BassThumb

Exactly. High-end Ugly Stiks. You can do SOOOO much better with that $100.

I couldn't agree more. I've had better luck during fall cold fronts than I have during those high pressure, bluebird, Indian Summer days. Rainy, windy, and cold weather in the fall can bring the best fishing of the year, just as long as the weather is stable. I caught this years PB yesterday in intermittent drizzle, in the midst of a passing cold front, hours before a massive rain storm that dropped 10" of rain in parts of MN.

When the lakes are frozen from Nov thru March, it can make fishing difficult.

I peg if I want a faster presentation or if I'm fishing heavy cover. I let the sinker slide if I want a more subtle presentation. When I pitch/flip, the sinker is almost always pegged. When I cast to weed lines and structure, I let if slide more often than not. I use the Eagle Claw bobber stops all the time, and if I want to let the sinker slide, I just move the bobber stop up the line a foot or so. Be careful not to kink your line with these stops, as gotarheelz14 said.

With rods, I like to take the total of rods that usually out on the deck(6-8) and split it, 3 or 4 rods each. If one rod comes out of the locker, another gets put away. Otherwise damage could be done if you're not very careful, like bent guides and broken tips.

Mid-day usually, after the water temp rises a bit it seems to give the fish a boost. There are often aggressive fish in the shallows that will chase a lure. I tend to go out earlier in the afternoon, and rarely fish until dark during the fall. The low light periods in fall are rarely are as good as they are in the summer.

Thats's crazy! I'd be upset, too. They do small, isolated releases of chemicals around here, usually for Eurasian Milfoil and Curly Leaf Pondweed. The DNR simply releases pellets and leaves a floating milk jug with a orange sign banded to it, stating what's going on and directing people to stay away for a few days. The jugs are eventually blown away or picked up by residents. Is the pond badly infested, and with what? As far as you know, has it ever had any fish kills from oxygen depletion due to weed die-off, like what can happen with Curly Leaf Pondweed?

I prefer late fall. My best fishing of the year often comes in mid to late October when the water temps are in the 45-50 range. In these conditions, sometimes the best fishing is on pretty nasty days when you normally wouldn't expect a great bite, i.e. air temp in the mid-40s, cloudy, cold mist with threat of rain. My best ever largemouth fishing was during a week in Oct that had stable weather like that.

That's what I do, too. I also spend some time skipping under docks and overhanging brush with Senkos and tubes.

I've had my best luck with watermelon/red flake and white, with watermelon/black flake and green pumpkin/black also producing well.

I totally agree. Pointers and Sammys are the only LC baits worth the price, IMO. X-Raps are almost as good. You can get three of those for every two Pointers. You don't need that many colors either. I think size and speed is more important when it comes to jerkbaits. Gold/orange belly, silver, clown is about it.

The 3/16 - 3/8 oz Megastrike E-2 and the Picasso Football heads are my favorite for fishing shaky-style. These stand-up heads shine when you're fishing the bait on the bottom most of the time. I also like the 1/16 - 1/8 oz Bagleys head for standard jig worming, where I mostly swim and twitch the bait, trying to let it hang on weed tops or near weed edges, so I can jiggle jiggle jiggle and pop it free to trigger strikes.

Nice vid. Will insurance cover that?

Both teams were flat, but someones gotta win...

The prices of so many lures have gotten out of hand already. Imagine what the stuff would cost if they had to be made with more expensive, alternative metals. I'm willing to bet that the effect of lead is peanuts compared to that of the contaminants that enter the lake through simple runoff after a rain.

Shimano Curado 201E. If you're a righty, try a LH reel, so that you don't have to switch hands just as the lure is hitting the water and falling, as this will cause you to miss some strikes or be caught in a poor hook-setting position. You'll also be able to make more and quicker flips/pitches.

Daiwa Strikeforce. They don't suck.

Same here. I haven't tried many of the others, though.

1/2 oz lipless crank or DT Fat 1 wakebait, thick mono(14-17#), fished with the rod tip up. I do this sometimes, throwing cranks over the weeds on my buzzbait rod.

22" and 1.6lbs.... that's skinny. I caught a LM 24" and 3.5lbs and I thought it was dieing of old age. Your fish is the skinnest I've heard of. Old age is my guess, too. They don't get much longer than that up here. They seem to stop at about 22-24" and then just get fatter.

I had a bass this year that looked like it was wasting away, but it managed to hit a buzzbait and put up a little fight. It came from my favorite lake that has good sized fish and a decent amount of pressure. The fish basically looked like a filleted carcass, with a huge head and no meat on it behind the gills. The spine looked razor sharp and the body was at most 1" wide behind the head. It measured 22" and weighed 1.6 lbs. I have never seen a fish like that before or since, from any body of water.

I skip lures hard to the edges and let them hit the dock. Hopefully, the commotion will bring curious bass to the edges, where my lure is falling. I have caught a few fish by pitching a spinnerbait to the edge, letting it fall, and moving the boat 20 feet so that I can slow roll the spinner under the dock and hopefully bump the brick that anchors it. I don't spend much time on floating docks. I don't think I've ever caught more than one fish from a floating dock at one time. Fish prefer docks with posts.

This ailing economy immensely affected my fishing. It allowed me to buy my first house, and that allowed me to buy my first bassboat. It's a previously repossessed Stratos 275 that was sold to me out of a dealership in Missouri who listed boats on eBAy, on the cheap, because they didn't pay very much for them at the repo auction. This changed my focus from mostly river smallmouth wade-fishing to exclusively largemouth fishing on lakes.

1.- No 2.- I just pull it to the shore, leave enough line not to put a nasty bend on my rod and lip it. I'm with Raul on this one. The less clutter, the better.

Pads, milfoil, coontail, cabbage, etc.