Hyrule Bass

yeah i hear briery is managed as a big fish lake by the state

on the flip side, ive never had a problem using frogs and mono. i just feel that the rod will bend and flex more before i can set a hook hard enough to actually stretch the mono.

nice trip to MN, mustve been fun. but youre telling me there is a world record bass in VA?

id probably go for the package people have mentioned that will give you the outdoor and sportsman channels. every saturday and sunday morning its all fishing shows and some in the afternoon too. evenings are mostly hunting it seems. you will just have to try them, if you dont like them, cancel the package. you probably already have NBC Sports though. regardless of what channels, most of the fishing shows are going to be during the morning/daytime on weekdays and weekends. i know one of them dedicates friday nights to fishing as well. just look on your channel guide if time warner has that and shows the channels you dont pay for, and get a feel for when everything comes on...

the hook will probably already be set before you get the amount of pressure needed to stretch the mono, stretch is not as big as a deal as you might think

live bait like night crawlers or minnows will be the quickest way to see if there are fish in there. or you could spend hours possibly casting a lure into dead water that isnt holding any fish...

nice fish, ive dreamed about one atleast the size for awhile now. several years ago, i was fishing with nightcrawlers for whatever i could catch. using a little zebco 33. i hooked into a flathead bigger than the one in your picture. it ate my nightcrawler on the fall and just sat there, i set the hook and it didnt move, i knew it was on. i kept telling my brother in law "this is it, this is it, i got a monster" well the fish swam right towards me, i was cranking that 33 fast as i could. i was sitting in the back of my uncles boat, it was on the lift, but it gave me better access to the water than the dock did in this cove. the fish swam under the boat and i just knew my 33 rod would snap in two as small as it is, it was bent past a U shape. i pulled it out from under the boat, it swam up and surfaced to my left in front of the dock and started rolling on top of the water. it was a huge flathead, it snapped my line while rolling and it was gone. ever since then ive been on the hunt for a catfish of great size. and ever since then all i seem to catch is mainly 18 inch 3lb channel cats no matter the bait. and i literally mean a ton of them that were exactly 18 inches and 3lbs, i dont even bother to measure or weight or photo them anymore lol. but that huge flathead i hooked is part of the reason i catfish as much as i bass fish...

heres what i would try. at night, get a flood light and hook up to the dock and plug it in shining on the water off the end of the dock. i use this for a light: http://www.homedepot.com/catalog/productImages/300/42/4293c45c-7098-4ffa-8e91-6f3a543fa771_300.jpg if the bait is there like you say, it will congregate under the light where its shining in the water. get a cast net and you can get all the fresh live bait you want, whether it be alewives or shad thats there. if youve never thrown a cast net for bait, its going to take some practice. youll wish you had a 3rd hand to throw it with...

i thought i saw one posted on here bigger than that a few years ago...

i drove over the shenandoah everyday to and from work on route 9 near the VA/WV border, but havent had time or taken the time to fish it this year...

cant think of a specific example of this. but one time i was having a tough time fishing a pond, hadnt caught a fish in the two hours i was there. went to my old reliable berkley red shad shakey worm, t-rigged. was tossing it around with no luck either. as i was starting to lose interest i was thinking a few more casts and ill go. next i proceeded to make an errant cast, it was in the water but not where i wanted. so i start burning it back in. as im getting near the bank i see a streak shooting the water 100mph toward me. i quickly kill my bait which stops right at the edge of the bank in the water. this bass comes into less than a foot of water and goes absolutely bananas on the worm when it strikes, it was real vicious looking to me. i set the hook, a couple handle cranks and i swing the bass on shore. unhook it, release it and called it a day...i believed i could catch a fish on that bait, just not the way it happened... then there was the time i was also losing interest so i tied on a crickhopper to catch some of the nice bluegill in the same pond as above. i cast out and start my retrieve, looking out at the highway and the farm across the street in kind of a lull i feel a tug on my line, look back and its a small bluegill on my crickhopper. being lazy i was letting it jerk around hoping it would free itself. this is in shallow very clear water right near the bank. as im watching the bluegill, this bass shoots out from under an algae patch and crushes this bluegill and goes into a tail walk twice. the bass starts to head for deeper water, feeling the the tension of my line which wasnt out very far to begin with, it circles back towards shore, dives out of the water like superman straight towards me. im wanting to catch this bass but dont see how im gonna do it since my lure is hooked into a bluegill. so as this bass is flying towards me through the air, i can see clearly in its mouth. the bluegill was halfway down the basses throat tail first. all while in mid air i decided to yank like a hookset. when i do this i see the bluegill go down the basses throat completely and one of the small trebles on my crickhopper catches the bass in the top lip and reel her in. she was 19 inches and 4lbs. i got my wish of not having to unhook that bluegill and instead got to unhook a nice bass...if i had blinked i wouldve missed it all, it happened so fast...this is when i learned i could use small bluegill to catch nice bass...

