Chris

If you had the hook or weight pegged don't. I think the bass was clamped down on the weight and when it opened up its mouth it just let go.

Are you primarily a shallow water fishermen?

small area small population of fish

It takes time to get in tune with your baits. You can use the ear plugs, and close your eyes but it really takes 1000's of casts and months on the water if not years to get in tune with your baits to the point where you can tell if a bass sniffed your bait. It takes total concentration and time.

Try looking it up on earth.google.com you might get a better picture. :

I wouldn't waste my time chasing bass busting on shad or chasing shad schools. If I was in an area that shad was going crazy close to me I would fire off a few casts with either a topwater lure like a spit'n image or a prop bait or a jerkbait. If you run around chasing schoolers your going to be on the short end of the stick. What would be smart was to target places that the bass come to feed. You want to look for obstacles that will bunch up the shad. A bend in the river (fish the outside bend), point, hump, narrow cut, bridge, rock bank, pilings, the large tanks that the barges tie up to, dam, log jam full of river trash, a depression, stump if in the right place. Target ambush points. If the lake drops out because of draw down find the channel and places where the channel is closest to shallow water. Bridges and steep banks or bluff banks are areas that the bass just need to make a minor adjustment for comfort. They don't need to abandon their area from lack of water or depth. The draw down also concentrates the bait even more and makes fishing ambush points more important. Lure options are up to you and what works for you. I would take along a spinning rod with some finesse lures. I also would spend some time learning to swim a jig because this time of the year it is killer. Crankbaits are another great option or a jerkbait.

When you held that fish out of the water did it change colors or showed its markings if not stick it in the livewell for a while then look. Deep fish are pail, fish from muddy water are pail, and if the bass is in an environment that is like sand or clay they tend to be pail also. A bass tries to blend in to the surroundings and if everything around it is light the bass doesn't want to stick out like a sore thumb and tends to try to blend in. I have caught bass even in shallow areas with a sand bottom that where real light more of a light green color without any other markings. When you drop that bass in your livewell they change their colors because the surroundings changed. Most of the time they are not quick to change back but they do. You will notice that other fish in that lake seem to be light also.

This is a good post that might help you this time of the year.

What he said

Short answer: bass can see with thier eyes closed.

I was kinda thinking the same thing it sounds like home to me and what I grew up fishing lol ;D 1) cream worm- natural, junebug 2) spitt'n image jr. 3) soft jerkbait like a bass assasin tenn shad or crystal shad 4) Rapala gold floating minnow 5) scum frog 6) pegged tequilla green flake worm, junebug, or redshad green flake 7) floating worm 8) sugar shad gold (or rattle trap 1/4oz) 9) spook jr 10) spinnerbait-you wanna bend the blade arm up at more of a 90 degree angle this helps the bait deflect off of the pad stems. 11) black/blue flake zoom lizard (great color) 12) buzzbait or prop bait That is some stuff I used around Fla that have lakes like that.

