MIbassyaker

Anything plastic, weedless. Toad, stick worm, trick worm, ribbontail worm, craw, beaver, creature, whatever. If you want something specific: Rage toad or Rage Shad, weedless on a 1/8 or 1/4oz weighted hook. Use the MH rod and tie directly to your 30lb braid with a double palomar knot. Cast, buzz it across the top of the slop, past and over the edges.

Make sense. I heard your reel turns the other way down there, too.

Ah, that explains it. I was going to ask, were is that vertical lake where you can catch upside-down bass? (sorry; I have no idea how to fix it)

I felt a little better once I looked up recent results of the local tournament divisions in this area: big bass is not breaking 5lbs very often, and the exceptions are all on a handful of lakes that are regularly way to busy for my taste. For the lakes on those schedules that I actually fish sometimes, most of the tournament folks don't seem to be doing any better than I am.

Picture showing up fine for me - white shirt, jeans, hat, sunglasses, big fish, and (looks like) a thumbs up. Looks good, Bill.

Overwhelming preference for small and quiet. I regularly fish about 12-15 different lakes, rivers, and river bayous within an hour's drive of my home. But my three favorite lakes are: 1. 50 acres, surrounded by county park and a no motors restriction at the launch; excellent for numbers but not many big fish (although my PB came from it) 2. 30 acres, lightly developed on one side with a handful of houses and about 5-6 docks; no public launch, but can paddle in 1/4 mile with a canoe or kayak through a creek channel with roadside access. The docks are so overgrown I don't think even the residents use the lake much. 3. 100 acres, public launch, but very minimal parking. Good thing, too, otherwise it might get a lot more traffic -- not huge numbers of bass and it's easy to get skunked, but the average size bass living in here is probably bigger than that of all but a few of the other lakes in the immediate area. All developed, but the residents rarely seem to fish it and don't get up before about 10am.

I haven't had your temperatures to deal with, but it's still been slow all summer for me, both for sizes and numbers. Recently, ned rig and mojo/slip-shot rigged worms and creature baits have been catching most of my fish; the rest have been on topwater (Buzzbait, Pop-R and Jitterbug), but only very early in the morning.

I almost always tie everything direct regardless of water clarity. Except as mentioned above with lots of wood, which for me is typically rivers, and then it's just a mono leader.

Wow. Probably 80% or more never caught, and 50% or more never in the water. Oddly, that never seems to stop me from buying more.

That is pretty great.

Lol, nope, you're right. I won't be doing that. But I'm also not sure I'd use a c-rig in a rocky river at all (or any version of one other than the finesse, anywhere). So, All-star: are you throwing to ledges in 30 feet of water with a baitcaster?

All that hardware and multiple knots, for something you may need to keep re-tying anyway because of abrasion on the rocks.... No thanks. I'd just go with the slip-shot version of the finesse c-rig. 8lb mono (probably trilene xt), with 1/8oz mojo or other cylindrical weight sliding freely ahead of a bobber stopper, and the hook a foot and a half below. It's only one knot. You can put beads between the weight and the stopper if you want. And when your line gets damaged and you need to re-tie, just slide the stopper and weight further up the line.

I have not tried all available stickbaits. But, of the ones I have tried, the difference in action between Senkos and others on a wacky rig is noticeable, with the Senko having the advantage. Do the fish care about this difference? They seem to, but its not as though I've done a controlled experiment. And I haven't tried Yum dingers yet, but I've heard multiple people recommend them. More importantly, I don't always wacky rig my stickbaits. This year, for instance, I have been t-rigging them and working them over emergent vegetation, or as a soft jerkbait, more than anything else. And for that, I don't see any reason to prefer the senko over other more durable brands. The Big Bite Baits trick stick is MUCH cheaper and, for these purposes does the job just fine.

I've been wondering about this too -- why don't I hear more about the Rage Tail Shad? I've found them to be dynamite in slop that would foul up a buzzbait blade, and they seem to have at least some of the same drawing power. I like the Rage Toad, too

Navionics!

