the wind was blowing so hard it got difficult to see what you were doing. Im really glad i didnt rent out a canoe that evening....... I woulda got stranded on the far side of the lake until after dark......

welcome from ur neighbors in ohio........ just ignore everyone from texas, california, and florida. pay attention to our us yanks and ull be fine!

this is exactly why i love ohio. (there arent many reasons) theres a ton of small lakes that hold plenty of fish (lil ones, but still fish) my normal lake, Sippo Lake (small) is about 5 mins away. plus five for the hike in. Mogadore Resv. is 25mins. Atwood Lake is about 35 mins. and Nobles Pond where i fish occasionally, is about 15mins.

So I went to the lake this week knowing full well a storm front had stalled out and hadn't reached my area yet. the way i read the radar, I had about two hours before the front caught back up to where they had predcicted it would be. I was wrong..... but it was awesome! I was jig fishing up really shallow and getting tons of light bites. theyd grab and run with it! I was just making an adjustment to a smaller jig with less of a weedgaurd when the rain started, light at first. and the bite got alot faster! still missed. but then the rain really started to come down...... the bite slowed then stoped.... What Im wondering. is the bite went away before I thought it would. fishing from shore. through lilly pads. what is the best way to keep on the bite with light rain? any ideas?

you've got a few options, wait out the bluegill spawn (sounds like theyre busy making more Bass food.....) move spots, or focus on the edge of the bluegill madness with baits that mimic injured bluegill. Ive got some nice bass bites from the edge of the bluegill spawning grounds with jigs and swimbaits and such in bluegill colors. i could be wrong, but thats whats happened to me before.

double follow up if anyone is still looking over this string....... First of all, I disagree about the fish finder. I fish from shore(keep reading, I know it backs up to something else you said.... Ill get to it in a sec) and all I carry is one, maybe two rods. a backpack with a small selection of lures. and what i can fit on my belt. truth be told. too many people on this site have become in my opinion, "Jaded" by the fact that they have a boat, a rod locker packed with too many rigs. too much tackle. a fishfinder. 3 livewells. a huge outboard....ect. I fish for fun, from on a tiny little lake with nothing more than what I can hike in with. I have to learn to become dependent on what I have already. I basically ran out of money..... well, literally (about 5 months ago) so what i managed to store away for the bait monkey when he comes out of hybernation is all Ive got. No new gear, no new tools.... all i can afford is new line and replacements for my terminal tackle. (but I did like ur feedback from the rest of the post. I just think too often people forget the roots of even their own fishing expierence. I watched a guy try to fish at my home lake last week, he had all Quantum Reels on Allstar Rods, not one, but two of those huge tackle bags with about 8 planos in each over flowing with baits. and he literally carried 7 rods to the shore. He spent more time tinkering, less time fishing, and got skunked....... he forgot how to shore fish I kid you not!) Second follow up The reason I set so many goals is because Im trying to get a basic understanding of a technique. then i move on..... but i keep using the techniques Ive been able to apply successfully to my fishing. Its a technique I learned while in college as a Music Education Major speciallizing in percussion. You teach the student how to do something. then it becomes knowledge, not new...... that technique gets honed through practice while you learn new techniques. it takes disciple not to toss out the things you just learned. but eventually what youre going to do is build up a full composition of what you've been learning. In music, you learn "phrases" or "sections" of a piece of music, then piece on a new section. then each time you play, you play the entire thing. so ur re-enforcing the old material & fine tuning it while youre learning the new. Its an awesum cycle that builds alot of cofidence in what you already know & gives ur the courage to keep moving forward.... (Just thought Id share that) plus, like I said, I just wanna get a taste for a number of techniques that work in certian secnarios then Ill fine tune the ones I can apply best to my normal fishing (right now thats me studying jig fishing like its my job) (Sorry, long post)

good input guys. that was an awesome answer to my question! thanks.

that makes alot of sense. my lakes dingy and has tons of mud and pads. The first and third fish, with the darker markings I hauled out of really shallow water in the pads, where alot of the time, the weeds are actually filtering out some of the muddy color...... ive heard people say the bass up shallow get a "tan" on their backs from the sun....cheesy i know. the big girl in the middle was on a deeper drop off at the edge of the flats..... right before the spawn. coming up to eat bluegill & shinners i presume. so maybe shes one of the fish we catch here who hangs on the deeper edge by the pier? (which was only about 45yards away...) I think that makes alot of sense..... the two pad fish have to blend in with the constantly changing shadows up shallow in the pad fields?

and no, "Defeating and/or not giving in to the tackle monkey" doesn't count! thats an ongoing therapy needed course of action.... in fact, I think we need a Tackle Buyers Anonymous group or something.

So, here in ohio, its about mid season for bass. were nearing the halfway point, and I took some time to reanalyze my bass fishing skills and what i want to improve on. My goals when the season started were as follows (or something like these): 1. Throw more kinds of baits (not rely on my "crutch bait")- COMPLETE 2. Double my catch rate from last year- COMPLETE ;D 3. Take more time to analyze the bite (& know when to switch baits based on this information)- Im too stuborn to admit a bait isnt working..... 4. Analyze and eliminate non-productive waters faster (& start fishing the conditions not where I got fish before)- COMPLETE (to the best of my ability without a boat) 5. Catch a fish on each of the following baits I had not done before: -Jig- COMPLETE -Straight Tail Worm- COMPLETE -Spinner Bait- -Ribbon Tail Worm- COMPLETE -Grub- COMPLETE & Finnally 6. Learn to do the "walk the dog technique" with a topwater stick bait- COMPLETE ;D So, now being mid season, those goals have changed and Ive started aiming myself at new goals (I set this lest about 2 months ago, I just haven't had a chance to post if yet. So some of the things have already gotten done.) they are as follows: 1. Take more time to analyze the bite & know when to switch baits more effectively. 2. Cover water faster & saturate an area more effectively. 3. Improve my pitching skills by practicing in the yard.- COMPLETE 4. Improve my casting skills overall by adding different kinds of casts to my arsenal.- COMPLETE 5. Fish more variety of cover than I'm used to (ie lily pads). 6. Catch a fish on each of the following techniques: - Topwate Stick Bait (Walk the Dog)- - Football Jig- - Lizard- - Tube Bait- - Spinner Bait- - Swim Bait- - Senko- So lets here it, I know we all need to improve. And Im currious to see how my goal meeting skills stack up against the rest of you guys..... Where are you with your goals for this year?

first of all. welcome home soldier. second of all, welcome to the forums. and third of all. what you can learn from books, magazines, and the internet(especailly the people here.) is A HUGE advantage. I went from catching about 3 or 4 bass all year last year (my first year bass fishing) to doubling that in a mater of my first 3 or 4 outtings this year. All becasue of what ive learned, all of my homework I did this last winter. and wht these guys here have taught me. secondly, theres tons to do in madison btw. lots of lakes. and if youre into music(I know u know how to do close order drill marching being a marine) theres a good drum & buggle corps called the Madison Scouts there. I almost marched on snare drum with them a while back. regaurdless, good luck fishing and again, thanks for serving so the rest of us can enjoy things like fishing.

Im not from the south west.... im actually opposite of you. North East Ohio. If you ever some up towards the portage lakes let me know........ and visa versa for me down there.