Swamp Girl

Spot on. And, yes, I rely on intuition. If you're ever in a canoe with me and I suggest you cast to a certain spot, do it. When I'm retrieving a lure, my head is rotating as I'm searching for the next spot that feels right. Andy understands.

Well, yeah, but if you put a couple young anglers in a barebones canoe on a Maine pond or bog or a backcountry lake in Northwestern Ontario and pitted them against me, it wouldn't be prudent to bet against the old gal.

Ha! So true. I was just wondering if he adventured down Canada's logging roads.

I need to use Sally more. My preliminary tests suggested that a spinnerbait outfishes her, but I will try her again.

To recap, I bought five acres on a 170-acre pond in Maine. It checked the following boxes: Five minutes from my house No public access No ramp, so no larger motor boats Only one shoreline can be developed, as the other three shorelines are wetlands The wetlands are loaded with bass. The ten homes on the developed shoreline are all set back 250'. Plentiful largemouth The smallmouth aren't plentiful, but they're all fat. Big trees on my lot, plus the lot is flat and has electricity where it starts The action can be fast. Earlier this year, I caught 48 in two hours and 15 minutes and I had several other 40+ evening and morning sessions. The only downside was the size of the bass. When I started fishing it three years ago, they were 15" to 16". The other bodies of water I fish have bass up to 22"+. However, I felt that the pond's lmb were growing bigger and this morning offered further evidence. I launched at 5:30 a.m. in the rain. This was the first bass and representative of the average size I used to catch, albeit a little fatter: Then I caught some thicker, longer bass that I would not have caught three, two, or even a year ago. I'm not saying that I never caught any of the following size, but not like I'm catching them now, with multiple 18+ inchers in a session. In the end, I think the bass are bigger, but I also think I'm learning where and how to catch the bigger ones: I caught a skinny bass on a frog, but snarled my line on the very next cast. I continued to catch bigger bass then I've caught in the past years and bigger too than the average bass I was catching earlier this year. Of course, I caught smaller bass too, like this one: Then a couple more bigger ones. I caught all my bass on the frog, spinnerbait, and Whopper Plopper. I had to quit after three hours to help with the new puppy. Only 17 in all, but I'm sure happy to see the bass getting bigger. You can see in their bellies that they're eating well and I can see that they're growing longer. This was my last bass, a pretty nice one: If I can, I'll go fish again today. I love fishing gray, wet days. See the second bass from the bottom? What a fight she gave me. I hooked her in about 12" of water, with weeds and bushes everywhere. The wind blew me into the bank and she ran under the canoe, right into big, thick lily pads. At one point, I had utter slack in my line as my line tangled with three rods sticking out the back of the canoe and she snagged what looked to be the biggest lily pad in the pond. Whew!

@Backroad Angler: Why is this your screen name? What back roads do you use?

Suh-weeeet!

Whoa! What a kid!!!

I took Glenn's advice and mounted a 300 hp Suzuki on my canoe. The bad news is that I died. The good news is that there are 30-pound bass in Heaven and those are just the rock bass!

You guys have posted so many essential skills. I'll only add two: Stealth: To borrow from Frank Zappa: If you go where the bass lie low, don't bump anything don' cha know! Memory: This has happened so many times that it's freaky; I'll cast to a spot and just know that a bass is about to hit and then it does because that spot looked just like so many other spots where bass hunkered. If you remember the specifics of where you've caught bass, you'll catch more bass going forward.

I own five acres of its shoreline. There are ten other shoreline owners and no public access, so it doesn't get fished much. In Maine, you can't own a body of water exceeding ten acres. FWIW, I'm a canoe angler who generally fishes shallow, weedy ponds and bogs. I'm sneaky in my stealthy canoe and get quite close to bass, sometimes even bumping into them with the bow of my canoe. I catch a lot of bass, as the BR guys will attest, but for the last week or two, the bass have been beating me. I'm fishing my pond tomorrow morning. I'll start with a frog and fluke. It'll be raining pretty hard, but I like rainy fishing.

I love the anglers fishing the ends of the spectrum, i.e. @Pat Brown's Jake, @Bazoo's boy, and all the old farts like Alex, @WRB, me, and many, many more.

@HawkeyeSmallie: In New England, a body of water generally has to be more than a thousand acres to be called a lake. It's 170 acres, not counting the marsh and I spend a lot of time in the marsh. It's mid-coast Maine, five minutes from the coast. It's natural and yeah, I love it.

@BluegillsTightlines: GREAT morning for sure!

Thanks, @gimruis. The biggest problem I have with my canoe is the bass pull me into trouble. Last time at my pond, I hooked a big bass at least ten feet from wood and it pulled me into the tree in about three seconds. How can a bass between three and four pounds pull an 85-pound canoe with me in it? No wonder we love them. Whenever I have someone in the bow and they hook a fish, I pick up my paddle and move them to open water. I know tomorrow morning I won't even have a 10' buffer. I'll start in the thicket. Like this: Anyway, I'm hoping for a 50% landing percentage, but I'll more likely achieve 25% and feel lucky to attain that. Overall, I am quite pleased with my weed-fishing. I have come far in three years, landing fish today that would have freed themselves a couple years ago. Plus, I enjoy the challenge. It's like solving a Rubic's Cube at night in the back of a pickup driving flat-out and pell-mell across a just-plowed field.

Thanks, @Pat Brown. I am cucumber cool when it comes to fishing poppers and Ploppers. The bass will hit and I'll wait until I feel their weight. I never react too soon. With frogs, however, I lose my cool. I think it's because frog fishing is your face. I can cast a Plopper half of forever, so when a bass hits, as they almost do at the end of my cast, they're yonder. With frogging, I'm sitting in the weeds and I can't cast as far and they're as likely to hit inches from my canoe as they are at the end of a cast.

It'll just be fun to catch a bass on something other than a wakebait, worm, underspin, or spinnerbait. I wish I could use a Mepps, but there's no way I can retrieve one of those through August's weeds. I'm yanking off weeds from the majority of my casts already with my single, point-protected hooks.

Okay, change of plan. Tomorrow morning will be froggin' and flukin'.

I'd be a better frogger if I looked more like this gal:

Amen. Buying torpedoes to sink anglers with FFS has me living on Ramen. Torpedoes are expensive!

@The Baron: Frogs are so much fun and so hard to fish. By popular demand, I'm going froggin' tomorrow morning. I too expect lots of blowups and few fish, partly because of the lure itself and partly because of where I'll be casting it, i.e. the parts of the pond that are more weeds than water. May the @Pat Brown be with me! Here's Pat wishing me the best:

I so want to believe that @TnRiver46 is right when he wrote that our activities can't kill a fishery, but as a kid, I saw other anglers ruin a beloved pond. They began with stringers of 17" bass and then removed stringers of 14" bass and then stringers of 9" bass. At that point, we simply quit going. And when I was a kid, we watched Jacques Cousteau specials, where he'd call the oceans "inexhaustible," again and again. Well, in merely my lifetime, Cousteau has been proven wrong again and again, as trawlers with sonar decimate many species. So, when you accept that we can have an effect, from farm ponds to oceans, we need to carefully consider new technologies.

Young bucks, do ^THIS^ while you still can. It's the greatest show on Earth.

F'instance?

If you stop fishing to photograph the Sun rising or setting, you're simply happy to be on the water.