scaleface

I like short shank hooks for the sassy shads . I just bend crappie hooks to have a bigger bite and shorten the hook . I ordered some Short shank from D.O.A. They arrived a week or two ago but the wife said I cant open them until today , Christmas . LOL Shes catching on .

I fish below Mississippi river dams and smaller dams . I generally use inexpensive sinking lures because lots of baits get lost . Jig and Grubs are used the most . I catch largemouths , smallmoutsh , whites , hybrids , walleye sauger , cats , crappie , drum and even snag giant carp .

I use to use the small Diving b a lot . Nice tight action . I broke or lost all of them . I still have a few of the larger size . I never caught much on those .

When the owls are hooting during the day the fish are biting .

It depends on "why" I'm not catching anything . Most of the time it will be a t-rigged plastic worm . What do you do when your go to lure is getting ignored ? The reason I picked a t-rig is because I can fish it in the hairiest places where bass lurk . But if that doesnt work I'm going to keep on changing . I remember one day in particular that I couldnt buy a strike and it was a beautiful day . The idea hit me that maybe the bass were rejecting my offerings because they were getting too good a look at them . I started burning a spinner-bait as fast as I could and finally caught a few . I remember exactly what lure that was to . It was a quarter ounce grey skirted Fleck Weed Wader with white Indiana Blades . I'll have to make a couple of those this winter

Black jig with a bright orange trailer .

This is in northern Missouri . In the winter when gulls are diving for shad its because of the shad die off . In the summer/fall it is because of fish chasing shad but not necessarily largemouth bass . In the small lakes I fish it will definitely be largemouths , in the big lake its probably white bass .

I use to dabble in lure making . This was my best running bait and caught a lot of fish on it . I didnt clear coat it so it got chewed up rather fast .

Yours clicks a little . My silent RES is a true one knocker . Its loud and works best on the drop .

Soft Plastic craws are number 1 where I fish . Tubes, Hula Grubs , spinnerbaits , Beetle spins , Buzzbzits and poppers ,Jig head and grub .

I dont know of any damage, they were wide spread in this area . They are rare. We had them here in 2014 too .

i wont be doing any metal detecting this winter .The temps dropped below zero so fast that we had frost quakes . Those are miniature earthquakes caused by the moisture in the ground and rock freezing and expanding . I have a few guns that need sighting in I'll do that this winter .

No set rule . I always make an educated guess on what to do next .

My favorite grass bait are weightless soft plastics texas rigged .The thicker the slop the better .I use a heavy flipping hook to give a little extra casting weight and be strong enough to bring in six lbs of bass and 6 lbs of grass .

I made a topic about this rig last spring but being this thread has been bumped and I'm bored to death on this below zero day I will post it here . I've always been intrigued by the hair rigs Europeans use but could never rig one up .One day this past spring while carp fishing , I decided to come up with something easy that will work the same way .First I needed a bait holder , so i just used a small treble hook with the barbs pinched down to cause less damage . Then an octopuss hook above that .Its the main hook ,the one that catches the carp when it rejects the bait then bolts . I needed the octopuss hook stay in line , so I slid a piece of tubing on the shaft . The tubing was stripped off a piece of electrical wire .The line is simply slid through the tubing then the eye of the hook and tied to the treble .Slide the tubing onto the hook . The tubing must be small enough to stay on the shaft and not slide up over the eye of the hook .A bobber stop holds it all together . Its a lot simpler than it sounds and only requires one knot . It worked great . Sometimes the fish were hooked with the treble other times only the single .The picture is shown with a piece of bread but the real bait I used was a mixture of Wheaties and commercial fish food . Any dough-ball will work . To use the rig I employ a heavy weight and keep the line tight . Its a bolt rig . The carp feels the weight after it sucks the bait in , panics and bolts hooking itself in the process . I put the rods in good holders , well anchored .The first day using it I was catching carp consistently at a campground . People started taking notice and soon there were half a dozen other people fishing around me and none of them caught a single carp . Heres the components and the finished rig .

Me too . One hundred fish days are not uncommon then you usually have other fish mixed in also . Cats , walleye , drum but strangely not crappie . I guess the whites are to aggressive for crappie .

Talk about a football .

Yep , Ilike this . Also from species to species .

I think using a lure for long period of time just trying to learn it would be a waste of time . Use it for awhile then try to figure out how to catch fish . I rather spend my time catching fish than playing with lures .

Hamma I won a lowly club tourney in the back of the boat .For two days the guy running the trolling motor was convinced that spinnerbaits were the lure for the conditions and thats all he threw . I just followed up with a t-rig lizard and quickly worked every piece of cover we zoomed by . He was livid . I think it was the last tourney he ever fished . Some folks just are not cut out for tourney fishing , even at the club level . LOL . We were just a bunch of good ol boys having fun and he couldnt cut it .

Interesting , but I think it would be difficult to cast. The hooks look like junk too .

I bend the hooks on cheap crappie jig heads to make them shorter and give them a bigger bite then fished them with Sassy Shads . Because there is not as much hook going through the plastic it is not as stiff and has more action . The whole lure vibrates sort of like a lipless crankbait . I just now went to the DOA web site and ordered a pack of 1/16th , 1/8th and 1/4 ounce short shank jig heads and three packs of three inch shad tails . No more fishing with inferior heads and the risk of hook failure . LOL .

A short shank hook gives the Sassy Shad type baits a lot more action . The only company I know that makes then is D.O.A.

I like channel cat fishing a lot . Summer night in my boat anchored on a large flat , a cooler with shad on ice . I know how to catch the cats on Mark Twain . My dad wasnt much into bass , catfish was his favorite . This is one of the last times we fished together . Hes still alive , just unable to do anything now .