Bluebasser86

Welcome!

Welcome!

For my Zman baits, I do use the open hooks, but with very thin plastics, this EWG ned works great.

She was way under a dock and moved pretty slow but still managed to jump a couple times. I've had much more intense fights on a Ned for sure.

He's playing. I still think they win pretty convincingly with Love.

Started out pretty bad this morning. Tried to make them react to moving baits, no dice. Once I slowed down and figured out they wanted something on the bottom, it was on. Ned did most of the damage, including big fish of the day, but I caught some on a homemade finesse jig also. Air temp just over 40, water temps were 51-52.

I met A-mart at an Elite Series event at Table Rock several years ago. I was actually talking to Zona and he came up and joined the conversation. He was nice guy and the exact same as he is on TV. I could tell his mind was going warp speed through all the details of the day and what to do the next day. He must have been pretty dialed, because he finished 4th, less than 2lbs from the winner. Sad day for the sport, he will be missed.

Barely in the 40's today while I was on the water, it was lonely out there too. Thankfully I found some good company.

When my wife and I were first dating, the first time we went fishing she brought a probably 20 year old Zebco 33 combo. I tried to tie a little jighead on below a bobber and the line broke when I cinched the knot down. Repeated that the next few times I tried. Cut off about 10' of line, continued to do it. I'm guessing the line was original and just rotted on the reel. Next trip, we were at Table Rock and I'd bought her a new spinning combo and taught her how to use it. Summer time on Table Rock, so it was slow, but as I was idling back into a creek arm looking at my graph, I saw the water boiling off a point. For the next 2 hours, we caught spots, largemouth, and smallmouth almost every cast. That pretty well spoiled her for a while, as she was expecting it to be like that every time we went fishing. Now, if she can fish a Ned rig and get a fairly consistent smallmouth bite, she's pretty happy and will stick with it for several hours.

He's smart and has a nose for the ball, but he's also very undersized and that combined with the fact that he's not as young as he use to be is starting to become a problem I believe. Still, with Frank Clark and Anthony Hitchens both on the team, he's far from the worst cost/performance player. Hitchens with a PFF score of 35 and a cap hit of 10.5 million to be one of the worst starting LBs in the league, Clark at 58.8 and the highest cap hit on the team at almost 26 million. Mathieu is overpaid for his performance, but at least he's done something notable in a couple games this year. I still hope they let him walk this offseason. Time to let Thornhill take the reigns and bring in another serviceable vet and draft a rookie to take their place in a year or two.

I've seen some varied reports from Stockton. The most common theme seems to keep a moving bait in your hand and cover water to try and put your bait in front of as many fish as possible.

I've caught a lot of pond bass when the water is cold and muddy that look like that. Probably has something to do with their diet also.

I swap mine to Owner ST36s. I hate the outbarb design of the Katsuage hooks.

A 1/16 or 1/8oz Warden's Roostertail is one of the deadliest tiny bass catchers out there.

Looks like a bass that came out of cold, muddy water to me.

Fish infected with LMBV almost take on a zombie-like state, swimming and existing aimlessly and appearing to be decomposing in the process, it's a sad thing to witness.

My dad loves UL fishing, so I grew up fishing a majority of the time with an UL. Caught many big fish with it, lost some big ones because of it. Fished a semi-private lake a lot as a kid and an old man that fished frequently was a super finesse fisherman. He fished almost only with tiny grubs and crappie jigs on UL gear and 2lb test, but targeted bass. I fished with him several times and learned how enticing those tiny baits could be and how well that light line could present those little baits. I had the privilege of fishing with one of Ned's MWF buddies, one of the benefits of living 30 minutes from Ned I guess. I talked with him a lot via email, but only got to fish with him once. He was probably in his 70's at this point, and never before or since have I been outfished so badly from the back of my own boat, easily 10-1. I had the big fish of the day, but it did little to heal my pride from the straight up and down butt whooping I'd taken on the water. I'd say the combination of those 3 people influenced me the most in my finesse fishing.

Before I had a boat capable of fishing the power plant lakes, I use to do it when the ice got thick enough. Oddly enough, my dad called me tonight because he found my old tipup and asked if I still wanted it.

I hold it with just my pinky behind the reel stem, even with my UL and 500/750 sized reels. Shouldn't need to have your finger on the line to feel the bite with an UL rod but I can lay it over my finger if I needed to.

Get an Old Town and save yourself some money AND get all the features you're looking for ?

So it's exactly like everything else in fishing, it depends on the situation. Fishing those big, thumping blades is one of my favorite bites of the year though, they about take the rod away from you.

There's a couple power lines on the lakes I fish that are loaded with lures. They're not important enough for me to risk my life to retrieve though.

It's been in several lakes around here. The lake nearest my house had it bad. Wasn't worth fishing for a few years. It effects mostly the larger fish but it doesn't kill all of them. What eventually happens is the survivors that are resistant to the disease spawn and produce resistant fry and the fishing remains down until those fish can repopulate the lake. Don't know if it will hit lakes that huge as hard as it did the densely populated 100 acre lake I'm talking about, but that one came roaring back and now is one of the more popular lakes in the area and back to producing 5-6 pound fish regularly again.

I'm beginning to think color matters more with frogs than we'd like to think. Maybe not subtle differences, but I got it handed to me by my buddy once while I was fishing an all white frog and he was fishing a Booyah Cricket frog, which is a white belly with brown/tan sides and back. Maybe because we fish more open water pockets between grass than we do mats here where we're walking the frog a lot so it has a chance to roll and show the sides more.

The firetiger one is a Berkley Frenzy Diver.