Im not sure what time warner offers as i have directv, but NBC Sports which used to be Versus shows fishing shows. Then you have the Outdoor Channel, Sportsman Channel, and Pursuit Channel which all show fishing shows, but they also show hunting shows. In the fall and winter you wont see many fishing shows at all, mostly just hunting, then come january or february most of the fishing shows start coming back on. directv doesnt offer WFN, but thats of no concern to you with time warner. just listing known channels that have fishing shows on them, but they will also show hunting too...

i lost my dad when i was 17 years old, 17 years ago this past april. i still miss him till this day. sometimes i will think about him while riding down the road in the car or something and just start tearing up and cry a little. he was an alcoholic and got cirrhosis of the liver. i think he pushed us(me, my mom, and sisters) away so we didnt have to watch him go through it. my mom moved us to VA, but me and my sister went and saw him every month almost in NC. i hated to see him all swollen up like that. i remember going to NC and visiting him in Duke hospital the same weekend as my tribes pow-wow. returned home sunday night to VA and went to school monday morning. got called out of class to the office for an early release, my mom was there to pick me up, my grandfather had called and my dad passed away that morning and back to NC i went. It was one of the toughest funerals i ever been to, but a lot of my friends showed up and that helped to support me. i used to visit his gravesite everytime i went to NC, but i havent done that in awhile now. i feel like its a pain inside of you that never lets go, but also one that you learn to cope with and it doesnt affect your every day mentality. i have some good memories that i dwell on from time to time. one is the only time me and him went fishing with just the two of us, yeah it only happened once ever, when i was about 7-8 years old. we had many family fishing trips, but it had never been just us. we used to go to this nature center in great falls and park. walk down a trail in the woods and come to a pond, make a right and walk down a different trail that ended up paralleling the potomac river. we must of timed it just right because we brung home a stringer full of bass. just cast your night crawler out, let it drift down river and when it got under a certain tree limb overhanging the water you just start to reel back in and you would have a bass most every cast that day it seemed. then there was the 1991 football season. this was the year i truely got into watching football and my dad taught me a lot about the game and the rules. every sunday we would sit together and watch the redskins play, cheering and yelling at the tv. turns out that would be a season in which the redskins went on to win the superbowl. i always guess there was just something about that season that it was destiny for us to watch every game together and for our team to win it all. we never ended up watching a whole season together like that again. i could go on and on, but well, ill just end it here...

also, if you want to use artificial. some of the popular baits i hear about, atleast for SML, are thundersticks and pearl white flukes on plain jig heads...

thats one awesome looking catfish

stripers like to school up a lot. when there is bait around you will see the water "boiling" on top from them feeding. ive caught two stripers off a dock where i fish at Smith Mtn Lake. both were while catfishing at night). one on a chicken liver and one on a piece of white perch cut bait. both were mid-april when the stripers are going through their spawn phase, though they cant successfully spawn there. they were also following in spawning alewives to feed on them at night. both times i had a dock light shining in the water that attracted hundreds of alewives.

if they are indeed flatheads, your best bet is going to be live bait. a live bluegill might be your best bet, and will potentially catch you some large bass as well. or try something like a nightcrawler or shrimp like the guy suggested. he told you how to catch them, you did something different. your description of the splashing and fin out of the water does sound like that was carp you were seeing. but then again, the guy told you catfish, and you claim to have seen what appears to be flathead catfish, so ill assume its flathead youre trying to catch now. i believe Florida considers flatheads to be an invasive species. try what the guy told you to use to catch them, thats local direct firsthand knowledge of the pond. if you insist on trying to catch flatheads on artificial, your best bet might be a spoon...

it might help to name your price range, some people might have some suggestions...

based on what youve described in other threads, i would make the switch. okuma makes a popular bait runner too. or you could check out casting reels with bait clickers

1/2 freezing dont really work. certain spots will just split when you put the hook in it. plus its just going to unthaw when it hits the water and it will unthaw in the container while fishing...i was using elastic thread for awhile, but then i lost my roll of it. now i have these small stretchy hair things, i just stretch one out over the liver on the hook and it works well so far.

if its legal in your state it should work. live snakes will work too if you aint afraid to catch them and hook them...

it appears he wanted an all around reel but didnt ask the right questions to start with. he also stated he is fishing off a dock in the boston harbor. i doubt he is just putting on bait and dropping it straight down off the dock, might be different out on a boat. i didnt want to bust anyones bubble either, but i dont think the reel he got is ideal for the fishing he is doing if he needs to cast his bait out any...i think another reel would suit him much better, unless im just picturing this whole thing wrong. the chesapeake bay striper i posted in other species was caught trolling using a tekota, its a fine reel, but is it really ideal for fishing off a dock when it isnt ideal for casting?

shrimp will work. and the same as powerduster above says, i get the cheap frozen uncooked ones from walmart. for worms, i use regular old night crawlers...chicken livers will work too...

i have directv so no WFN. if you email them and ask why they dont have it or if they would consider adding it, they say there is not enough support for it and want you to help gain support in your area for it and stuff like that....

i say just keep doing what you been doing the best you can. without good eyesight, your feeling of the fish is of utmost importance. if you can feel your bait stop falling but are sure its not on the bottom yet, you may have a fish that picked your bait off on the fall...