Bluebasser86

Haven't tried Black Label Tackle, but Black Market Balsa baits are great, although they're pretty spendy. You can fish their squarebills in places you'd fish a spinnerbait without hanging up, at least I can with mine.

So muddy, rapidly dropping, cooling water during a cold front? I'd stay home. If I was going no matter what, I'd have thrown a big bladed spinnerbait, dark colored bladed jig, and flipped a dark colored jig at any visible cover and probably had similar results. Conditions like those are just hard to get bit in. Too many changes happening too fast probably just shut them down completely for a few days until the acclimate.

Welcome from a fellow LEO!

I have the hollow body mice, they're a good walking bait that gets bit good. I have both the plopping suicide duck and the hollow body "fruck". I think the suicide duck was built more with pike in mind but bass with definitely hit them too. I did pretty well with the fruck last year. Savage Gear makes great bait, especially affordably priced swimbaits.

Are they the ploppers or the hollow bodies?

Always keep learning, even if it's just looking at a routine situation from a different perspective. I've been bass fishing for over 2 decades and still regularly learn something new here.

They're pretty fun to sight fish for or during the mulberry hatch if you can find trees that hang over the water. I managed to catch my first fly rod grass carp a couple years ago. They're very wary and have good eyesight so they're hard to get to take a fly, then they fight like crazy so they're hard to land once hooked. I use to sight fish common carp in creeks with small jigs on an ultralight. Most of them were less than 5lbs but even those pulled hard on 4lb test.

Put my biggest bass of the year so far in the boat today on my Assassin. She was a serious puller but it handled it no problem. Was my biggest bass on a KK reel to date as well.

I'd go Tatsu all day. AbrasX is nice, but Tatsu is the best.

Most of my old pre-rap warts have a snap on them. I think it gives them a wider range of motion since they're such a wide wobbling bait.

Pink trick worms on a wacky rig. Pink TRD on a Ned. Electric chicken bladed jig. I use all of them pretty often.

Yep, we're done here. LOCKDOWN!!

I use the Eagle Claw hooks and haven't had one bent even by large catfish but the Gamakatsu Superline hooks is where I'd look if you want another strong option.

Not so much our dogs now, but my last dog, that idiot loved to eat bees and never seemed to get stung somehow.

Every time I read a story about someone "snagging" a big fish,

Just seeing the weatherman's stupid face with his stupid smile telling us how we're going to get more stupid snow, has me feeling some kind of way.

BFL this weekend canceled due to extreme cold. Ice in some of the coves and likely to increase with temps below zero forecast for this weekends overnight temps. SATMAR 2 37° /18° Rain and drizzle in the p.m. Hist. Avg. 52°/30° SUNMAR 3 22° /-2° Snow; colder

My Assassin has been put through everything I could think of and it's still going strong. Over 2 years of year round use and spending a lot of time each winter catching fish that fight way harder than any bass and it's still one of the furthest casting reels I own.

You can get a patent, but how much that really does??? Zman has a copyright on the Chatterbait, there's no chatterbait copies out there right? The changes have to be so minor it seems to get around patents that I honestly don't know if they're worth the paper they're written on anymore. You might be better off trying to sell to a big company and collect royalties per pack sold or something like that.

They aren't listed online, but they're in every story I've ever been in.

There's local forums that have more localized reports. Lots of guys report here and in the local forums.

DST means I get to work 7 hours and get paid for 8 that night ? Of course I get to work through the longest hour of the year each fall too when the clock sets back.

Usually they're just left in my experience. A big part of the reason why the little group I fish with went with the MLF format. I remember once at Grand Lake, OK seeing over a dozen bass dead or dying after a club tournament got done weighing in. I looked at those fish and just thought how terrible of a picture that paints for non-fishermen. Even people who would otherwise have no opinion on tournament fishing could easily be put off by a scene like that. I think that's why more and more we're going to see the weigh and immediate release type tournaments to try to increase fish survival.

I have a 200B on my spinnerbait rod and another on my small swimbait rod, a 100B on one of my jerkbait rods, a 100B Chronarch on my bladed jig rod, and a few more 200B Curados in storage.

You can buy small heat shrink tubing for cheap and just shrink it down and slip it over the eye of the hitchhiker. I do it to my spinnerbait trailer hooks when the original heat shrink gets worn out. I get mine at Harbor Freight.