hawgenvy

I'm really sorry, but I can't stop laughing at your profile picture long enough to read your post.

Look up the line diameter of the 50 braid and the 12 mono and apply a little arithmetic. For example, if you look up Power Pro Spectra 50 lb braid on the TW site, it says it has the same diameter as 12 lb mono. Therefore, you would need to first put on 145-110 = 35 yards of 12 lb mono as backing on the reel so that your 110 yards of Power Pro Spectra braid will fill the spool to capacity. How many rotations of your spool of mono equal 35 yards? Measure out how many rotations make one yard and multiply by 35. If its a small diameter spool, compensate by adding 5-10 more yards of mono because the spool will get smaller as line is rolled off.

There you go! You've heard it from the master.

Agree with above. Try deeper when the top isn't working! There are some big mamas down there just waiting to ambush anything slowly swimming, slithering, wiggling or hopping on the bottom. Or run a horny toad on the surface but let it drop periodically to the roots and wait 10 seconds before you move it again. And hold on tight. Use heavy line.

Amazing. Thanks, good post on the glades. I'll be out there late spring -- if the water level actually drops this year! Lake O is the highest it's been in many years. When I do I'll keep an eye out for lemurs.

Lemurs?

Nice!

Yesterday I had the afternoon off, or so I thought. My wife kept giving me chores: mail a package at the post office, stop at the bank, put gas in her car. Feed the dog. Buy such and such at the grocery store. Dinner at 6:30. Well, I figured that would leave me almost an hour to fish, from 5:20 to 6:15. I chose a nearby lake behind a friends house. Results: Four 2-3 pounders, a 3-3, a 3-12, a 4-12, a 5.1, and a very fat 5-11, caught on a black/blue jig. I was home for dinner at 6:23. My wife wanted to know, while I was setting the table, why I was doing it with such a big grin!

Hey guys, I am a urologist. Really. And if you're between 40 and 80, get the PSA blood test and the finger. Please. Once a year. I do. And no, I am NOT practicing my prostate exam on that fish in my profile photo. It's just an optical illusion. (But I think I heard somewhere it relaxes them.)

If it were me: Dobyns Savvy 734 casting rod ($179.99) and a Lew's Tournament Pro G Speed Spool casting reel ($199.99). That will leave you $20.02 to spend on some decent line. If it were me and I could come up with another $60, I'd buy instead a Dobyns Champion 734 casting rod. Love 'em.

Welcome to the forums Brantley5! You'll get a lot of advice all right, and most of it is good advice. Just follow the rules and ask almost anything. Remember to search topics first before posting a question. A lot of stuff that people ask has been posted already.

I use 4.8" Keitech Swing Fats a lot, but also like Gambler Big EZ and the smaller EZ Swimmer. They have good action but are much slicker and slide better through more dense vegetation, or over pads easily, because they don't have the ribs. Use a 4-0 or even a 5-0 hook. Also, you can actually punch mats with them rigged with a 1 1/2 oz tungsten weight. The EZ twins will attract big fish. Also, I've been meaning to try Zoom Swimming Super Flukes with the paddle tail. The regular Super Fluke keeps bringing me dinks. Oh, I use the Strike King Rage Craw sometimes Texas rigged 3-0 with a tiny screw weight and use it just like a spinner bait with success. Also can use the T-rigged Rage Craw like a jig, or as a jig trailer, or on a punching rig with a big weight. All depends how much jiggle you think the bass want.

What differences are there between you and your dad in rods/reels/line, speed and pattern of retrieval, depth that he runs the bait, fish attractant, cleaner hands, pays more attention to cover, willingness to run the bait deeper down into the weeds? Snaps it out of the weeds more enticingly? Or is it that he anticipates the bites better, feels the bites better, or sets the hook better? Or is it that he dawdles less, casts farther, has bait in the water more minutes per hour, has more rods with more types of spinner baits ready to go? Anyway, it has to be something -- either coincidence or something he does differently, maybe something subtle, maybe something you can't put in words. If you can figure it out you'll catch more fish too. And if you figure it out, let us know too!

A jig I'll swing at right away, but thick plastics like soft swimbaits and soft frogs I personally have much better luck if I wait a couple of seconds. I think the fish either takes the bait down a little further a second or two after it first inhales it, or else the fish clamps down harder after a second or two and gets that hook point right against the mucosa. In either case swinging after a short delay is less likely to pop the frog out of their mouth, in my experience. Sometimes the first blowup of the day takes me by surprise and I set too soon and miss, and the frog goes flying over my head. After that I force myself to be patient and wait a couple of seconds. I said earlier four seconds but it's probably two. It always seems longer though, as I can hardly wait to swing hard and nail the brute. Another thing, once I know the frog is in the bass, either because there was a blowup and the frog is gone or because the line is moving, I'll reel the slack up just till I almost feel the fish before swinging hard. I don't want to warn the bass that something bad is going to happen. I want the bad news delivered as a complete surprise.

