smalljaw67

Yeah, they are alder but not really old, there is a Yum Dancin' eel, and some Rebel minnows along with some bomber cranks with the oldest being the Hellbender. The HellBender I'd keep in the box because it is the old style box.

Well I hope they don't, I love the 1 knockers and the square bills but one thing I wish is that they would bring back the XT3, in fact they shouldn't have discontinued that bait at all. Maybe they do a YUM and discontinue everything and introduce a new line of stuff or maybe they just don't have any baits, who know but it will be a shame as I too, enjoyed a lot of their stuff and I have a bunch of square bills, one knockers and jerkbaits that get used a lot.

Once they start hitting topwater and in my area it is either late May to early June. From then until mid fall when the water temps drop below 58 degrees, sounds like a strange number but that is the lowest temperature that I've drawn a topwater strike and that was on a wake bait but consistent topwater strikes usually die off here when the water temp is in the low 60s.

Don't base your fishing off what the pros are doing, do what works for you. If you watch tournaments enough you'll notice it is a copy cat game and you often see tournaments where the one guy who if flipping wins the event and everyone else was fishing deep water, and vice-versa. I only use braid for heavy flipping and I don't use fluorocarbon at all and everyone uses fluorocarbon but I don't and I feel my fishing doesn't suffer because of it, if braid works for you then don't worry about what those guys are doing, I'll bet they see what the leader is doing and they copy cat as well, follow your instincts.

The Accurist is in the line of $100 casting reels that are pretty good, the Lews Speed Spool is in that category as well but for all the grief that that Quantum gets, the Accurist is one reel that was a solid work horse reel.

If you search this site you'll find a review of the line, it is Berkley Trilene XL Armor coated, not XT. I've used it in 6lb test and it was a great line, I was very impressed with it. I will tell you that the strength was excellent but it was probably due to the fact the diameter is larger per pound test because of the coating. The coating had no impact on the handling of the line, XL handles great but it also has a little more stretch than I like and the abrasion resistance isn't good, not so with the armor coated line. It handles extremely well and the abrasion resistance is as good as, if not better than XT, very good line and I got some in 8lb to try this season. If you search this forum for Berkley Trilene XL Armor Coated Line review, you will find a more detailed review that I did last year.

I have used the Sebile Magic Swimmer along with the Storm Kickin' Stick and the Storm Swimmin' Stick and I put those in the same category as the bait you just purchased. I didn't have any luck with these when I first got them, I could not figure out why I wasn't catching anything, they looked awesome in the water. Well I put them away and figured I'd never use them but then I read an article about using a magic swimmer at times when a jerkbait would work, so I began treating these as jerkbaits and I began having success. After I caught some fish I was able to put some things together and I'll share that with you. The first thing is water clarity, I was able to catch fish in stained water as well as clear but the best fishing was 3'+ of visibility, the worst fishing was less than a foot of visibility. The second is water temperature, I use suspending jerkbaits until we hit the "sweet spot" 55 degrees up to 62 or just before the fish go on beds, I found that 58 degrees seems to be when the most fish have been caught but the largest was caught at 56 degrees. The thing that worked was a slow steady retrieve, and during that retrieve if I didn't get a strike by the half way point in my retrieve I would give the rod a little jerk and quickly throw slack in my line, it would cause the bait to suddenly lunge forward and if you throw slack in your line just right, the bait will turn sideways, some will do almost a 180 but sideways is good enough. That quick movement with the change in direction has caused the majority of my strikes, I didn't even know a fish was tracking it and I'd give it that little pop and then slack and WHAM!!!! I can't tell you about the bait you have as I never used it but I did see it and the tactics I laid out should work well with that particular bait.

Bluegill, shad, and craw along with a high visibility color like chartreuse/black back and red craw or some variant of that.

I love my DT series and X-Raps but I find myself using my Bagley Balsa B2 more and more and I got some new plastic rattling Killer B2s to try this season. The newer Bagley baits like the Balsa Shad and Sunny B are made with through wire construction now, so you get a balsa bait that is super durable. I think the new owners of Bagley are getting thing right, the rattling killer B2s I got are really nice, and with oval split rings but they are a little higher in price but the durability is better.

