MIbassyaker

I will say what I always say to threads like this: It is a sign of humane virtue to be disturbed when confronted with the fact that your angling activities have harmed a fish. Congratulate yourself for your ethical sensitivity, and consider making a donation of some of your time, influence, or money to a conservation effort or fund. Compensate for what you've taken by giving back.

Best bass is still my first fish of the year, from back in early May: a little over 4lb (best estimate, given the reliability of my old scale)

Depends on the proof.

I do not doubt sonar would be a great friend, if I had one!

Rightly or wrongly, I tend to abandon the middle of the water column mid-summer. Topwaters and bottom-draggers/hoppers: poppers, propbaits, and toads (plastic body rigged weedless) over and around pads and other emergent vegetation. Or a big texas-rigged worm on the bottom. But my real goal is to not have any more go-to lures. Or rather, to get to a point where everything is a go-to lure depending on location and situation. There are some lures and rigs I have had persistent difficulty with for a long time. Buzzbaits and jigs (of all things), for instance. I've also had a hard time getting the hang of dropshot. And I almost never know when I should be using a deep-running crankbait, if at all. So I've been trying to find ways to use these more.

See, here is something a lot of my friends don't understand. "Oh, you should go fishing with so-and-so..." No, sorry. I don't need a play date. Lots of people fish socially, but that's not what I do it for.

I have zero interest in fishing large lakes, and almost all my fishing nowadays is done from a kayak on natural lakes a couple hundred acres or less, or on relatively wild stretches of rivers and streams. The less development the better. If other people are around, I'd rather be elsewhere. The good thing is, there are literally hundreds of different waters I can fish within an hour's drive of my house and I have not come remotely close to trying them all. I try out a few new ones every summer -- some are boom, some are bust, but even the busts are worth it. The bad thing is, I live in a well-populated area and virtually every body of water with public access gets at least moderate traffic unless it's well hidden or hard to get to. So I fish mornings from before sunup to 11 or so almost exclusively. I have found even some lakes with heavy rec use are completely empty early.

I've had channel cats hit in-line spinners, crankbaits and grubs on jigheads. More recently, though, it's been Bowfin going after my shallow running cranks.

Beautiful fish, wolfy

Generally I think keeping them sealed in pack is better than a box, so If I buy new plastics in thier own pack, I keep them in the pack. But I've also accumulated a lot of miscellaneous plastics from buckets, grab bags and bargain bins, and these I put in tackle boxes organized roughly by size and type with similar colors combined in the same tray.

Do you think the length of the beard matters? Seems like the longer ones would have better action, but might get hung up more often.

I don't doubt they see hooks -- they see quite well, after all. I just don't see any reason to expect them to be shy of hooks. They're not picky eaters, after all, and they don't "know" what a hook is.

I'm also in MI, but farther south than A-Jay. Most of the lakes I fish have about 5-6 foot visibility, some twice that or more. I frequently use up to 50lb braid around weeds and I have no problem getting bass to strike lures tied on directly. I think about it this way: bass that live around weeds are surrounded by all kinds of stalks, stems, tendrils and other fibers of vegetation. They hunt food in and around and through this stuff every day. To them, even if they see fishing line, it probably just registers as another tendril of vegetation that's in the way.

Densely-packed lily pads are a goldmine. Big bass sit under there all day. Get you a hollow-bodied frog, and some soft plastics you can throw weedless unweighted or weighted, senko, fluke, trick worm, beaver...whatever. Run the frog over top and watch for blowups as you cross small spaces and holes between pads. If you can't hook up with the frog, immediately throw the other bait into the same hole. Braided line is ideal for this.

I still have an old one of those in the craw pattern! A great lure, and one of my favorites from childhood. I haven't used it in years, but back in the day, it was good for bass and the occasional river walleye, and on at least one occasion, a particularly ambitious perch. I also recall it survived a close call with a pike, my brother and I having just barely gotten the little monster onto the dock before it cut the line. Out of curiosity, I just checked ebay listings -- yeah, there really are quite a few available.

The Department of Natural Resources for your state. It goes by a slightly different name and initials in different places, but it's the main public body that regulates fish and game in your state --they're the ones who make the rules and sell you the license.

I use junebug a lot on worms and creature baits right at sunrise -- a dark profile, winking through the gloom as the first rays of the sun catch on that greenish flake...

If the fish is a goner, keep it, eat it for dinner, and save the life of a chicken instead. Killing fish bothers me too when I am unable or unwilling to eat them. But literally everything you and I do in our lives has an impact on some members of some species, somewhere. If you take up space, eat food, move around, and use energy, here in the world, you are --directly and indirectly-- causing death and injury to untold numbers of wild and domesticated animals every day. The life of a sport fish, especially one that is not a member of an endangered species, is not special in this regard. Occasionally killing and seriously injuring a fish is simply an unavoidable cost of fishing, in the similar way that occasional roadkill is an unavoidable cost of driving. It's alright to feel bad, but don't apologize for your angling activities; instead, consider compensating by giving something back: donate some of your time and money to conservation efforts; A little environmental cleanup and habitat restoration can save the lives of countless organisms, more than making up for the few lives of bass you've taken here and there.

What is there to be confused about? The OP is (1) astonished and delighted by the effectiveness of the rig, cobbled together on a whim, and (2) is asking for thoughts on interpretation of why it worked. In any case, the identity of the blind squirrel matters! If it is the fish, then any other ridiculous-looking rig may have randomly worked just as well. If it is the angler, then the OP has perhaps stumbled upon a pattern!

1-4 twitches at a time, moving about a foot each twitch, interspersed with pauses of a few seconds. Typically faster than a popper, but you can fish it as slow as a popper also.

Who is the blind squirrel in this analogy? The fish or the angler?

I started keeping a spreadsheet log a few years ago when I moved to MI. I do it to help keep track of basic location, seasonal, weather, and pattern information on the dozens of (mostly small, natural) lake and river systems near me that I've fished....which differ in clarity, vegetation and other cover, forage, competitor species, and fishing pressure, but otherwise are often superficially similar. Now, you might ask, how often do I actually get useful information out of the log? Do I actually consult it in some way that helps? Kind of, but rather, It is the act of making the log that helps the most -- it is an excuse to organize my thoughts, photos and notes in a systematic way, which improves my memory and my general knowledge of what tends to work, when, and under which circumstances, in my area. Among other things, this helps me make informed guesses when fishing a new lake or river section I haven't been to before, which I try to do a few times every season. I'm also the kind of person who likes making lists and keeping records of things, so there is that, too.

Most: Any plastic bait on a texas rig. Least: Buzzbaits. I don't think I've ever caught a fish on a buzzbait. I'm even throwing them more than usual this year, having just bought a couple Cavitrons on the strength of recommendations by folks here. They're nice... but still, nothin'. Can't get a strike. I must be doing something wrong.

Yeah, if it produced, then by definition it's not dumb. First time I saw a worm on a wacky rig, I thought it looked dumb.

Yeah...but I'm working on it. Good article; thanks.