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I have confidence in and have had good luck with Horny Toads, June Bug or Watermelon Seed, in shallow water. I use 4-0 screw lock unweighted or 1/16 oz weighted and braid line. Lots of the bites happen when I pause to let it drop into a hole in the vegetation or let it sink to the bottom of lily pads. The bass will usually hold on to it, and the hook up ratio has been best for me when I give full slack for 4 seconds while I reel down gently -- and then set hard.

Sounds like you have some great memories from those nights long ago. I've had some successful snook nights too, over by the St Lucie river. Also night fishing for huge tarpon in a flats boat just off the beach in a calm summer ocean. Spooky stuff, especially when a big tarpon jumps, and you can just barely see it, like a ghostly hallucination. I'm amazed how well fish can hone in on artificial baits floating in the blackness. Some day maybe I'll go bass fishing all night. If I can find a buddy crazy enough to join me.

So you know you can't catch fish on, let's say, the Ziggle Monkey? If you're like me, and you're out there catching lots of fish on Old Faithful, you're just not going to change baits. It's because you're having success already. But when the bite slows maybe then you'll then try out the Ziggle Monkey. If you don't catch fish on it, even though intellectually you know it's because they're not biting, you will subconsciously lose confidence in it. You may never try it again. Or maybe you'll try it once more, when nothing else works, and since nothing else works, that will reinforce your negative feelings about the new bait. You are highly unlikely to try it again. Now, someone on the other side of the lake starts out with the Ziggle when they're really biting, and catches several bass. He may eventually change baits, but knows forever that the Ziggle Monkey is at least a decent bait. If he once again uses it when they're biting, it becomes a very good bait. Maybe that's why some people feel they can't catch fish on a bait that is the favorite of many other anglers.

Have you read this article about the guy in Valdosta, Ga? He fishes all night long with a buzz bait. The bass turn on at certain hours of the night. If you want to do it right, fish all night long! Maybe you too can catch a thousand 10-pounders. (Me, I'd just get bitten by mosquitoes all night, and catch a thousand colds.)

Bass anglers tend to get fixed in their ways, and are superstitious too. But there may be techniques that bring in great fish that they haven't tried, or they tried once or twice and it didn't work and now it's never going to be tried again. It is true that it's daunting, all the possible ways to fish for bass, all the types of lures, lines, rods, techniques. You just cant try everything, but it is important to break away from the tried and true every once in a while to have a go at something completely different. That's the beauty of fishing with (if you can on occasion) a guy who has more or different experience than you do, like a local professional guide. It can be a real eye opener to see new techniques that produce fish. Also, tournament fishing gives you the opportunity to compare your skills with many others' and see what worked better than your technique that day. Although I am still somewhat of a novice, I try to get experience with a great variety of lures, just so I can become, to varying degrees, proficient in each one. Who knows? Any lure I'll learn to use now could some day bring home my big mama, or bring in the right five for a local tournament win.

I think I get a lot more bites with fluorocarbon. Especially in "finesse" type situations, like with a weightless Senko or fluke or dropshot. But most the time I end up fishing with braid anyway, because I'm usually fishing thick cover where braid is more reliable because it is much stronger.

In the blistering days of August in So Florida, a fluke is about the only bait I can catch a LM bass on. Funny how things work so differently for different people in different situations.

It might. If the water is stained or muddy it probably doesn't matter. But if the water is clear use fluorocarbon.

All braid starts out white and then color is added later. Apparently, there is no way to colorize the polymer that the strands are made from (that are then woven into braid). The colored dyes are added later and end up just on the surface of the fibers, which is why the lines tend to bleed and slowly lose color. It makes logical sense to purchase white braid, which is the natural color anyway, and ought to be cheaper. But it's hard to find. Stren has a white braid but I don't really like it because it seems very stiff. Anyway, to tell the truth, white braid freaks me out because it seems too visible, so I end up blackening the final several inches with a Sharpie. Theoretically, white should be the least visible to the fish when used for top water applications, because the sky looks white from under the surface. But that little bit in front of the nose of my frog or buzz bait that the fish may see from the side bothers me so I blacken it. I don't like to add a mono leader to my braid because, besides leaders being a pain in the butt, I have had in the past a couple of lines break at my uni knot when setting the hook. So now I'm permanently superstitious about directly tied leaders. There is too much superstition in fishing. I guess we can't help it. It's a vulnerability, and tackle sellers take full advantage of it.

Thanks a lot. Your post, which has several of my favs on the list, has now got me hanging sad and droopy. But I'm not yet suicidal -- because I know that the characteristics of the jig itself, and the action imparted to it by the angler and by the current, can reanimate Mr Droopy into a lively bug that waves over Mrs Fish and says "Eat me."