Ok, here is how I break down which hook to use and which one does what, they all have a reason and purpose. EWG or extra wide gap, these became popular because of creature baits, with an oversize gap the hook has more hook point coming through the plastic which means better penetration, use on beavers or worms that are thick. The round bend hook is the original worm hook, I use these a lot on T-rigged and split shot rigged finesse worms as they have plenty of bite and have a smaller profile which helps when coming through cover. The sproat and O'Shaughnessy bend, these are what use to be popular on spinnerbaits and buzzbaits before larger round bends became the norm. I'll be honest in that I have a finesse buzzbait that I use and it is cheap but it uses a Laser sharp hook with the O'Shaughnessy bend, it is a 1/4oz Luck-E-Strike buzzbait you find in walmart and are sold in a kit. What I like is the holding ability, once you hook a fish with a hook using an O'Shaughnessy bend, they rarely come off but I don't like them any larger than a 2/0 because that bend also hampers hook up and the smaller hooks penetrate better with less force. I will also say that I make a copy of the Eakins jig, and I like using a Mustad 32893 which has a sproat bend, similar to an O'Shaughnessy but a little more open, the same sproat bend hook was used in the original Eakins jig because of the holding ability of that type of hook and the more open bite of a sproat made it great for a thin trailer like a craw worm. So the last one is one you don't need to worry about but use the wide gap on thicker plastics and use the round bend on normal thickness or thin worms.

The river I fish doesn't have pike but we have a lot of large muskies and I tried a wire leader for 5 casts, it ruined the action on my bait. I will say this, I catch a lot of smallmouth on Rogues and other jerkbaits and I never have a musky hit but when I tie on a LC Pointer 100, I can bet dollars to donuts that in the next 15 to 20 casts I'll have a musky hit. Sometimes it is just a pencil (small 18" 20" musky) and you get those no problem but a lot of times it is the 40"+ monsters and you know after the 3rd run that your line is going to give and it usually does. My friend got a 42" musky on a clown colored super rogue jr. while throwing it on a medium power spinning rod, and 8lb mono, the fish slammed it and then turned and the bait had him in the only place it wasn't going to bite him off, in the corner of the mouth with the front hook stuck on the gill plate, what luck. I've also caught thousands of pickerel and have never been bit off with a hard bait, with worms, yes, but not with jerkbaits.

You can usually get an idea of depth based on the size of the lip on the bait. My Friend has small cards like you find on top of a Rapala box and he writes the depth down and puts it in the slot with his crankbait. I do things different, I put shallow cranks in their own box, and in the box I separate the ones that run less than 3', they go on the left side, and the ones that run 3' to 5' go on the right side. Then my medium divers are the same way, and these are all 3700 series boxes, my medium divers are 6' to 12' and the ones that dive 6' to 8' go on the left and 9' to 12' go on the right, if you organize like that it will take the guess work out and it really helps when you have a lot of baits.

I don't fish the magnum super fluke but I do occasionally throw the 6" Slug-O and for that I use the Owner twist lock light in a 5/0, but they also make it in a 6/0 that would work with the magnum. I know a lot of guys look at me and tell me I should use a heavier hook like the beast hook but if I'm in sparse cover, I can set that hook with 6lb line if I needed to but it is stout enough for 12lb to 14lb line but it is a light wire but strong, I have yet to have a smallmouth bend it.

If you call the 800 number for customer service you can ask them if your local store has it in stock. My local store is severely understaffed and you can't always get someone to answer a phone so I called customer service to see if there was another way to find out and they told me anytime you want to know if your local store has something in their inventory all you have to do is call the 800 number and they can tell you.

Crankbait running depth is based off of it running on 10lb monofilament. Of course different brands will have different diameters and it can cause the bait to go deeper or shallower but the number is just an estimate. I always go off the first number, if something has a wide range like the Rapala DT Thug, 4' to 8', I'm using the number 4 and when I throw that bait it is usually in the 3.5' to 4.5' zone and it will hit bottom.

To me that is 2 rods, topwaters and wake baits with trebles is going to require a more moderate action, especially with braid, and a frog rod, in slop is going to need to be a little stiffer. I use braid for heavy flipping and frogs only and the rod I use for frogs will not work with a wake bait or topwater no matter what kind of line I put on. Moderate rods are used for punching but that is a vertical presentation, trying to set the hook when a bass blows up on a frog at distance with a moderate fast rod is going to be challenging to say the least, but I'm not really sure how that would work.

I use to use a 5.1:1 but todays reels are smooth with better gears and bearings do a 6.4:1 is ok for deep diving baits, especially with the long rods there are now. The low gear ratios were used a lot when the long rod was 6'6" to 7', and even when 7'3 to 7'6" rods became common, the 5.1:1 was still good but more and more anglers found that with the longer rods and better reels, a faster reel could work with a big crank just as good as the slower reel.

The MH-F is too stiff in my book for hard jerkbaits and topwaters, now a medium power yes but not medium heavy.

My Cabelas has it listed at $74 but read the red banner, "while supplies last" and it begins at 8am, well I was at my local Cabelas to pick up the Supreme I ordered because they didn't have one at the local store or the XT. I called customer service when I saw that flyer yesterday and I asked if the item isn't in the stores inventory can I get a rain check and I was told no, it is for store stock only and they actually checked to see if my store had any and the confirmed my earlier assessment, the store didn't have any in stock. Now, if I would have drove down to the store at 7am to make sure I could get to the fishing department on time and they didn't have it in stock, I would be pretty angry to put it mildly. Check store availability before making that same error.

