Swamp Girl

I catch smallmouth, but not big ones. I don't measure them or weigh them, but I love catching them, so I don't know what my five biggest are and they're pretty much all the same size anyway. Here are the first five I found in my attachments. If Dwight's fish see my measly fish, his brutes will get hungry: Since you're fishing following a stroke and have balance challenges, you have NOTHING to be embarrassed about. You're the toughest angler in this thread.

Yeah, I know, but what you see are the bass I catch. What you don't see are the bass I lose to weeds. The don't break my line. They just shuck my hooks when they plunge into the weeds and reeds are the worst. Of course, I ask for trouble when I see a four-foot wide opening in a green field and drop two, big treble hooks on top of that just to see Mini-Mount Saint Helens erupt.

@T-Billy, I kid you not: I always think of you and that bass together now because I know it amuses you! Say, Tim, I just visited an Ohio musky board and the backbiting there reminded me of one reason I stopped musky fishing. So few fish leads to overwhelming competition, at least for me.

Heck, yeah, it would! However, I'd settle for fishing for bass where there's more water than weeds.

Tim, I have never caught a musky as big as yours. I've come seemingly close a couple times, but as you know, in the world of musky fishing, my measly 46" muskies are a mile away from a 48.25" beast. @Pat Brown, your ten are so impressive, but we must all bow down to @king fisher's monster.

Here are ten of various shapes. I also caught two 22.25-inchers that weighed 6.71 (seventh fish down) and 6.75 pounds (not included), but I like these fat ones best, even if some weighed less:

Your best days surpass my best days by a lot. I've seen the photos of your best days and they're the stuff of my dreams. For consistency, Maine is hard to beat.* I think @Bluebasser86 equals it, which is strange, for who thinks of Kansas as a bass paradise, but given @Bluebasser86's tournament wins, he's no ordinary angler. Likewise, Maine can be great, but I work hard at fishing. I rise at three in the morning and it's typically foggy. I sometimes launch at three in the morning in the rain. I paddle through swamps in the dark and haul all my gear through the woods and across meadows in the dark. My two biggest bass were both caught in total darkness. With the biggest one, I didn't even want to turn on my light to reveal my presence, so I cast into weeds, hoping I'd hit an opening with my Whopper Plopper. The first two casts were nothing but weeds. The third cast was open water, so my fourth cast was to the same area and that's when she hit. Of course, hooking such a bass in total darkness in a swamp when you're alone in a tippy canoe is a far distance from landing such a bass. I also suspect that some anglers would be a little lost without their electronics and I'm pretty sure some would tip my particular canoe within seconds of launching. It's as rider friendly as an unbroken horse. Even if you do everything I do, that's no guarantee you'll catch them. I've gone fishing with a few other anglers and none caught close to my catch. So, a body of water can help, but in the end, it comes down to the angler, much like a bass boat with state of the art electronics can help, but only if the angler is skilled. *Northwestern Ontario can surpass Maine and Kansas. I once had a 20 lb. smallmouth bag in an hour (five bass between 19.5" and 21") and another time, I caught five muskies in an hour and lost a sixth. Hundred-bass days by myself were pretty common. Even if a cold front slammed us and the wind howled, I could still catch 30 smallies that averaged 17.5" in a canoe, where half the day is spent fighting the wind. However, I worked even harder in Ontario to reach such fishing than I do in Maine.

I love hundred-fish days. I've said many times that I love a busy boat and a hundred-bass day delivers that, but you had an even better day, i.e. quantity plus quality.

I bet you're right. I think your total catch was one of the best of the year at BR.

@Bluebasser86: Your fourth fish and your biggest bass are sooo fat. Meanwhile, we're getting five to eight inches tonight. At least our winters are beautiful.

Heck, yeah, it is! YouTube videos aren't sponsorships, but they are moneymakers for some and when I watch the YouTubers who have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, I don't envy them. I pity them. I see their drone shots and their shots taken from tripods on the shoreline as they pull away, which they must then retrieve, and I think, "Thank goodness that's not me," because each of those shots yank them from actual fishing and being 67 years old, I only have a few years of fishing remaining and I don't want anyone or anything to pull me away.

To move product, don't you have to toot your horn? Don't you have to say, look at what I catch using this product? Aren't my fish big? Don't you want to catch fish like me?

@The Bassman: Heck, yeah, those are chunks!

At my latitude, most of the water holds lmb or smb or both, white perch, pumpkinseed, and pickerel. Pike are rare. Walleye are even rarer. Yellow perch are fairly common.

I broke my PB lmb at least four times in 2023, according to the scale. However, there were fish I didn't weigh simply because I don't like keeping those special bass out of their home for more than seconds. The first bass was 5.49 pounds. The second bass was 6.54 pounds. I also caught a couple long bass (22.5" with pinched tails), while nowhere near as thick as the two bass below, that weighed 6.71 and 6.75 pounds. Then I caught two bass that bulged in every direction that I didn't weigh. Since I played and netted and held all these fish, I could see and feel their weight and the two bulging bass were my heaviest, but since they went unweighed, I don't have numbers to attach to them. Some need those numbers for them to be real, but I remember every precious second I got to spent with them. One of those bass is the third bass below. I caught those two heaviest bass in the dark. Full darkness. In a canoe that's as tippy as sitting on a piece of plywood atop a fence rail. If you've ever rowed a shell with sculls, my canoe isn't far from that. Landing my heaviest bass in full darkness in a slender canoe is challenging enough. So, while protecting them was paramount to me, I also just didn't want to add weighing them to that challenge.

Since you say it works out of the box, I'm going to buy a couple and fish it that way. Soft plastic or pork would lessen the wobble, I'm thinking.

Thanks, all, for the suggestions and insights. I look forward to testing your ideas come spring. I likely won't go until mid-May because being a stream in wetlands means there's no solid ground on either side and tipping in cold water could be my last day. I just googled it and I like the looks of it. My issue with a Johnson's Silver Spoon was the stiff weed guard. The Neimire has a yielding weedguard. I think it would be great casting into weeds. I used to use pork rind on a Johnson's. What do you use on a Neimire?

Thanks! I'm excited to see if you're right.

I hope not! Pics of dinks remind all of us that we all catch them.

Do you think there's a time when that river (again, not much current) will load with bass? As I stated earlier, I did catch a few there this fall, but nowhere near as many in other rivers with more current.

I've watched YouTube videos of anglers on the Susky. It's gorgeous and full of fish. Yes, you have. Nope, not me. So, thanks!

And I just learned how jet drives work, their limitations, what they look like, and why anglers use them...from you!

Gosh, it'll be hard to list it all, but here are some of the big things I've learned: You can chuck various lures into thick cover and catch bass, not weeds. I know that seems obvious to most of you, but I learned it here. I bought my handy, yellow bump board because of BR. I learned about Whopper Ploppers, underspins, Keitechs, wakebaits, and much more. Together, they've put hundreds of bass in my boat. I've also learned about lures like chatterbaits and Ned rigs, which I've used inconsistently, but hope to spend more time fishing in 2024. I've learned that the misconceptions that many women might have about men not welcoming them to a fishing community are wrong, wrong, and wrong. I've learned that Tim(@RipzLipz) is the funniest poster.

And as a paddler, you're EXTRA especially welcomed to BR.

That's this crazy: Rain is life. I never complain about rain. And you're right about rain sweeping the noise-makers off a lake.