moguy1973

Good luck finding one of those. Blackdog is MIA as of late.

Pihrana?

If you aren't throwing tubes in rivers you'll be missing out.

I'd bet 99% of fishermen will never fish a bass tournament in their lifetime. They do fish for fun, and fishing for smallmouth that fight harder than largemouth do and that's fun in my book. Catching big largemouth can be exciting, but they don't fight very hard. Catching a 2-3lb smallie will feel like a lot bigger fish. All the places that have big largemouth are also warm climate places. People up north hate the cold and their lakes freeze over in the winter so they have to go south to fish, and there aren't many smallies down there where it's warm.

If you are going to try tubes, try rigging them stupid rig style to keep them weedless if you need to have some weight to get them down in current.

I can tell you right now Academy has better prices than most places if they carry the brand you want. Amazon had Power Pro for $24 for a spool. Academy had it for $19.

I think the advantage is more or less being able to keep contact with the bottom while keeping your bait slightly suspended off the bottom. Think of it more as a bottom bouncer like they use for walleye. Drop shot, the section of line the weight is on isn't stiff like the wire used on the Tokyo rig so feeling the bottom is little more accurate with the latter. Plus since it's a little more compact and the weight will swing up behind the bait you can use it to punch through thicker vegetation where a drop shot wouldn't make it through.

I don’t use too many poppers. In fact the only one I own currently is a regular sized Rebel Pop-R and I can usually get a snap in there without having to bend it.

That's usually what happens to the cheap ebay ones I buy. Black and I use them so long they turn silver.

LOL. Malarkey. I've fished for 30+ years and have used snaps and swivels pretty much the whole time and have only had maybe 3 open up on me, and on those I probably should have changed them before I started fishing with them those days. And I don't use the fancy snaps, I use chinese made ebay special duo-lock snaps that I buy by lots of 100 at a time. My line breaks more than the snaps do. I've caught 40" pike and 20lb catfish using #2 snaps without them failing. I'd rather use snaps and carry less rods and have to retie less when I want to change lures. Saves me a lot of time when I'm on the water.

As a kid we took trips to southern Michigan to visit my dad's side of the family. Would catch a lot of bass, yellow perch, bluegill. Around here I would go out with my grandpa on my mom's side and he would take me catfish and crappie fishing a lot. We caught 100's of crappie, and he would clean every single one of them for huge fish frys. Then I slid away from ponds and really got into trout fishing, spinning rod at first and then 100% fly fishing for them. After my mom passed away, who was an amazing trout fisherwoman, who tied her own flies and everything, I got away from trout fishing and headed back into bass and eventually discovered the drug called smallmouth fishing.

Very true

I think I'm at different stages at different times of the year. In the winter when there isn't ice covering the pond I'm at stage 1. I know there are fish out there, just getting them to not be sluggish and bite whatever I'm throwing at them is the goal. Any fish any size will do. When I'm river fishing I'm in stage 2. I like the big ones, but catching as many as I can in the time I'm on the river is my goal. Fighting little smallmouth can be just as fun as catching the big ones sometimes, and having as many on the end of my rod as possible meets that goal. In the summer on the pond I'm in stage 3, looking for that big one that I know is out there because others have caught them and released them back to be caught again. Stage 4 is a weird one for me, I don't use many techniques, and the ones I do produce for me and I'm comfortable with using them because of that. Whenever I try to switch it up with something new and don't have success with them, I'm always back to my tried and true methods. I'm always in stage 5 mode. I have two daughters and a lot of younger nieces and nephews and they are all into fishing and always looking to me for advice on how to catch more fish, be it pan fish, bass, trout, whatever. And I'm always willing to teach them, and most importantly how to fish correctly, using the right knots, and how to use specific lures and whatnot.

Except even Ned Kehde doesn't call it that. He calls it the Midwest Finesse rig.

It's just a way for the lure companies to try to make money. Look at Livingston when Randy Howell won the Classic on Guntersville. He won it with a red Livingston crankbait. Then they came out with one and put his name on it and called it the Howeller Dream Master. Does it catch fish any better than the one without his name on it? Nah. It just catches fishermen.

Mine would have to be forgetting the drain plug. Was out by myself. Put the boat in the water, parked the truck. Got back to the boat and the lake was on had a long no wake zone to get past a wake barrier in front of the marina. Went to full power and the bow rose up like I had the motor fully trimmed out and it wouldn't get up on plane. Shut it down, went to the back and opened the back hatch and found it was full of water. Then I saw my plug laying in the splash well in front of my motor. Luckily my arm was long enough to reach down into the water to put the plug in. Hit the bilge and pumped the water out. Took about 5 minutes or so and all was good with nothing but a wet arm to show for it.

That's for sure to catch some fish-ermen.

This technology is not good in my opinion. Far too detailed, and even though you still have to get the fish to bite, this is too much. Now this technology isn't made for fishing as the unit is pretty big currently, but I'm sure someone has their eye on this to make it compact to fit on a fishing boat.

I really enjoy fly fishing, but I have never fished for anything but trout with it. I would really like to get to the point where fishing for bass with conventional rods is boring and I need something new, but I don't think I'll ever get to that point with the time constraints I have for the foreseeable future. I have a really nice St. Croix 7wt my mom left me that would work great for bass fishing. I may have to try it out next year on the farm pond.

I have only had the chance to fish Stockton once and it was a few years ago during the spawn in a post front situation with high winds and cold temps. We still caught close to 100 small mouth in a couple days, mostly buck bass as we couldn't get our baits down fast enough before the smaller fish would hit it. Most of our luck came in the Little Sac Branch around Masters.

Stockton is the one. State record came from there a while back. Table Rock has a lot of them too but it’s a bigger lake so they can be harder to find.

I’d be contacting them. Looks like the epoxy machine got a little carried away with that one.

Redbreast is where it's at.

When looking at a Navionics map like that in a lake that doesn't have a really well defined creek/river channel they will put a blue line just to show where the channel used to be. Sometimes though they'll actually show the old creek/river banks on the map. If you look at the west arm of Big Creek Lake where Little Creek comes in, they show a double set of dotted lines, that's where the creek used to run and is the channel in that arm. Like said above, Big Creek Lake doesn't have a very noticeable channel anymore in either arm of the lake. If you want to see what a creek or river channel looks like, just scroll south on that map a bit to Saylorville Lake. Down toward the dam end of the lake you can see the channel snaking through the middle of the Lake.

I've had my kayak for 12 years now, never once had the urge to try to stand up in it. I've caught plenty of fish while seated. I've never tipped it over either, although I've had a few close calls when I've misjudged the current near laydowns. I've watched my friend fall out of his 4 times because he's been standing and bumped into a hidden rock or stump while floating down the river.