For me, $250 is where I draw the line at, the amount of smoothness you gain or performance isn't worth the extra money, at least to me. Even though I draw the line at $250 I rather enjoy the $150 to $200 range a lot more and I'll explain why. I got a great deal on the 2 Smoke reels I have and the Tournament Pro I got before the price hike and all of them are less than my 2 generation Revo Premier and to be honest, I enjoy them all equally. I got Pflueger Supreme XT casting reel, it has got to be one of the nicest $150 reels I've used, now it isn't as refined as a Shimano Metanium or even the Core but it is light, and the performance isn't much different than a reel costing twice that price. Some will get mad at that statement but I've owned high end gear and what I've noticed is that the added performance difference between a good, solid $150 work horse reel and a high end $300+ doesn't amount to double, in fact the performance gains are rather small. The difference is in the build, the refinement, the attention to detail, and while the performance isn't night and day noticeable, the refinement is, if you can say a work horse is a smooth as a high end reel, not even close, I could not believe how smooth the Steez was when I picked it up. The tolerances are good on a work horse reel but when you grab that high end reel it just has a feel to it that once you get use to it, anything less feels like crap and that right there is why I draw the line at $250, because once I go high, I can't really justify the price but it is very, very hard to go back down the line because the feel of a high end reel is something you just can't get in a work horse type reel.

Catching fish on a hard jerkbait is almost as fun as topwater for me and you'll like it too once you understand it. You already got good information and if you have smallmouths in the water you fish, well you'll like it that much more. You get 3 kinds of stikes with a jerkbait, the first is what I call the "Oh look, a fish" bite, that is when you give the bait a few jerks and let it sit and when you go to jerk the next time instead of the lure moving you rod instantly loads up and you already set the hook without knowing a fish was on it. The next one is the "sneaky Pete" bite, this is when you get a bite on the pause, you finish the cadence, jerk-jerk-jerk and pause, and after 3 seconds your line just moves off and the rod loads as if the fish is trying to sneak off with the lure. The 3rd type of bite is the "rip the rod from your hands" bite and I find when one hits like that, most of the other will follow suit and you'll have a most fun day. This bite will happen the very second you stop the bait most of the time, but it will also occur in between jerks and it is the bite that usually catches you off guard. You begin fishing and you have been at it for about a dozen casts or so and you get into the cast and retrieve lull and that is when it happens and if you aren't careful and you let your guard down and loosen the grip you have on the rod, it may end up pulled right from your hands!!! Go get a few different kind and have at it, you can catch them on the jerkbait 3 to 5 days after ice out but I find 43 degrees is the magic temperature for smallmouth and 50 degrees is the magic temp for largemouth, and all the means is when they really smash the bait but you'll get them is lower water temps, just long pauses.

French Pearl and pro blue.

I will not use them if I have less than 2' of visibility, and it isn't because they won't work but you will do better with other baits. You can catch them on a jerkbait that makes noise but in cold water it is hard because the fish will not actively chase, it is the pause that becomes important. That said, if your bait ends up close enough it will work but more often than not, there is a better lure for your situation. I have a log book and I can go and look at all the times I've caught fish on a jerkbait, I have the water clarity listed and you can actually see the catch rate go down with water clarity, 2' was the water clarity where I still caught a good number of fish but it was less than 3' and a good bit less than gin clear. I'd say if your water is like that all the time and you have 1' of visibility then try it but if you are talking inches of visibility then go with something else. Another reason is the fish will move shallower in that dirty water and they will be close to the bottom so a jig can work as well as a lipless crank.

Spinnerbait, close quarter jigs, Texas rigs, chatterbaits, and anything a 7' rod will do but a little less casting distance. The 6'6" MH-F is a must have rod for me as I target cast spinnerbaits meaning I seldom fish them in open water that long distance casts would be needed. I think the MH power with a fast action would be a little too stiff for jerkbaits and topwaters but the single hook presentation will all work well.

I just purchased the old MGX model at Cabela's, the one in the link you posted. I got the size 30 and I will tell you this, at retail it is a good reel, at that price is is a fantastic deal, and 3 weeks ago I got it for $59.99 and it was an absolute steal!! It has a sealed drag system which is a big deal to me but is still a nice feature even if you don't care about it. I also like the sure click bail they use, I'm not a big fan of spending a lot of money on spinning reels but I like to get ones that are at least $100 as they are normally worth replacing parts if something goes bad. Anyway, I'm really impressed with this reel at the price point, magnesium body and rotor with aluminum side covers, spare aluminum spool and carry bag, plus it has one more bearing than the new one but still has the same gear ratio and weight, 7.5oz for the size 30. If I had the cash I would have got another one, maybe even 2 more but if they go back on sale like that again I'm going to grab at least one more.