When things go south:(more food for thought) I have had more than one tournament that I never turned up a keeper pre fishing. I watched one of those new bass shows the other day and Rick Clunn hit the nail on the head and I am so glad someone finally came out and said it. You have got to fish for today and forget about yesterday or even the cast before. If you get caught up in the idea that the day is going to stink you already beat yourself. To many people fish or pre fish on a slow day sloppy and with a bad mind set and it effects your fishing greatly. It messes with you confidence and you start second guessing yourself. If you are in an area and you know there is fish there FISH IT! I don't care if there is no fish on your graph or if conditions change use that spot as a starting point and take some time to find the fish. Try to figure out how conditions caused the fish to move and areas that they should move to. If you need to slowdown, scale down, move down, whatever do it. If you need to take some time to re group and treat the lake as a new lake and find fish hey at least your being productive and you putting yourself in a better position to be in front of more fish or getting bites. Bites are the key then you can refine your technique and pinpoint your larger or in some cases keeper fish. I love tough tournaments or conditions because it messes up so many people. Most of the time people see tough conditions and it throws them for a loop. You need to make yourself think that each cast or pitch has a 5 pound bass sitting there waiting to bite. It sounds weird but you got to do it to put yourself in the right frame of mind. The other part is having a positive attitude which is hard at times but with these two things will help dig yourself out of a hole. Always remember that an angry man catches no fish. Patterns change from day to day hour to hour and you need to change with it. You got to figure them out even if it means you file 13 your pattern that you have been catching fish on for the past week. If the pattern isn't working you might have to start over from scratch and figure them out, change, or move. Sometimes its just a matter of hitting the right place at the right time. Some spots have a window of opportunity and if you are not there at the right time you miss out. This could be a feeding area or point. Fish use places when they want to hang out or feed. If your there at the right time you cash in on the spot. If your there before the window opens or after it closes you miss out. The other part of this deal is that nobody fishes the same as everyone else. I remember one time I was teaching a guy how to pitch a jig. I told the guy to fish a brush pile the way he would normally. The guy fished the edges and tinkered around for a while then said nobody was home. Then I pitched in the brush pile and pulled out 2 fish. You can have a large group of fishermen on a given lake all saying the same thing there is no fish. Then you make a change and load the boat. Great anglers or not it could be a little thing that makes all the difference and maybe the other guys have not keyed into it. I had one tournament that was tough everyone was throwing up their hands and lost. I threw a spinnerbait and had a follower and then changed to a crankbait and had another follower. I switched 180 degrees and swam a 1/8 oz jig and loaded the boat. I had other times where they want one lure or color over another or depth. My point is that it could be just a little thing that maybe nobody had figured out yet. As you narrow down what the fish are doing and what they will hit your beginning to develop a pattern. A Pattern is nothing more than a group of fish doing the same thing at the same time either holding at a certain depth, cover, structure and you can duplicate what your doing to catch them in other areas of the same type. Some days the fish might be hanging on stumps that are right on the edge of a drop. You take what you learned from fishing that area and find other stumps that are sitting next to different drop offs and see if the fish are there. If they are then you just found a pattern. Sometimes you can have several patterns working at the same time. Confidence plays a major part in trying to figure out a new lake. You could use the systematic approach where you start off with what you like to fish and then expand into other areas or techniques while you get a picture of what the lake is doing. As a tournament fishermen if you like to fish off colored water then you tend to try to find it if available. If your a structure fishermen then you look for the right structure that fits your style of fishing. We tend to look for something that is familiar to us or something that fits our style of fishing. For a lot of us every day is a jig day or crankbait day because we search out areas that that technique will work. What throws us for a loop is when the techniques we love to use don't fit the water that is new to us and we don't change what we are doing. Each lake fishes different and when your not comfortable using other techniques you get stuck. The all mighty 0! If someone says that they never blank they are telling you a story. Many people just chalk it up to they just where not biting. There are times when you find fish during practice on water that you know really well. Then the tournament comes around and you have nothing to show for it. You get back to the ramp just in time to hear one of the guys say "Man we really caught a ton of fish in practice but in the tournament they turned off." This is code word for they just fished out your hole. There are so many factors that go into why people with great intentions and skill still comes in with zip. The idea that everyone has off days is more true. There are times that no matter where you go or what you do you just have a hard time putting things together. I had a tournament last year on a heavy stained lake. During practice I knew what they where biting and how to catch a great limit. I prefished right and had several patterns working for me. I caught one 3 pounder on a spinnerbait in a pocket in some grass and that was it in the tournament. I didn't zero but I never got on the fish that I should have. I thought wow it must be a tough day. I came in for weightin and found out it was just tough for me. I never seen so many limits. The fish where on beds and I didn't know it. When I was prefishing the bass where in prespawn and when the tournament rolled around they where locked on beds. With the stained water I couldn't see them. This lake had a late spawn and I thought I was fishing post spawn fish. The lesson is to keep an open mind and check all options even when you think you got it right things change.

There are times when you can out think yourself and there are times when just going on gut is better than thinking things through. Tough days can really throw guys for a loop because you start second guessing yourself and run around like a chicken with their head chopped off. Some guys stick to the same pattern waiting for it to turn on other guys just panic. They change from rod to rod lure to lure and place to place going back to square one and into prefishing mode. For myself there has not been many times when I had a pattern pegged and it turned out to be the winning pattern. Most of the time what I found in prefishing played a part in what worked for the tournament but my pattern in most cases is ever changing little adjustments. I have won several tournaments where I never spent one day prefishing. I knew the water and how it fished and I didn't want any preconceived notion of what I should be doing. On one lake the tournament started everyone took off here I am sitting still in the dock area putting a jig on the rod. My partner said "well are we going to fish?" I said yep and dropped the trolling motor and started fishing. I had 9 lbs over second place at weigh in and won big bass. I have had other tournaments that if I didn't prefish I would have been lost. We where fishing one lake and my partner found an area and wanted to fish it in the morning. It was a large bay with lots of irregular features in it. We started at the beginning of the bay and fished all of it. An hour later we where at the end of the bay and I had a small limit and my partner had 2 keepers. My partner said well lets try your spot. I never left that area because it had the most bait and enough wind to keep the fish active and no other boating pressure. We placed third that tournament. I will never leave fish to go find fish unless I sure that the place is tapped out of fish. Most of the time if I do leave I come back to check if they turned back on. Sometimes you got to be committed to a place and grind it out. Each situation is different and you gotta go by gut and make small adjustments to try to figure out what's up.

