mrmacwvu1

sorry for your loss

very effecive bait for river smallies

My brother has a rooster tail spinner he uses when he is trout fishing he calls cockslayer.

when the weather is nice i always recommend to take a friend with you onto the lake and practice getting back into your boat in case you would ever fall in. when someone is there to help you, you will not panic and you can practice. on bigger boats people need to practice standing on the motor and using the trim to raise themselves out of the water.

One thing that I try to teach people to do is keep a log of what you did on the lake that you were fishing. I try to include tempature both water and air, cloud cover vs sunny or raining, time of day, lures I used, methods of retrieve, barametric pressure, boat positioning, and any other minute detail that i can think of. I then try to log them and study them before I can on my next outing. If I find something that is working and the conditions are similar then I have a memory bank to fall back on. Another thing is though is do not get stuck on just one bait on a pattern. If you are in the zone and the fish are on that is the time to start throwing baits that you have no confidence in. Start experminting and you just might find something that will blow your mind. I did this on Erie and now one of my go to tactics is yo yoing white spinnerbaits. Deadly for smallies at times. That i and rediscovered fishing a spoon.

until you have been on Erie and catch one over 6 pounds it can't be explained

one more vote for cabin creek

lol

woodford reserve is my go to anymore

I did this a couple years ago on Lake Erie. It was one of those days to where I was getting bit on everything I threw. So my father-in-law and I just started throwing random baits and trying new stategys. Anyway I started Yo yoing a white spinnerbait and I killed them. Now it is one of my favorite ways to fish for smallies up there.

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gander mountain in Charleston WV

in a few weeks. I will be fishing the middle of the basin. Fairport to be exact. I was wondering if the jerkbait bite was on strong. If anyone has any info let me know thanks in advance.

Live in West Virginia but fish Ohio and KY. Know enough to catch some fish have a john boat for small lakes or rivers. I will buy the first round at the bar after we are done fishing. Is this a better way to ask then the previous poster.

thanks that was what I was thinking. I will have to call my father-in-law and see what the temps are. I just do not have the room to drag all of my tackle with me. He fishes fast anyway so that eliminates tubes and jigs. I will try some swim baits and cranks and jerkbaits. I will have a senko on as well for when he gets a bird nest because he refuses to tighten his drag and tries throwing into twenty mile an hour winds.

i will be heading up in two weeks. Do you still think the jerkbait bite will be on? I will be fishing more toward the eastern portion of the lake. Not as many smallies but just as big. Thanks in advance.

wait about another week or so or whenever the water warms up just a few more degrees and the x raps will end up being a go to bait it is a slash bait not a jerk bait

roadwarrior usually has a post that talks about fan casting senkos that is a great place to start not sure how to find it but maybe someone that knows more then I can find it for you

The first time that I went fishing on lake Erie I was hung over. I had been deep sea fishing many times and never got sea sick. However I always took medicine the night before so I was fine. Well I did not know how far out we were going out to perch fish. Needless to say the ways kicked up and they issued a small craft advisory. I turned gree. I do not think that I have ever felt that bad before. It was somewhere between the drunken college days hugging the toilet lying to God that you will never drink again and the the worst case of food poisoning ever. I will never make that mistake again. The dick move is that my father-in-law took his medicine and did not think to tell me.

blaze minnow if is similar to the original floating rapala but with better action river smallies kill it i bought 20 of them just to keep as extras

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absolutly the rapala can be fished in many different applications. It can be twitched on top, used like a jerkbait, or use it on a steady retrieve. Silver and Black seem to work the best for me.

whatever they are fishing on tv too many people are struck by lightning

As far as colors go i like to look at what the bass are actually eating. In the spring i will try to see what the bass are feeding on. A quick trick to do this if you do not want walk around the banks is anytime you catch a bass put it in a live-well for all that you catch at the end of the day release the fish and see if they puked anything up in the live-well. I have found crawfish, minows and a dead baby duck this way. Also anything that looks like live bait, such as worms salamanders crawfish ect. I smallie fish alot and I trie to match the color of my soft plastics to what color the crayfish are. If I am on Erie i trie to mimic goby colors and what ever the size and color the baitfish are. Another thing that I recommend to all fishermen are to keep a log. In mine I try to keep the day, time, water tempature, outside tempature, barrometric pressure, wind, water clarity and whether it is cloudy or sunny out. I do this for everytime I fish. I then write down not only my successes but my failures as well including lure including size colors hooks and any modifications that I have made to the lures, presentation, line rod,reel, time spent doing it and structure and cover I was fishing. I know this seems like alot of work but it gives you knowlege for the future so years down the road you can look up what the conditions were in the past when and where you had success. Also it provides you with failures so you are not doing the same thing over and over again with no success. I actuall got tired of writing this down and had my wife make me table on the computer to put all of my info down on and organize it. I hope this helps some.

read mike iconelie's article on spoons in the article section of this site great read and I use similar techniques in the winter