Swamp Girl

Exactly!

I think @Bluebasser86's tournament accounts are thrilling. He's a good storyteller and I feel like I'm there.

Oh, I hated the rabbits in my Wisconsin garden. Sure, they were cute, but so destructive. They'd chop off my raspberry canes right before they were going to bear fruit and even felled two of my fruit-bearing apple trees.

You should be proud. Your garden is A+. Gardening and fishing are a lot alike in that they're both excuses the leave the walls behind. Growing the garden thanks the Earth, for it feeds the bumblebees and the other pollinators. You have a groundhog? I don't. I have chippies, red and gray squirrels, turkeys, raccoons, and a skunk that visit my feeders, in addition to the hundreds of small birds.

Tim, that video is top-notch. Top-knot? Easy to follow and I'm going to start tying that knot.

@Jar11591: Your gardening is immaculate.

Thanks, Tim. All out of reactions and off to watch the video right now.

I think you're right, Mike. Giving bad advice can leave to poor fishing and a person might quit before they ever had a real chance to succeed. So many of those YouTubers use clickbait titles because YouTube pays their bills. My title is math and I like how I counted the bass caught by each hour as it really illustrates how fishing improves as light wanes. Whenever possible, I launch on overcast or rainy days for this reason. Sunshine is for beachin' girls, not bassin' girls!

Ah, I see.

Tim, do you have a photo of one of your snelled straight shanks? Are you snelling them or do you buy them that way? Also, why snell them? Why not tie them directly to your line? @T-Billy: Tim, I'm going to buy some right now. Can you suggest a brand and size?

Tim, I'm so quick on the trigger that I figure I'd miss some with the snelled straight shanks too. I deep hooked one bass this year, but none in 2022 and 2023. One is enough. I can live with losing some to not deep hook another. @CastingClinic: I like the composition of your rock BASS photos.

Thanks, ICD, about my signature. After fishing in the rain the other night, being chased to shore by lightning, and then paddling home in the dark, I thought of it. I'll be fishing in heavy rain tomorrow morning too. The ONLY thing I don't like about fishing in the rain is that it's hard to take a good photo because rain gets on my camera lens. I am amazed at how many places I've never fished on my pond. The marsh is more extensive than I thought.

I'm baffled that you've never lost a fish on an EWG before this morning. I lose them all the time on EWGs. I do fast hook sets so I won't deeply hook them. When I do catch them, I hook them right in the lip, but about half find their immediate freedom.

@PhishLI: Your first photo gives away your location. You are fishing in the Amazon rainforest. Or the Congo.

Great news. The satellites that photograph the Earth just photographed my pond and it's a highly detailed image. I can see my boardwalk and even my canoe. More importantly, I can see the marsh that I fish and it's MUCH more extensive than I've thought. The narrow channel I fish is actually a stream mouth and it also goes back much farther than I've been fishing. So excited to fish these areas where I've never cast.

I'm about 50% too, however my landing percentage varies greatly from hour to hour. This thread has me thinking about how many I land when I'm fishing. Yesterday evening, in my first hour, I landed about 15% of the bass that hit. I think I lost some of them because the bass were half hitting. They'd grab the tail of my Crush City Mayors and run with just the tail in their mouths. Later in the evening, when they fully committed, I caught about 85% of the bass, losing a few to mostly jumps. Some of the largies jumped so high that I mistook them for smallies.

ICD, nothing outfights a river smallie. Well, maybe a tidal striped bass because they both fight current.

@Pat Brown: "Had a fun week." says it all, Pat, about your approach to life and fishing. I'm also all about fun in bass fishing. When the kid I take fishing caught some four and five-pounders, he suddenly was less happy to catch 2.5-pounders. "Never pass on happiness" is my motto, and yours too, Pat.

Thanks, Mike! I watched a YouTube video where a bass pro said that fishing early and late wasn't worth the effort, but catching just two bass in my first hour when the Sun was highest and hottest and having them hit so weakly suggests otherwise.

If a gar gets tangled up in your 250 HP Merc, you'd have to replace the prop.

Way to keep angling, Alex! You're my role model.

Thanks, @Glenn.

@NorcalBassin: Yeah, the final hour was sweet. I was fishing my pond, so I leave a canoe there. And I'm fishing a friend's pond on Thursday morning, so I'll use his canoe. I love when I don't have to carry my Kevlar canoe. Your Kramer GIF made me laugh! Thanks for that!

I turn 68 at the end of August. I walk more slowly through the woods to prevent falling. My Kevlar canoe is a constant balance challenge. I hope I can fish until I'm 80, but I won't know until I'm there. When I fish my Royalex Old Town canoe, it's so stable that it feels like the deck of an aircraft carrier and I sometimes stand in it.

It was 84 degrees when I launched, which is hot for Maine and hot for me. I fished four hours, from 4:15 to 8:15. I caught two fish in the first hour. Others hit my lures, which were a red crawfish-colored Mayor and a T-rigged green pumpkin crawfish, but I wasn't hooking them for more than a second or two. Here's where I was fishing at first. The pace picked up in the second hour, from 5:15 to 6:15, as I caught nine bass, mostly in open water and up against barely shaded shorelines. Here are some of the bass caught in the first two hours. Then I reached my favorite shoreline. The bass are bigger here. I caught nine bass in the third hour and 14 in the final hour, thus the 2-9-9-14 of the trip report's title. Yep, I started catching bigger bass on my favorite shoreline. Then the most exciting moment of the evening happened. I worked up a narrow channel that holds bigger girls. I cast my loon-colored Whopper Plopper three times, but couldn't trigger a bite. So, I then cast my red crawfish Mayor and a bass crushed it. She was barely 18", but she fought like a ten-pounder. Actually, she fought like a 20-pound pike. She ran off line and then went on another, longer run. She ricocheted from one side of the channel to the other and then seemed to plow the bottom under the boat. She wasn't thick, but she was the strongest bass of my life. She was bonkers and such a thrill. I worked the area just outside the channel and caught a couple nice ones. Then I caught the biggest bass of the evening. In 2022 and 2023, I caught only two 18-inchers total. This evening, I caught a couple. This one was thicker than the wild gal in the channel, but not nearly as strong. Another nice one. A sweet sunset. And my final bass. I exited the pond with a little light remaining so I wouldn't have to walk the woods back to my car in full darkness. I came home so happy. 34 bass in all. My happiness was due to being on my pond and catching a good number of bass, but mostly due to the fight of that somewhat slender gal in the channel. We measure the length and weight of our bass, but have no way to measure their fighting spirit and that's a shame. My lifetime PB, caught earlier this spring, was a dud fightwise. She was 22.25 inches and oh-so-thick, but she had no spark. This evening's old warrior was all fire and fury. I didn't catch as many as I'd caught earlier in June, but better than my last two trips, when I caught 10 and 19, which I attributed to the weather extremes we've had, from the mid-nineties to the mid-fifties and lots of lightning. The other possibility is that Dr. Evil stole my mojo and I'm slowly mustering more.