MIbassyaker

Did I hear somebody say "grass lake"?

Bizz Baits is a familiar name here if you've been around for awhile -- they were a site sponsor a number of years ago when they were smaller and had just a few plastic options. I have been ordering from them off and on ever since; it's great to see how they've grown and expanded. The owner, Brian, started the company based on a college business class project, and won a start-up competition with it. I don't know anyone who has more consistently-clean laminate color patterns.

No, is that where you were/are? I though maybe the Platte. There are so many rivers all up and down the lake Michigan coast. To float I need to recruit the spouse for a car shuffle, and she's not really into it. So I'm limited to closer places where it's minimal inconvenience. And we don't get up north very often.

I was just thinking about this, because I used a whopper plopper again last Sunday for the first time in 2 years and caught my three biggest fish on it for that trip. It is possible bass in some places have either undergone avoidance learning to the whopper plopper from being caught, or catchable bass have been selected out by harvest or mortality -- these would be the main mechanisms of reduced catch rates due to "fishing pressure". Generally, anything bass perceive as unnaturally-distinctive should be vulnerable to pressure -- the more they can tell the difference between it and typical food, the easier they will learn to avoid it. This is presumably why Spinnerbait effectiveness has appeared to wax and wane over time (Just google "are spinnerbaits dead?"), while things like worms, jigs and grubs really haven't. But in order for an effect of pressure like this to be really noticeable for the WP, a very large percentage of bass in fishery would have to be affected in the short time the Whopper Plopper has been really popular... and that seems implausible to me except in small, very heavily-fished waters. The size and speed of the drop in effectiveness people are reporting seems to me unrealistic to be due entirely to fishing pressure. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who have never found the WP very productive at all. They tried it, never had much success, and have never really understood the hype. And then there are people like me who often catch "a few" with it, who use it situationally, but have never had any of these big blow-out days where bass are jumping on it every other cast, and haven't really noticed any change in effectiveness. Some of the waters I fish get more pressure than others, but none are "untouched". And it happens that those where i have had the most success with the WP are among the more pressured. This leads me to think we're mostly dealing with something that is more perception than reality -- in particular, an instance of Regression to the Mean. Initially when the WP became popular, some people did really well, some did not, but mostly due to random factors. The big successes got a lot of attention (helped along by Chris Lane's Toledo Bend win), the failures did not, creating the perception of something more "magic" than it really was, and the WP blew up. But because of the law of averages, random variations cancel themselves out over time, and those who did really well with the WP initially have just came down to earth, as they should if initial successes were due in a large part to healthy contributions of random chance. And if you never had success with the WP initially, you wouldn't be fishing it now. So the opportunity to observe random swings of changing success in the other direction does not arise. I would bet what people are experiencing here is maybe some fishing pressure, but only on top of a larger degree of regression toward the mean. Unless you're in small, heavily fished waters.

Huh. Never tried them.

Whatever it is, I'm not doing it.

Midsummer West-Central Michigan River Float Edition... The Grand: The Flat: The Thornapple:

I put oval split rings on walking topwaters.

Here are some data that give perspective on the rarity of a 7-pounder in the North: Michigan has a tournament registration and reporting system that releases data every year on catch results across the state: https://www.michigan.gov/dnr/things-to-do/fishing/fishing-tournament-information-system While tournaments are of course only a small snapshot of bass fishing (e.g., not all waters, not all anglers fish tournaments, not all catches are weighed, etc.), the system gets a ton of data on many of the more popular waters, and we can use these data to see what our expectations for sizes should be for a reasonably-skilled angler. Looking at the summary reports over the last 4 years, 434,644 bass were weighed in tournaments, including 339961 (78%) Largemouth and 94682 (22%) Smallmouth. In weigh tournaments, average largest bass weighed was a high 3lb-er each year (3.77lb-3.9lb), while length tournaments the big bass was 18.56-18.85 inches. 18" or 3# is really a pretty a good fish up here! A total of 16542 bass weighed were 4lb or 20 inches, or more. That is, only 3.8% of the TOP 5 bass weighed/measured by anglers/teams in tournaments statewide were above the 4lb/20 inch mark. And while there are a number of 6lbers reported each year, there were exactly 7 bass over 7lb, and 5 bass over 8lb . That's 12 bass over 7lb, statewide, over 4 years, among 400k+ bass weighed, and who knows how many more caught. And of course some of those larger fish were goby-stuffed smallmouth on St. Clair & the Great lakes, rather than inland largemouth. They don't exactly grow on trees!