You use a bullet weight when you want to penetrate cover or if you need it to be able to feel your bait in deeper depths or if you want to have contact with the bottom. In the lakes that you are fishing with all those weeds and such you are better off with a weightless worm or a heavy salted lure or splitshot rig.

this is the flasher I was talking about http://www.basspro.com/servlet/catalog.TextId?hvarTextId=52525&hvarSearchValue2=520&hvarSearchValue3=184&hvarSearchValue4=00&hvarTarget=search&AFID=&sourceid=&cmCat=SEARCHRESULTS

The thermocline is a depth of water where the cold and warm water mix and has a unified temp. When you have a turnover you have a larger area that is uniform to the same temp. When the water reaches a certain point (temp) then the thermocline is more defined. In the winter the thermocline tends to be deeper unless you have a warm trend or Indian summer.

super fluke, paddletail shad, dropshot, senko but use it like a jerkbait A tube might be a good choice skip it up by the bridge and let it spiral down to the bottom then jerk it once off the bottom then reel it in slow.

If you got an 2006 BPS Master Catalog flip to page 425 on the right of the page. That fuzzy line at the 10 ft mark should be the thermocline the dark line at the 14ft mark should be a fish. The the fuzzy stuff and large dark line at the top 0-2ft mark should be the surface and clutter. It has been awhile since I had one but I think I am correct.

Oh WOW I didn't catch that part : Yeah it will take awhile for another fish to move in particularly if it is isolated cover. Main structure or cover close of main features will take less time.

Be upfront about what you want or need. Make sure that you have a way to promote their product to increase sales. Make sure that you know there stuff and believe in there product. Companies get hammered everyday from people wanting something so it needs to be worth there while the conversation or letter needs to be "this is what I can do for you" and "this is what makes me stand out from the rest." Don't try to ask for the world because that is a big turn off unless you can demonstrate that you are worth it. To many people kinda have the attitude that this is a right and you can't go on without me which isn't good. Be honest don't make yourself out to be something that your not or that you can move mountains when you can't. Know what you want or need before you get your self stuck in a conversation and end up with a sucky deal. Make yourself out a resume because you are applying for a job. Make sure that it is professional and that you act in such a manner. You are representing them and they don't want Forest Gump to be their contact with the rest of the public. A good public speaker is a (+) and you also need to have enough experience with the product and fishing in general to "know what your talking about." Use good grammar and spelling you want project yourself as an educated person. Most of the time you kinda start off as a "field tester" which isn't a bad thing and you should have an opportunity to climb up the ladder as you show promise that you can gain sales. Make sure that the level that your fishing at warrants the kind of sponsorship you are asking for. What I mean is that if all I do is fish in a club and there isn't anyway for me to promote a companies product other than Internet chat sites and that is the only contact I have with the public which in turn doesn't put their product on the tackle shop's shelves then why would I ask for a full sponsorship. If your new to the game then it would be a good idea to target smaller companies. If your an old goat like me then it would be good to expand out provided that you have the ability to promote sales. You got to be marketable and a salesmen that's key outside of being a stud at the weigh in. I could be the best fishermen in the world but if I can't sell you the lures that I fish with what good am I to a company. Lastly if you tell the company that you can do X,Y,Z make sure you do it because they will find someone who will. I myself have been very fortunate and have some fantastic sponsors from companies large and small. It wasn't easy and I had many doors slammed in my face in the process. You just got to drive on.

Well,... Large fish will take up the best available cover, structure, or feeding areas available in a given area. When things change is when conditions change or environment that cause the larger fish to move and take up new areas. Fall is kinda throws a wrench into things because these larger fish will move off and follow bait. One summer I was fishing the main lake and caught a nice 6lb bass on a crankbait. It's "home" was an old drainage pipe and I caught the same fish over and over throughout the summer. This fish was unique because it had a place on it that was identifiable. Later that fall while fishing a feeder river to the lake I was fishing about a mile up river. This would be about 2 miles away from where I caught the same fish in the summer. This time I caught the fish next to a bridge hanging around some old stumps on a spinnerbait. Big fish move if the main food source moves in this case the shad migrated up river.

The fish followed the shad. This time of the year the shad swim up stream to spawn and smallmouth follow. Try to find areas that would hold up the fish like a dam or something.

what rig do you use for a lizard to catch bass? weightless, Texas rig, Carolina rig, dropshot what colors? pumpkinseed, watermelon, black/blue, tequila, greenpumpkin, what brand? zoom What else can you catch on a lizard? frogs, snakes, catfish, bluegills, turtles,

What I have found is that some years when the spring had high water or bad fronts or just plain bad weather that push fish off the spawn some fish will spawn in the fall. I seen it happen in few places it is not common but it does happen. The other part of the deal is that sometimes fish do get tail rot or "Red Sore Disease." Also sometimes something will attack the bass otters, turtles, gators, gar, musky, ect.

Spring and Fall are when bass are most active. Bass put on the feed bag in the spring to feed up before they get locked onto the spawn and in the fall they put on the feed bag before the winter.