Swamp Girl

I'm just glad that somebody is catching fish and sharing their catches!

@txchaser: You've caught a bass over 13 pounds, so I believe everything you asserted. I will only add that the deepest water I fish is 10'. Often, 8' is the deepest. So, I don't think the smaller and bigger bass I catch separate themselves as much by water depth as the smaller and bigger bass you catch, where you range of depths is much more pronounced. Without such stark depth differences, I catch most of my bigger fish in shallow water. I caught the 5.5-pounder and 4-pounder below minutes apart, both up against the shoreline. You can see from the photos that they were hugging the shoreline, each in about a foot of water. They might not be big to you, but they're pretty big bass for mid-Maine. One time in the fall of 2024, I did catch a 4-pounder, a 5-pounder, and a 4.5-pounder on three consecutive casts in the middle of a pond where it was deeper, so I have learned that the bigger bass in Maine can relate to deeper water. Just not always. Lacking Forward Facing Sonar, it's a crap shoot finding them anyway, but my Female Finding Sonar aka my hunches works pretty well most days.

Thank you. However, dragging on the bottom worries me. See the image below? That's what much of the lake bottoms that I fish look like. Can you drag a jig over that without getting caught? When the bottoms don't look like that, they're a mat of weeds. I tend to fish high, usually on the surface, for these reasons.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays TnRiver46 from the swift completion of his appointed fishing.

2014. However, even seven feet is just a slice of 41 feet.

I would have trolled both ways and caught some bass. Seriously, I'm glad that tree is gone.

I was in Oregon once for the biggest ice storm of my life. Everything was encased in inches of ice. That was near Mt. Hood. And I was in Buffalo at the beginning of their 7' of snowfall storm. The wall cloud was jet black. HOWEVER, I've never driven through tunnels of snow. I've only seen photos of such a scene.

I just Google Crater Lake's annual snowfall average: It's...wait for it...wait for it........41................wait for it..................FEET! The snow's actually pretty. It's the wind that makes it rough. It's been howling for 20 hours and will howl for another 20. It bullies my car. Snow raking is hard work. I don't blame you. My current home has a steep roof, so there's no raking. HOORAY!

Good job, Rocky!

Heh. You're probably right.

The Monkey and Father Time have identical records: Infinity and 0.

If you're right, then where we cast is so important because X cast might not put our lures in front of a bass, but Y cast will.

Nice to see you jumping right into the threads, OMB! OMB, don't believe Bob for a sec. His wife is a very lucky woman and Bob keeps busy by engineering ecosystems and building half scale copies of Paris and Rome or something along that line.

I also had no idea too, Bob, and I'm with you too on not knowing why they eat our lures with so much real food in front of their faces.

Where was that?

If you think we're snowy just now, compare today's snowfall to the winter a decade ago. The first photo is my car: I can't find my photos of our 31" snowfall, but the worst winter was the winter when it didn't stop snowing. Everyday, it snowed one to three inches. I climbed the extension ladder everyday to fight the ice dams, but they won and we had water coming through ceilings in five places. I also hired guys to climb the roof and shovel, but we just couldn't keep up with it. Repairing ceilings that spring was expensive!

The monkey won. I just bought three.

I've caught the same catch! You better be getting a cut from the Bait Monkey!

On the coast of Maine, the wind is howling, which is pretty common for spring. When I was snowblowing this morning, at one point, I leaned into the wind lest it topple me. The wind would gust and blow the snow I was blowing back at me. It had ice in it and it hurt! We added about another ten inches yesterday to the snow already there. Here's a photo of a tree form Juniper in my front yard wearing a cap of snow. One more snowfall and the Juniper will disappear! However, the clock is ticking for our snow. We'll be reaching highs in the low to mid-thirties in a few days and with everyday delivering more sunshine, the snow will fade...until March, which brings big snowfalls, but they don't last long. We had a 31" snowfall about six years ago, which was the biggest single snowfall of my life, but nothing compared to the snow that can fall on the south shore of Lake Ontario. FWIW, I'm turning off my Christmas lights in two days. I keep them on for much longer than most to help light our long nights, but the nights have already shortened considerably. Oh, I know that "snow." It's the worst.

I would like to use them more, but I really struggle to find enough open water to retrieve more than weeds.

You are so right. I'm an old woman and after fishing again for lmbs after about a half century away, I still don't know what 90% of the Bass Resource guys know. There are soooooo many new lures and techniques and the BR gang remember all their names and have seemingly tried them all. As far as using big lures for smallies, I've caught thousands of brown bass with F13 Rapalas twitched on the surface.

You're so fun and funny, Bob!

I understand your confusion. My property is on a pond. It's literally called that on maps. However, it's 170 acres. I fish another pond that's twice that. A third one is 50 acres. They're all called ponds, which is a New England thing. However, my friend has a farm pond. She has a farm and her farm pond would be called a pond everywhere, not just New England.

When I fished northwestern Ontario, we rarely fished for pike, but pike fished for our F13 Rapalas on six-pound test that we used to catch smallmouth. Of course, we also lost some lures to pike, usually two or more everyday, but strangely, the pike we were most likely to land were the 40-inchers and the pike we were mostly likely to lose were the hammer handles.

I'm sorry, Koz. That's a big tree. Keep us posted, please.