River float today, as I was itching to catch some smallmouth. I chose a river section I hadn't yet fished or paddled before: And wouldn't you know it, the first bass was green --a 16"er who took a whopper plopper 75. Everything after that was bronze, though. A handful of 14-15"s were very interested in a rage tail menace grub: But the best of the day was this 17", another WP fish: Actually, two this size on the WP, but the other wriggled overboard before I could snap a pic. 10 total, a few nice ones -- all I can ask for in a new location. Pretty good day.

Now it's a merry-go-under ?

Well, I haven't had much of a "season". I missed the last 4 events in the wake of work and home obligations, some international travel, and other distractions. But I'm back in the saddle this weekend! I have 4 fishing today, along with the leader -- Palaniuk, Christie, Ito, Mullins.

River floats are so much fun, I wish I could do them more often. Might get my chance Sunday down here, a couple hours south of you, on a stretch that hopefully won't have too much weekend traffic.

Overheard at a launch, while I'm loading or unloading 5-6 rods into one small kayak --- PERSON: "Wow that's a lot of rods. Do you catch more fish with more rods? Hahaha." ME: "Well, they don't catch much if I leave them at home" PERSON: "..."

Power Worm finds a pair of 18"s hanging out on the weedline, around 12 feet: 3.38lb and 2.93lb respectively, best of 7 this morning

I would be willing to bet the difficulty has very little to do with lure choice and lure noise, and much more to do with not finding and hitting productive spots. If you're stuck on the bank, you usually have to move around frequently to be successful, stay low and stealthy, and choose your casts carefully. You're much more likely to be spooking fish by casting a looming shadow than by using a noisy lure. Bass can tell the difference between different sounds; a vibrating chatterbait sounds like food to them; it doesn't really sound like danger. I would think more about what kind of spots do you choose to cast to? What is there to hold fish? How long do you try one spot before moving on to another? How deep are you fishing, and how fast? How close to the bottom? I would worry about those things first before splitting hairs over the exact lure type or color or noise. Is there vegetation, sunken trees and laydowns, or hard cover like docks, rocks or riprap? In murky water, bass will often stay very close to cover elements like these. If there is a lot of cover right on the shoreline, bass could be right there, much closer and shallower than you may think. You can cover the bases pretty well with 2 or 3 baits -- something you can fish vertically, at multiple depths or on the bottom (jig, texas rig, ned rig), and something you can fish horizontally, through an area or past multiple spots (crankbait, spinnerbait). In murky water, I like bright colors, like chartreuses and oranges, but it tends to matter less what the lure looks like than in clear water.

See, this is why I never take selfies

I was expecting a typical midsummer morning of topwater & plastics. That turned out to be a little bit right, but mostly wrong. 3 hours in, I had gotten exactly three bites: a couple of buzzbait dinks and a 2lb frog fish: I had seen basically no surface activity. But nobody wanted a worm or jig on the bottom either, at any depth. Nor a senko, a flipping craw, a chatterbait...what to do? A warm, sunny, dead calm July morning doesn't exactly scream "spinnerbait" to me, but why not? Maybe the sun flashing on the blade could get me a reaction bite or two... Well, that did it - the SB produced 8 more bass over the next hour before I had to leave, all keeper size (14") or bigger including this 2.30lb and 3.00lb: (That's a 3/8oz Pepper Baits Bleeding Bluegill gold double willow...today's hero) When in doubt, try something out!

Wowza! The power worm strikes again -- congrats!

Finally, after a month of obligations and other distractions, I was able to get back out this morning, and was greeted within three casts by this 4.59lb, who could not resist a Duo Pencil 100: Unfortunately, most of its friends had no trouble resisting anything I threw for the next 4 1/2 hours, aside from four others in the 12"-13" range. At one point a juvenile loon showed up and hung around my area for awhile. Eventually a parent (I assume) swooped in, warbling, and promptly escorted it away:

For the past 10 years or so I've kept track of a little more than 40 bodies of water in my area that I spend time on, and fish in sort of a rotation. I've been recording catch rates and sizes of bass per hour of effort on each one. Any place where I don't catch bass of some quantity or quality, I have tended to stop visiting. But of all the places I've been more than once, the one lake where I have the lowest catch rate per hour, and where have been skunked the most often, is also the one with the highest average size -- it's also my second most-visited.

This 4.18lb slurped a pumpkinseed Pop Max a little after dawn this morning. Best of 8 before I had to go at 10am.

All soft plastics outing? Not at all unheard of. Starting Lineup: GYCB Senko, weightless, t-rigged GYCB Hula Grub + 1/4oz Title shot jig Keitech Swing Impact fat + 1/4oz Owner flashy swimmer Rage Space Monkey, t-rigged, 1/4oz bullet Zoom Trick Worm, 1/8oz Owner finesse ball head. Coming off the bench: Rage Cut-R worm Zoom Super Fluke Zoom Lizard 7" Berkely power worm 4" Berkley power worm Ned Rig (Z-man TRD)