Bluebasser86

Topwater can be great this time of year.

Welcome!

Much better week this week than last. The cooler nights are finally starting to get them moving a bit a seems. Not great, but much better. Had a couple nice ones and a bunch of solid fish.

I have a bat, and yesterday I won a Joker in a raffle ?

That's the "blue" from my screen name.

It's frustrating. IMO, game fish shouldn't be legal to keep unless caught by rod and reel, but Kansas has very lax restrictions, especially when it comes to bass. You can keep 6 over 18" from the lake those fish came from, and I've seen buckets of big bass caught on live shad getting taken home. You can even use bass for live bait here as long as it's a keeper sized fish and you count it towards your daily limit.

DD's are very rare in KS, but I know of 2 that got filleted and eaten this past winter from the same lake that were caught on limblines baited with sunfish and shad meant for catfish. To a lot of people, a big bass is just another fish.

Pretty much a fan cast, for covering stuff like points, submerged grass flats or trees, along the edges of docks, around shallow shelves, bluff walls. I fish them in most any conditions, but they don't work well if there's too much wind.

Going to guess something in the digestive tract was punctured.

It's move of a covering water retrieve for me. You can do it slowly along the edge of cover if you'd like, but I prefer a popper for fishing specific targets like that because they're easier to move slowly.

No doubt, both of them can be really ugly, but smallmouth are way prettier fish on average IMO.

Welcome! Check out the local forums, southeast region, lots of Florida anglers there.

Yes, it's a WTD bait, pretty similar to a Lucky Craft Sammy actually.

It fishes a 78 pointer very well.

I don't know that I'd call it a "gimmick", as fish do certainly eat bats in the rare occurrence they come in contact with them, but I look at it as another crawler that just happens to look like a bat. No way do I believe a fish sees it and gets excited because it's going to get to eat a bat.

I've caught some nice fish on the H2O, never fished the other.

A 19" fish with a good belly around here goes anywhere from 3.75-4.50 and that fish looks to fall somewhere in that range.

Welcome! A fish with those measurements would go 6 pounds very easily, and probably bigger. For reference, I caught one a few years ago that was just over 22" long and 17" around that weighed 7.76 pounds.

That's Brian's 12.2. I'm with Kansas Angling Experience as one of his Co-Guides. Same lake I caught my 9.1 from.

My big one was on a Lucky Craft Flash Pointer 127 on a 6' 10" MH/F Ethos rod and Okuma Helios reel spooled with 12lb Seaguar flourocarbon. My 9lb 1oz wiper was on a jerkbait, and so was that 12.2lb wiper.

I fish by myself a lot because I don't have weekends off. I target bass a majority of the time, but wiper are more fun to catch when they're biting, they can sure turn off and be impossible to catch sometimes though. I'd say Illinois/Indiana has bigger ones, but I'm not sure they have the population. Kansas stocks lots of wipers so there's tons of them. 4-8 pounds is pretty much the normal size range of what we have, but fish over 10 aren't real uncommon if you fish for them. This video is mostly a wiper video from Olathe. The biggest one I know of personally caught on video from Kansas was 12.2 but I can't post it because of language in the video. I do have video of my 11.2 I caught back in April though.

I fished Perry last week. Nothing to report on the fishing, but a PSA for anyone that is planning on fishing out there anytime soon. I was the only truck in the lot at the state park ramp and there was only 2 others when I called it a day. I left my windows slightly cracked because it was hot out. When I got back, there were greasy forearm prints on the driver's side window and matching palm prints and finger prints on the inside of the window. Not sure if they were trying to force my window down or maybe fish the door open, but it made me real glad that I did my usual check to make sure they weren't open far enough for me to get my hands through the gap. Nothing was missing or disturbed that I could see, but just the fact someone either tried or just was looking in my truck had me hot for the whole drive home. Thought about driving my truck to work and seeing if they wanted to lift the prints, would have been really easy for them, but didn't bother since there wasn't really any crime committed.

My Ned rod (that is labeled as a DS rod), is a 6' 10" ML/XF, paired with a Pfluegar Supreme XT that's loaded with 10lb KastKing Super Power braid. My DS rod is a 7' 3" ML/F, paired with a 25 size Okuma RTX, spooled with the same line.

I use mine exclusively for jerkbaits. It's the 6' 3" M/MF, a really sweet rod for smaller jerks.