Swamp Girl

I wonder what that is...hmmm. Oh, yeah, it's the ^Giants!^ You're describing Alex(AlabamaSpotHunter) here. This is off-topic, but I stumbled on it this morning at ladybassnanglers and I love it: "Fish don’t care if they are caught by a guy or a girl, young or old. Fish have no idea whom is behind the reel. Fish don’t care if you are a legendary angler or a first time tournament angler. Don’t let anyone, even yourself, under estimate your ability to catch fish. Fish don’t care what year, make, or model your boat is. I have been in all types of boats and have been able to catch fish in new boats and very used boats. My boat is new to me, it may have a scratch or two and it may not have the biggest screens of electronics and the seat most likely will have a nice piece of duct tape on it this year, but none of that has kept me off the water or kept the fish from biting ."

I greatly appreciate all the guys on Bass Resource and YouTube who film their own fishing videos. I even like the low production value videos where it's just a guy chucking a lure and rambling while he does. I also enjoy the high production value shows with drones, tripods, music, cutaways, and splicing. When I watch the high production values videos, where there are shots of the angler pulling away from shore, I think about how he had to frame that shot, set up the tripod, proceed from the shore, return to the shore, check the footage, and perhaps reshoot. That would make me bonkers! I would just want to fish! How about you? Do you produce videos? Wanna? Or are you grateful you don't? What kinds of videos do you like best? What don't you like in fishing videos? I'll answer my last question. I don't like long lead-ins. Treat the viewer with respect and start sharing what you know ASAP. I also hate when they lose a fish and say, "That was a monster!" Little fish come unbuttoned too.

@AlabamaSpothunter I bought half a dozen 6th Sense Crushes because of you, but you'll get no bill. I expect them to hook lots of bass in the prespawn. They're gorgeous lures. I expect the lure to be a: This past year, I missed the prespawn and spawn. I missed June and most of July. So, I am super exited about 2023 because I'll get to fish all these periods. I'm up to 21 new bodies of water to fish. The planning is almost as much fun as the fishing.

Finesse family, that is.

@AlabamaSpothunter We're in the same shoes, Alex. As a kid, I fished largemouth. As an adult, for a couple years, I was musky obsessed, but other than that, I was fishing for smallmouth in Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, the Wisconsin River, the Mississippi River, and a dozen or so lakes in northwestern Ontario. Total finesse fishing. Then, this past summer, for the first time in 50 years and after five years of caregiving without fishing, I started fishing for largemouth again. It was like running into a high school sweetheart at your high school class's 50-year reunion and being smitten again IF my high school sweetheart had become an enormously complex person in that half century. Bass fishing has become enormously complex, as you know. There isn't a day at Bass Resource where I don't google a lure or technique that someone mentions. I'm slowly adapting to catching largemouth with modern techniques, but I've got my decades of finesse fishing for smallmouth always nudging me. I'm an old dog, but I'm slowly learning some new tricks.

Alex, you use soooo many different lures to catch your fish. I admire that. I also admire your caring for a bleeder. I'm the same way. I don't hurt many fish, but when I do, it eats at me.

Heck, yeah. Look at the muscle between the tail and the body. I always look there first. The tail tells the tale.

That's a VERY nice one!

@gimruis I'm assuming you're thinking about gear ratios when you state that a spinning reel lets you "reel it in faster." There might be more in play than gear ratio, such as the distance from the hub of the spool to the outermost line. When it comes to radius, a little more makes a big difference, as in a 12" pizza being 113 square inches, whereas a 14" pizza is 153 square inches. That's about a 35% difference in total pizza for a mere 14% increase in diameter. I'm wondering if a crank of a spinning reel with a 5:1 ratio and a deep spool might be closer than you think to a baitcasting reel with a 8:1 ratio and a shallow spool. I'm just guessing, of course. Are there any engineers or mathematicians in the house?

My primary spinning rod is 7' 6". I'll try the braid, but unless I can one day cast as long with a baitcasting reel as I can with a spinning reel, I'll stick with the spinning reel. I have used braid with muskies and on my froggin' outfit. It's my thinking that hook-setting power comes from the rod, not the reel. My surface lure rod isn't as stout as my froggin' broomsticky rod, but it's no pushover. I caught about 20 bass in the 19-21 inch range with it this past year, mostly in slop. Those are four-to-five-and-a-half-pound fish according to the length to weight chart I consult. And they were caught from a lightweight canoe that gets pulled around in the fight, so I can't hold my ground, but that rod still worked most of the time. I lost some big fish, of course. One ran into wild rice reeds and I just couldn't turn it, not even with my drag cranked way up. You're a northerner. You know that they're like bamboo. Another time I was blown into thick weeds, inches below the surface, and the bass burrowed into that. Anyway, I'll switch to braid and we'll see how that goes and if I ever increase my casting distance with a baitcaster, I'll be open to switching to that!

Humble, too. BTW, I smile whenever I see Kramer by your name.

