Bluebasser86

Yeah they've certainly never saved my bacon on tough days, usually around this time of year or early in the spring. Nope, never

I would guess it's around a 45 degree bend on mine to get the right wobble. I had a lot of problems with the pure poison wobbling right. Mine would work fine for awhile then it would stop and I'd have to pop the rod to get it to start wobbling again. I couldn't find any real good, upclose pictures of the blade and bend of mine but I got the best I could do. At least you can tell the blade is bent down and get a little bit of an idea of the angle that works for me.

Is the entire guide missing or is the insert missing from the eyelet? If the whole thing is missing I'd fish with it. If the insert is missing it will shread your line and you'd be better off leaving it at home.

Little smallies don't always school either, at least not in some of the lakes I fish. It's possible, like others have said, you're in the wrong location and there just isn't many fish in that stretch of river. Current breaks are going to be your best bet to find a school of smallies holding.

Severe back pain is a terrible thing to have to deal with. I have bad spasms sometimes and I can't hardly breathe it hurts so bad at times. Hope you get to feeling better so you can get back on the water!

Nice one, what'd you get her one? At 21" she should be 5 pretty easy, maybe even pushing 6 depending on how fat she was. Looks to be pretty thick in the picture.

I have to have 2 claws on my baits, just a confidence thing. Plus the double claws/tails help to make the bait fall straight and come through the water without favoring one side or the other.

Another beast Big-O! I've done the same for a couple fish in brushpiles, nothing near that big unfortunately. It makes it a little scary when you're in muddy water and haven't seen it yet but when you get a good fish you want to get her in the boat!

Did you actually even see the fish dead on the bank later? I've seen some fish with split jaws from getting off stringers and half or all of their lower jaw missing from who knows what and other than that seem to be doing fine. Not trying to back what he did but I'd just try to stay away from him and keep my mouth shut. I've got access to a few different private lakes and ponds and I do whatever I can to stay in good graces with the communities around them. A couple of them the people who live there ask for a few of the bass or catfish I catch, I hate keeping fish but to get access to great fishing with limited pressure I even clean the fish for them . I really doubt the HOA will care much about the fish and they're probably more likely to just pull the plug on guests being able to fish unless they're with a resident.

I throw the #5 on a 6' 10" ML/F Rage spinning rod with a Pfluegar Supreme 25 and 8lb mono. That rod casts them really well and has a soft enough action to not pull the hooks out of the fish.

Bending the end of the blade slighty down or up can help. With the ones I make there seems to be a sweet spot on the amount of bend in the blade to get them to shake really well, might just have to play around with it a little bit.

I've caught a lot of nice fish on the Bitsy jigs, mainly the Bitsy flipping jig because it has a little heavier hook and weedguard so I can fish it in heavier cover and handle bigger fish.

I haven't tried it very many places but it seems to be very key to catching fish at Wabunsee for some reason. I catch more and bigger fish out of there with mismatched trailers, usually a craw colored jig and black and blue trailer.

Yep, same lake, and there is some pretty good fishing for channel but especially flatheads, pretty big ones too I've heard . I've also heard they really like bass jigs along with the usual live baits.

I'd go to Lake of the Ozarks. Most of the big boats should be gone and some of the best fishing I've experienced out there has been in October. Never personally fished Kentucky or Barkley but I imagine they don't have the pro circuit stop out there almost every year for nothing.

Pleasanton West actually has bigger fish I think, I've caught them up to 23" out of that little puddle. East has been one of my favorite little lakes for a few years now. It fishes shallow and there's some nice fish so it's right up my ally. I fished Wabunsee today with Sam (Flash). It was kind of a strange day, we started catching them like they'd never seen a bait, then it slowed down, then it stopped, then we caught them like they'd never seen a bait before again. We both lost a couple good fish, didn't see most of them. Both of us got busted off by a big catfish, about a minute apart. I got the overachiever of the day on a 1/2oz jig, maybe 6". We caught several smallies, Sam and I both had one around this size. I got my buzzbait hung on a limb behind one of the docks and when I went to get it I noticed a good fish sitting right on the bank looking towards the bank. I knew it was waiting for something to hop in the water so I tossed a Senko on the bank and plopped it in the water right in front of her and she was all over it. Pretty skinny and looked like she was blind in both eyes but she was the biggest of the day at 4.16.

Pleasanton East and Mound City are both gravel roads, West lake has a short piece of gravel road, maybe 100 yards. Pleasanton East lake doesn't have bad gravel road and it's only about a mile but the ramps are just barely a step above a gravel ramp. Mound City is miles of rutted, pothole filled dirt road to the lake. Met Peter at Pleasanton East after I got off work. Fished it from about 9-2. It was a little slow, seemed like we got them in little flurries. Nothing real big, my biggest was 3.24lbs and tried to swallow my homemade chatterbait. After making a lap around the lake we decided to head over to Mound City and see if they were biting as good as everyone said they were over there. Started catching them right away and didn't even make it out of the ramp cove before I caught my biggest of the day. It was pretty skinny, probably 20-20.5 inches but only 3.99lbs on a Pit Boss. Wish we would have had more time to fish Mound, we were flirting with catching a big fish from the timber at the south end but had a couple missed opportunities and just ran out of time.

The blisters are probably infections. With the hot water and lack of rain this summer I've seen lots of fish with infections from all the bacteria in the water. The one missing scales probably had a close call with a catfish or blue heron. They are there from what I've heard. There's a local tournament trail that fishes out there and it took 21 pounds to win this year, that's a good weight anywhere. Still I've heard it's almost too much work to be worth it.

As long as the water temp is above about 50 degrees then you have a chance to catch fish on topwater. I've had good luck with floating minnow type baits in cooler water.

Beaver baits are great for heavy brush and weed cover, I like the hogs in more open water or fishing docks but the can be interchanged very easily. If I'm flipping a brush hog into heavy cover I like to tear the front legs off so they don't hang in the cover as bad. Brush hogs style baits are also great on a C-rig.

At times color will make a big difference but you can get through a vast majority of situations with some black and blue and some green pumpkin colored jigs. Personally I do very well with burnt pumpkin (brown,orange,black, and green pumpkin) and okechobee craw colored jigs in the stained waters I normally fish, also in Kansas

At 399th st up in the river? If you're talking about that one I launched my boat from it last Wednesday with no problems. It was a huge waste of time going out there though. No shad in the river anywhere and that means no fish in the river anywhere. Then again when the shad move back with the cooler weather the fish will follow so maybe it is better now.

Probably more than a majority of the members on this site I'd be willing to bet, but then again I wouldn't challenge anyone with 2 pig smallies in their avatar either . You are probably more thorough than anyone else on here if you sharpen every hook you buy. That sounds too much like work to me and would really take some of the fun out of it for me, but I'm a bit lazy about some of the fine details I guess. As for the original post I've used them but didn't notice a big enough difference to be worth the huge difference in price.

I'm a big fan of the standout hook in #6-#2 depending on the size bait I'm planning on using. Owner mosquito hooks will work just fine if I run out of standout hooks though.

I've seen instances when rattles make a HUGE difference, usually in stained to muddy conditions. Still I don't fish them very often unless I really feel like they should be eating my jig better than they are and I just try it to see if it helps. Sometimes I'll add the rattle to the jig or if I'm using a big enough trailer I put a worm rattle in my trailer.