Swamp Girl

No, it was a crankbait! Flukes look like this: j/k!

Do tell.

84? Whoa. And still kayaking at 83. You are great, Alex.

You and several others have pined for farm ponds and although a farm pond wasn't my first pick, they would be my second, third, and fourth picks. I remember I once caught 21 solid bass at a farm pond, which would be a below average outing for me today, but it was the stuff that dreams are made of back then.

@king fisher: I printed the photo of your bass and took it to my pond. I held the photo over the side of my canoe so that the bass could see it. I heard a collective whimper arise out of the water. @Buzzbaiter: Heartbreak. When I was a kid, there were still country roads at the edge of my suburb that led to streams full of snakes, crawdads, and tiny, fearless fish. I went back 50 years later and tried to find my favorite stream. It was gone. I expect they sacrificied it the god, Development. @A-Jay: I like Day Three, when you scored a DDD (double double digit)!

I watched her video on the battleship as I created this thread. No lie.

It is, my friend, it is.

Given how I feel at nearly 68, I HOPE I'm still fishing at 80 like Alexander the Great, but I don't know.

If you could turn back time and fish one place for one more day, not as that place might be today, but as it was when you originally fished it, what would that place be? Mine would be Peninsula Point on the north shore of Lake Michigan. There's a rock there about the size of a VW Beetle. The rock is in the middle of a rocky, otherwise featureless flat, so you're really immersed in the tussle. The vodka clear water lets you see every bit of the battle, whether it's over your head when they jump, or round and round your legs. Is yours a farm pond that you once had access to fish? A lake that used to be wild? A river that was once pretty unknown? Or something else?

I have never fished alpine lakes. I'm jelly!

"Does this Bass make my hands look big????" Woody, that middle bass all of you look HUGE! Here's Woody in the city frustrated because they called in the Air Force (again) to cite him for jaywalking:

Hardcore, @DaubsNU1.

August is a bad sign. March is even worse. January is a sign akin to washing your son's hair and finding the birthmark 666 on his scalp.

This is the genesis for another thread, a thread about the places we'd love to fish one more time...and why. I do hope it happens.

Man, oh, man, that is not my experience. My takeaway: I need to get better at mid-day fishing! ^This^ is my experience, although I've never fished the midnight to 1:00 a.m. window.

The salad days...er, nights. Thanks for the photos, @Catt! @fishhugger: Bits from Wikipedia: "Although Lamarr had no formal training and was primarily self-taught, she invested her spare time, including on set between takes, in designing and drafting inventions,[40] which included an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a flavored carbonated drink.[30] During the late 1930s, Lamarr attended arms deals with her then-husband, arms dealer Fritz Mandl, "possibly to improve his chances of making a sale".[41] From the meetings, she learned that navies needed "a way to guide a torpedo as it raced through the water." Radio control had been proposed. However, an enemy might be able to jam such a torpedo's guidance system and set it off course.[42] When later discussing this with a new friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, her idea to prevent jamming by frequency hopping met Antheil's previous work in music. In that earlier work, Antheil attempted synchronizing note-hopping in the avant-garde piece written as a score for the film Ballet Mécanique (1923–24) that involved multiple synchronized player pianos. Antheil's idea in the piece was to synchronize the start time of identical player pianos with identical player piano rolls, so the pianos would be playing in time with one another. Together, they realized that radio frequencies could be changed similarly, using the same kind of mechanism, but miniaturized.[4][41]" It formed the basis for today’s WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth communication systems.

^That's^ it. That's the place.

I love to wade fish too. It's my favorite way to fish. I had an evening fishing the north shore of Lake Michigan for smallmouth that, if I could, I would relive a thousand times. I had waded up to my shouder blades so that when the smallmouth jumped, they were higher than my head.

An overspin (spinnerbait) like Catt's is pretty much the same thing, Bazoo, as an underspin. It's a little flashier, but not as weed-proof as an underspin.

I'm happy to give you topographic maps of smallmouth lakes I LOVE in Ontario. I'm too old and they're too far for me to fish them again, but I'd love if you did. Since we're posting pics of black and white beauties, here's Hedy Lamarr, who was all that a bag of chips the size of the Superdome. Read her incredible story if you don't know it:

Tim, there are lakes in northwestern in Ontario that I loved and fished for decades and time and again, I had nightmares that civilization arrived at those lakes and built sidewalks and Dairy Queens.

You have to do a little dance when you retrieve it. This:

Yay for rain!

An underspin with a paddletail or crawdad trailer. It fishes from the top of the water to the bottom. It's close to weedproof and casts half of forever.

I believe this 100%. Then what you had was paradise.