I wrote that "the Whopper Plopper...casts a long ways...." and one of the reasons I can chuck it so far is that it's a big lure. It's not massive, though, for a recovered muskyhead. Have you seen musky lures? Many are billy club-sized. I used a bait caster for those, but my spinning outfits handle the Whopper Plopper. I cast farther with a spinning rod than a bait casting rod and as I shared in another thread, I catch most of my fish at the ends of long casts. I used 17 lb. line because I couldn't keep bass out of the weeds with lesser line. One of my first threads was about my struggles with bass in weeds. The 17 lb. test mainly solved that. I was at the dog park today throwing a ball. A young man was there throwing a ball. He was throwing three to four times farther than me and it didn't appear he was even trying to throw it as far as he could. I was trying. Plus, I'm sitting in a canoe, which makes casting harder. I'm going with what works best for my old bones. Still, what do you suggest? I don't want to give up casting distance, but I am open to alternatives if they match or surpass the numbers, both quantity and quality, that I average. Ditto, ditto, ditto.

@The Bassman Tough hombre.

@Woody B Thanks, Woody. Throwing what the other guys aren't sounds like 24K advice to me. I am just impressed by your consistency. It seems that nearly every time you fish, you catch an 18-inch bass and other bass too. I like that 14-inch fattie. Some of my favorite fish are the shorter, fatter ones.

@GRiver ^That is Spartan!^

I've only had one game warden ask me for my license and he was the most impressive game warden imaginable. I was fishing a lake in northern Ontario, miles down a fresh cut logging road. To reach the lake, you had to run four sets of rapids on four miles of river. Who would ever think a game warden would do that, much less a 70-something game warden, as lean and chewy as beef jerky. And he did chew me, chastising me for a dead walleye in my live well made of rocks forming a corral in the river. "I'll eat it," I said, telling the truth. "No, you won't," he said. "Okay, I'll toss it in the woods," I said. "No, you won't," he said. "Okay, I'll toss it in the river," I said. "No, you won't." "Well, if I can't eat it and I can't toss it in the woods and I can't toss it in the river, what do I do?" "That's up to you to figure out!" Yeah, that two-legged beef jerky chewed me up and spat me out. No ticket though.

@Woody B, you are consistently successful. To achieve your level of consistency, I'm guessing you're not a one-trick, Whopper Plopper-pony like me. However, you must have favorite lures and techniques. Mind sharing two or three?

I also bought a laminator. Twice in 2022, I printed a map of the pond I was fishing and within the first hour, the map was worthless because canoes get wet. So, in 2023, I will have maps of the ponds and bogs that are laminated.* *This is considered ultra high tech fishing in Maine.

Loon-colored 130 Whopper Plopper cast by a spinning reel spooled with 17 lb. mono, as well as spinning reels with 12 lb. and 10 lb. mono. 2nd place: Either a wacky-rigged Senko or a wakebait. 3rd place: jerkbaits, Mepps #3 brass-bladed spinners, Rage Swimmers, and lipless crankbaits. It's fascinating how we catch bass so differently. I favored the Whopper Plopper because it's fun and casts a long ways, plus its retrieve is fast so I cover a lot of water with it.

I placed orders at three companies, but didn't buy many new and sexy lures. Mostly the basics like hooks, sinkers, swivels, Senkos, etc. I did buy a few purty crankbaits and I'm think I'm all set for next year. For the first time in my life, I'll be dropshotting, Roboworming, and squarebilling and I'm excited to try all that, but even more excited to get back to froggin' and to fish, for the first time in my life, for pre-spawn bass. I bought a magic thermometer that you aim at the water and a wetsuit top. Ya hear that, Tim? A wetsuit top! I'm going to buy wetsuit boots too because I generally have to step into the water to launch my canoe and that water will be chilly in early May. The wetsuit top will keep my core warm as I swim to shore if I ever tip. I also bought a new headlamp, as my old headlamp died in the dark on my final fishing trip.

@LrgmouthShad

Alex, I once went musky fishing with about 20 guys in northwestern Ontario. One was an ex-fighter pilot. Two were bouncers. One played college football. One was a race car driver. And so on. I was the only nerdy English major there, but lawdy, they were so creative with language. Funny. Raw. Profane. Playful. Word-wise, I felt like a puppy playing with the big dawgs. But those men were so much than their words. The final evening, I got in trouble on the big lake in a lightning storm. They didn't sit around and fill the warm, dry cabins with words. They went to their boats in that storm and went looking for me, their searchlights making the lake look like London in the Blitz. And when they finally found me, after a couple hours of searching, those big, tough men were so tender. They didn't chastise for lingering in the storm to cast a few more times and then running out of gas. They were simply grateful that I was returning to the warm, dry cabins with them. And I was too. P. S. - I wrote another article for Bass Resource yesterday. I have to let it sit for a few days before I submit it.

Gosh, I LOVE ^this.^ I just followed you. No, Alex, you'll get the dinner if you land that DD. It will be a treat for me to treat you. I'm guessing that Walt Whitman would have known how you'll feel when you land another Scaly Mammoth. As Whitman wrote, "I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me,." I'm just hoping that I can hear your mighty yawp from Maine and if I do, I'll yawp too. So will Tim. So will Phish and Eric. We'll all rejoice with you. The bulges in your friend's bass made me laugh. The bass I catch don't ever get so big that they grow every which way. Heck, yeah, ^that's^ right. I wrote an essay for Gray's Sporting Journal where I shared how fish swim in my dreams and the uncertainty of dreams is in my fishing. We don't know what's down there and I love not knowing. As you age, you see the same comedy and tragedy play out again and again and I sigh for the sameness, but not fishing. Fishing keeps us wondering and thus, the wonderment of fishing.

I give thanks for Thanksgiving fish photos. Alex, if you land a DD this winter, I'll pay for your dinner. Promise. Woo-hoo, @LrgmouthShad!