I think after so many decades of plastics that wiggle or flap on the retrive, there's a suspicion that if a bait doesn't do that it won't catch fish. The Ned Rig reminds me of nothing so much as the old Berkley studies with craw baits that showed bass would make the most strikes to plastic craw bodies when all the claws, legs, and other appendages were removed. IIRC, they didn't think anglers would buy something like that, so they didn't produce one for sale.

I wouldn't call it "needing a break" so much as temporarily losing the struggle for control of my life against all the other activities waiting in the wings to take over -- hiking, backpacking, biking, brewing, whitewater, landscaping and yardwork, concerts, movies...not to mention social life and family obligations and work... If I ever actually feel the need to take a break from a particular hobby, it means I probably really, REALLY need to take break now for my own health and sanity; otherwise I'd never get to that point.

If the art of catching bass was so simple that you could learn enough in three weeks to always catch fish, of good sizes, everywhere, most of us would probably be bored with it by now. One of the main things you'll need to work on is finding where the fish are in your waters, and understanding why they are there and what they're doing. How deep are they? What are they feeding on? What kinds of cover or structure features are they relating to? And, understand, sometimes the bass are just going to win no matter what you do.

Some baits really are poor quality, but nothing wrong with the ones you mentioned - Strike-king and Booyah tend to be excellent quality for the price, and I think everyone should have a rebel craw and an arbogast jitterbug somewhere in the tackle box.

I haven't tried the crazy legs, but I use the regular chigger craws all the time on a basic texas rig. The claws flap nicely with a little bit of movement. To be honest, though, most craw baits I've tried are pretty effective on a texas rig; I have a few favorites, but I haven't really noticed consistent differences in production. I don't intentionally wait to set the hook, but I'm usually fishing from a sitting position low on the water, on a kayak, and to get a good hookset I usually take a split second to reel down and turn my body to a better angle.

Wow! looks like a standard aglia blade. Pretty cool. interesting to see a swivel on the line tie, since Mepps have been advising for years (oddly, in my opinion) not to use swivels or snap-swivels with their in-lines.

I caught my first buzzbait fish ever this year on a 1/4 white/chartreuse cavitron. I've had buzzbaits of various kinds in my tacklebox for years, and would try them occasionally but never had any success. This year, I targeted buzzbaits as one of the lures/rigs I was going to work on, bought a couple cavitrons on the recommendations of people here, and I've had one tied on everywhere I go. I'm not throwing them constantly, but I've gotten to the point where, if I end up in a good position to buzz past some nice cover several times, especially if it's early or late, or a little cloudy, I'll go for it. and I've discovered I can get at least a blow-up pretty often by being more persistent than I used to be.

My wife went fishing with me exactly once, when we were dating, almost 20 years ago. She, her dad, her grandpa, and I, all in a little boat, puttin' the hurt on some bluegill and sunfish. She had fun, but has never expressed the slightest interest in doing it again, with any of us. Nowadays, when I fish with somebody else, it is with her dad and her uncle more than anyone, and with them it's always for walleye and crappie, never bass (although I always have a few texas rigs and topwaters to ready to throw to likely largemouth targets -- they just shake their heads when I catch one...they don't get it, and probably never will).

x2.

I have been using 1/8oz all summer at depths varying from 5 to 20 feet, and haven't yet felt a pressing need to change to anything lighter or heavier. I love this rig -- I grew up fishing a river for channel cats with live bait on a splitshot rig (with actual splitshot); caught all kinds of stuff with it, including my first ever bass, a smallie, on it. So the mojo version feels very intuitive to me. One problem we often had with the old splitshot rig was fish swallowing the hook. I used to think that was just the live bait, and probably was, to an extent. But my first couple times I tried the cylindrical-weight mojo rig with plastic baits, I noticed the fish were still getting very deep-hooked. I realized this might be because the weight was pegged, and maybe fish were taking the bait but not moving the weight, and I would only feel the strike when the weight moved. So I changed it to a "slip shot", with the weight freely-sliding ahead of a rubber bobber stop --I can now feel fish pull on the line even if they don't move the weight. And that has seemed to fix the problem for the most part. So here's my question: Is there a reason to peg the weight itself instead of letting it slide freely ahead of a stopper?