Shad_Master

If they are feeding on bait fish try changing out your craw trailer to a swimmin chunk and swim the jig through the area. You may be surprised, I was.

Where are you guys hearing this?

Thanks for the info - I had been given some as samples and haven't had a chance to use them yet - was just wondering. With any luck, I will dunk a few over the lunch hour today and will give you a report if there is anything to report.

I am by no means a jig expert - but would like to be and have been learning from some guys who are experts. My first question was sixe and depth, but CJ beat me to it - I think you are right on with the 1/4, the 1/2 may be too heavy for this early in the year and at that depth you are fishing. I would suggest pulling out to about 15' and work your way in - a lot of my jig bites in the early part of the year are "on the fall" - so you might want to make sure your trailer is more boyant to slow down the fall. Now having said all that, I ain't caught a fish all year - so take it or leave it

Haven't heard anything about these for a while - just wondering if anyone is using them and any reactions. If this has been discussed and I missed it, please redirect. Thanks

I don't have time to read the entire thread, so if someone else posted this, then consider this to be a "ditto" - I always tell people, "if I take it home and eat it - I can't catch it tomorrwo" -- usually enough said.

Last trip of the season last year, I was fishing with a guy that is always complaining about the cost of lures - he had just bought his first ever Lucky Craft CB and decided to give it a try on a submerged rock ledge. He hooked into a fish that immediately pulled him into a brush pile and wrapped him up - he tried for several minutes to get the fish out when his line broke - he tied on a Crank Bait that was probably 20 years old and fished for the rest of the day (caught fish) but never got hung up - ain't it always the way.

They don't pay for the fuel - your tax $$'s do

First of all, if you had posted this on the local DNR website, you would have gotten a lecture from the webmaster - "moss grows on trees and rocks" - "grass gows in the water". Secondly, my advice is don't do anything - let mother nature take care of it. Otherwise you run the risk of really screwing up the fishing. I fish a little city park pond near a housing development and across the street from a golf course. I used to catch consistent 3, 4 & 5 pounders in this small pond (similar to what you describe). The local residents complained to the city about the "weeds" in the lake and they started spraying. This destroyed the spawning areas and the average fish size in this water now is about 10". I often hear residents out walking while I am fishing comment on "how nice the pond looks" and it is all I can do to keep from throwing them in.

As funny as some of those things are, it doesn't compare to what just happens naturally at Wal-Mart on any Saturday or Sunday - I tell my wife it's like Disneyland with all the characters walking around. A couple of years ago a buddy of mine and I took our kids to a soccer tournament in another town not far from here. We spent the weekend at a motel and stopped by the Wal-Mart after the games to get swimming stuff for the kids - while we were cruising the parking lot looking for a spot, an entire wedding party - bride in long white gown, goom in powder blue tux, thee brides maids and three goomsmen came out. The bride and goom got into a car decorated with crepe paper, old shoes and tin cans and drove off while the rest of the party threw rice at them. Believe it or not Ripley.

Ditto on the parasite clips - don't know how these things work or why they work, only know they work!

There is a club that fishes out of Des Moines, but I don't personally know any of the members - one of the guys in my club does, I will try to get a contact for you and PM the information. In exchange you will need to give me a fishing report when we get close to our tournament at Badger Creek later this year

two stories from last year: 1) I was fishing a wing dam on my home lake and hugging the bank pretty closely - the wing dam is probably 100 - 200 yards long. This guy drove his boat across the lake and pulled up about 50 yards in front of me and cast his lure into the rocks and immediately got hung up. As he t-m'ed over to get his $.10 worm back, I pulled up to him and made cast under his boat and pulled a 17" er right out from under him. He called me names I had never heard before as I went on around him. No regard for the fact that he had cut me off. 2) Later in the year, I was fishing on the same lake - there were two guys in a boat fishing where I had been fishing in the previous example. I had been watching and they were fishing this stretch of bank very slowly and had not moved more than 20-25' for over 1/2 hour. I made a wide pass around them to head on over to the dam to set up to move on down the shore line. As I t-m'd past, I asked, "having any luck?" - the guy in the back yelled back "we won't have any if you cut us off". I was at least 50 yards from their boat and on the outside, away from the bank - I asked him how much of the shore line he planned to fish so that I didn't "crowd" them and then pulled up another 150 yards or so and called back if this would be okay? the guy shot me the bird.

You know, I can't think of any that I don't like -- at least on the BASS Tour - there are a couple of FLW guys that are suspect

Here and in the other post about non-boaters there are always good 'uns and bad 'uns - I try to pick the good 'uns when I can and chalk it up to experience when I get a bad 'un. All of my tournament fishing is at the club level and there have only been a couple of times when I felt like I had been front-ended. But both of those guys are real neat individuals and I would fun fish with them any time. But I have heard stories and seen things that frustrate the begeezus out of me. I have also had some guys in the back of my boat that I never asked back because they whined all day even when they were catching fish. Changing partners in the boat is easier than changing parners in a marriage.

In my experience (with chatter baits only) they tend to throw off the weeds and not have that gorilla snot sutff trailing off of them when you get them back in the boat. I throw them with braided line and can horse them out of most weed beds pretty easily - now wood is a different story, when pulling them through a brush pile, stump field, etc. they do tend to get hung up pretty hard and pretty easily.

It's not always about keeping the guys honest - sometimes it's about promoting comradship. Our club has a rule that says if we have more boaters than non-boaters signed up for a tournament draw that we start drawing from the boater pool, the first name picked is the boater and the second name picked is the non-boater - a boater can only be drawn out of their boat once per year though.

It sort of depends on where you are fishing 'em - if the bottom is realy soft, you may want to hop them more - if it's hard a short jerk may work best - in sunken timber a yo-yo presentation, deep in the junk, will often draw a strike.

It's a topwater chugger type bait - one of the guys in our club uses them all the time - I, on the other hand, have never had any luck with 'em.

I got to wondering if this was why they dumped Fish Fishburne - cause he made these guys look so short (?)

When my wife and I first got married we were given an electric can opener as a wedding present - one of the features of the appliance was that it had switch in the back that you could flip and make the can rotate clockwise or counter clockwise (???) don't know why but this was a selling point for the thing. However, I could not get the switch to flip - after several tries I laid it on the table and tapped it with a hammer - the entire cutting mechanism fell off :-[ We have now been marrked for 36 years and have never had an electric can opener - I have offered to buy her one on several occasions but it just makes her mad

Since the BPS opened up here a couple of years ago, I have had an opportunity to meet several of the pros: Rick Clunn, Jason Quinn, Edwin Evers and Mike McClelland - the odd thing to me is that the tallest one of the bunch is RC - doesn't have anything to do with anything, but just curious to me.

One of the guys in our club reported talking to DNR and part of the concern was that the oxygen level in the lake is particularly low - the expectation is that the fish kill will be huge from this. They will not have an official announcement until some time in April and our tourney is set for 4/26 so not much time for us to adapt if we need to. There is some discussion about moving to Snyder Bend - I've never been there - any thoughts?

I think this thing is screwed up the first one up was the "show me" state - MO, but I still got a 0

This wa featured on Fishing University this morning - it looks like a regular jerkbait with a chatter bait blade in front - the website shown on the show was z-mansbaits or something like that, but I haven't been able to get it to connect. It looks like it might be an interesting modification especially for suspending jerkbaits, if the blade doesn't screw up the suspension. I may actually try to create some with my old rouges and CB blades to try out this spring (if the water ever gets soft >)