Swamp Girl

I'm wanting to belly up to my bog buffet again. It'll likely happen Thursday. It's cool today and tomorrow (high twenties to high forties), but then it starts to warm on Tuesday and it's supposed to hit 73 on Thursday. Friday looks to be too windy for my canoe, so Thursday it is.

Me too! I caught some of my bass last week burning a fluke over weeds. It really helped me understand frog fishing, Pat. As you know, I have a mental block with frogs. I have caught thousands of bass on the surface, so my surface lure hooking reflex is rock solid, but when I tie on a frog, that all goes out the canoe. Well, when I burned the fluke and a bass hit, my surface lure instincts kicked in and I just kept reeling until I felt the weight and then set the hook...and it worked! And I thought, "If I can do it with a fluke, I can do it with a frog."

I don't know what my PB is because I released most of my 40"+ pike in the water for my and their safety. It wasn't their teeth that scared me, but their tendency to thrash in a boat. So, I'd use their thrashing to our mutual advantage. I'd bring them canoeside, grab the shaft of the hook with my needle nose pliers, and let them thrash free. Usually that happened with the first or second head shake. We'd catch them fishing for smallies. Our number one lure was an F13 Rapala, so that lure was long enough to keep their teeth from our 6 lb. mono. Mostly. A few cut our line, of course. We'd keep a smaller one, here and there, to eat. They're delicious. One trip, we launched a leaky, abandoned boat and brought a motor and big net to actually land one for a photo. Here's that pike below, caught on the first evening. I also caught six smallies that evening from 19.75" to 21.5". You can't see her full length because her tail wrapped around my side, but you get an idea. When she hit my surface rap, she did so with such force that she came completely out of the water and beached herself on a rock. I pointed to her flopping on the rock and told my partner, "That's my fish." She's held tight to my chest. I did that to control her and because I was soaked from the rain, thus providing more protection to her slime coat. So, she's not long-armed, so you can see her true size. After that, we abandoned the abandoned boat and returned to our canoe.

^This advice^ is how @softwateronly just caught so many thick fish. He was either changing his bait or the way he worked his baits. I'm fishing a 7" fluke this coming Thursday, Pat. It's a Depps and is thick as Nathan's hot dog. I know we're supposed to downsize our baits in the fall, but I've got a hunch the big girls will still be open to a big bait.

Dang, @softwateronly, that's a lotta bass! However, I am now mad at you for...just when I thought I was out (of buying more lures), you pull me back in!

Clever!

MH. All 7' 1" to 7' 3".

@1984isNOW: Gosh, I wish I could help you. Your perspectives are different than what I'm accustomed to seeing. The one's that familiar to me is the mouth shot. I've learned that when a bass reaches five pounds, I can fit my fist into its mouth. It looks like your fist would fit, so if there's any truth to what I'm saying, she's at least five pounds. She does look long beside your leg. How long? I can't say.

@BrianMDTX: I sure admire your tenacity. And I admire that big bass too!

I'm betting on you.

Well, then, I'd rise and shine long before the Sun does and fish that same stretch of bank, hoping that the bass move up against it when the light is low.

I so agree with you, WRB. If I'm retrieving a T-rigged worm, underspin, or spinnerbait through weeds, there is the tick-tick-tick as they plow through and the bump-bump as the ricochet off wood or rock, but then there's the uncertain something that's ever-so-slightly different. What still fools me is when they take a bait in their mouths and swim toward me at the exact same rate of my retrieve.

Here are five of the 58 bass I caught on Wednesday morning, along with my two best lures. The bottom bass was the biggest. The Yo-Zuri popper also produced. I tend to use translucent poppers with color here and there. There are some highly skilled Mass anglers who are Bass Resource members. They catch big bass. The linked thread that @DogBone_384 provided is full of info.

Mo, I'm fishing in Maine and my best fall bait has been a Yo-Zuri popper. I think any popper would work. As @Glenn advised in a recent video, I use a pop and pause retreat. However, I also scored big time on Wednesday morning with a walking bait.

I'm not surprised. She's got it all: length, belly, and shoulders.

I use straight braid with spooks, poppers, and Ploppers. 30 lb. test. I use a sweep and reel method to set the hook with more reeling than sweeping. I'm a long caster and 85% of my bass hit at the ends of my long casts, so I lost a lot of bass when I using stretchy mono. I'm not suggesting that this is the best way to go. It's just the way that works for me. Remember that I'm in canoe, so I'm not standing and not having the hook-setting power that men standing in bass boats have. Heck, when I set the hook, my canoe moves toward the bass, lessening the power of my hook setting.

@gimruis: You scored and scored and scored and.... I especially like the fat bass on the bump board. Was she the biggest?

Sir, thank you, sir! Seriously, Tim, it's amazing the slop that braid can pull bass outta and the distance I can still set the hook with braid. I think I lost a lure with braid only twice in 2024, once to a pickerel and once to what felt like a sharp rock. I could feel the braid grinding over something solid and then snap. Fluoro, on the other hand, is a line I can't get behind. It's so stiff and remembers every coil. I'm still trying to appreciate its merits, as I know many of you prefer it, but I mostly shake my head and sigh when I rarely use it.

I struggle to determine what time zone the lure lands in, much less what the laws are yonder!

I was bomb casting on Wednesday morning, using the walking dog lure below: And it's a big, heavy lure and on a spinning rod, it goes half of forever. About a dozen bass from 3.5 pounds to 5.5 pounds hit it way, way out there. I landed all of them, thanks to @T-Billy, who drafted me into the Straight Braid Brigade. Here's one of them: Some of them hit the lure on the first or second twitch and they were so far away that I felt the hit more than I saw it. I'll be casting a 7" Depps fluke when I fish next week. It's such a chunk of plastic that I'll be able to bomb cast it too.

I hope you do! You might not know this about me, but I'm quite fond of canoes. 😉 I'll do one more hoping-for-big-bass trip and then I might do a final trip or two on my pond because I'm simply happy on my pond. Oh, I remember your four big bass, three weighing four pounds and one topping five. And those thick pike too! You were my motivation to go out and catch some four-and-five-pounders too!

So kind of you, pdx! It was a trip of chunks, but an ugly trip too, as you can see in the backgrounds. I was fishing shallow water between fields of mud, not at all like the lovely water I tend to fish. That's because I was fishing above the dam that leaked the bog, leaving a river and mud. There were so many animal tracks in the mud. I'm guessing the eagles, herons, and I weren't the only ones feasting. Of course, the bass were both predator and prey. Those perch were cool, huh? I like the bulge in their backs right before their dorsal fins and that they hit 6" lures with 5/0 hooks. At one point, I looked into the water and saw three jumbo perch swimming under my canoe. If I hadn't been so bass-focused, I might have tried to catch them.

Sigh. @A-Jay's done now too, joining @gimruis, @The Baron, and others. It's getting mighty lonely on the Northwoods lakes. At least the three anglers I just mentioned finished in style!

Ha! I'm going to fish the little river one morning next week and I might fish my pond mid-day once or twice, but after that, I'm done for the year. Sigh. I found a couple more bass I caught yesterday morning that are chunky and I semi-succeeded in capturing an image from a video, but the quality is so poor that I'm not going to do any others. The one in the middle is long, but I really like the shorter, footbally bass at the bottom. Not long, but oh-so-thick.

Bob, one of your many fine attributes is that you also embrace going yonder. So has @WRB, who has written about portage lakes in Ontario.