MIbassyaker

I will sometimes stop at the river on the way home from work for 30 minutes. On-foot shore access points are a little bit out of the way, but if I know I'll have some extra time I'll toss a rod in the car with my tackle backpack, which is always stocked some basic baits and ready to go. I've done this occasionally for trout as well, as there are a few trout streams in the area too (although less successfully; I am not much of a troutmaster).

And here's a guide from State of Michigan, drawings rather than photos, but good summary and descriptions of the main plants around here: https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/egle/Documents/Programs/WRD/ANC/common-aquatic-plants-michigan.pdf?rev=516b7eea06ee4cf7abc58745b146fd9a

It's hard to tell -- milfoil tends to collapse when out of water and it kind of looks like it's doing that, even with all the algae, while coontail usually holds its shape better. Coontail also tends to branch more and gives sort of a "christmas tree" look in the water.

3lber, best of 9 this morning, and only 2 that were keeper-sized. Zoom Ultravibe speed worm.

This is interesting. I may try it. I'm very guilty of poor-quality pictures.

Very nicely organized -- I admire your discipline. I've got stuff semi-haphazardly packed into plano boxes, crates, trays, and bags on four shelves that take up half of a closet in my office room....and then a few boxes of misc. stuff I've never gotten around to finding a home for.

Heads up -- St. Clair is 7 days away. I only know this because I got the email from Rapala about my prize package from the Sabine event: $50 store credit online + a %30 off coupon. And I thought, "hey, isn't it about time for the next one?". And sure enough --one week away.

For long-term storage I use both the Plano stowaway boxes and the square hanging boxes. I just sort by weight (1/4, 3/8, 1/2, etc) and blade style (willow, indiana, colorado, etc). For short-term on the water use, I grab a few and put them in a pocket of a tackle bag or pack. Some spinnerbaits spend most of a season tied on or in a pack, while others languish in a Plano Box until I call them up. Some have never seen the water but hope to, some day...

Interesting. Looks like an update on the old Rage Shad. https://www.strikeking.com/en/shop/soft-baits/rgshd

Vertical vs. horizontal was emphasized a lot by Al and Ron Lindner of In-Fisherman years ago. I have always found their method very intuitive, and it is how I also tend to think about breaking things down -- start with two factors: (1) top vs. middle vs. bottom of the water column, and (2) horizontal vs. vertical (or stationary) presentation. Then, experiment further with additional factors like size, profile, speed, and (last) color. Using this scheme, I would classify the grub and crankbait as middle/horizontal (unless you were crawling them right on the bottom, which would be bottom/horizontal). I would classify the worm as vertical/bottom, under the assumption that it falls to the bottom before you move it. (unless it was hit mid-column before it hit the bottom). "middle/horizontal" is the classic swimming/moving bait presentation. it can be fished fast, covering a lot of area. If bass are active, chasing, and keying in on baitfish, they will hit this kind of presentation. Given this produced 4 of your 5 fish, I would have stuck with mid-column swimming presentations and experimented with retrieve speed, changes in speed and direction, pauses and such. Maybe tried adjusting size and profile (fat vs. long and skinny). Vertical presentations that hit the bottom, hop, or crawl almost always can get a bass if you hit the right spot. But they are slow, and it's hard to find the right location, so they are not very time-efficient unless you know that's what bass are going for. This can be the most productive if bass are hunkered down and less willing to chase. This produced 1 of your 5 fish, so don't ignore it completely, but maybe come back to it if the moving bait bite slows. Experiment with speed and size. You didn't have any action on top. I often start out trying topwater, but I will also give up on it pretty quicky if I don't see any evidence bass are willing to attack the surface. But If clouds roll in or I find shade somewhere, i might try again.

Congrats! It's so satisfying to catch them on one of your own creations!

I've caught bass on the 110, 90, and 75, and like most people, I fished them a lot when each of those models came out, but much less now. The biggest problem I've found is not so much that bass have stopped hitting them entirely (although probably less), but that, in most situations, I find there is some other bait that pretty clearly a better choice. For instance, summer vegetation is a real problem with the tail, and even the tiniest bit of grass ruins the retrieve. Buzzbaits and frogs are much better options in that case. In more open water, a popper or walking bait is usually better in my experience (or a crawler, like a jitterbug or pompadour). Unless a whopper plopper is going to draw strikes when other things aren't, there doesn't seem much reason to use them. The one time and place I still use them regularly is in rivers, and I've been using the 75 exclusively. I fished one for the first time this year yesterday and caught 2 bass (1 good one)...and 3 pike. And that's the other problem: They seem to attract pike and bowfins as much or more than they attract bass.

The gilding is a reflection from the bright orange kayak!

It was time for a river float trip. A few decent bronzies showed up: A few more that didn't get a board pic -- 15", 17.5" & 18.5": All but one of the bigger fish hit this "Crawdaddy" rage menace grub on a title shot head: A Whopper Plopper 75 produced The 17.5", along with three pike, including one that must have been around 30", maybe more (I don't take them out of the water unless I need to - better for them and me) There were dozen or so smaller bass as well on the menace, whopper plopper, senko, and tiny torpedo.

Well, the more colors you create, the more names you have to think up. And the more colors you have that are similar in hue (e.g., shades of "green"), the harder it is to come up with clearly descriptive names that don't get confused. So giving them distinctive names that can be told apart becomes more important for sales than having a descriptive name. (And yes, "California 420" is a marijuana reference.)

From this time of year until about mid-september, rivers are the real juice. Metabolism is up, the food-chain is exploding, water is low & bass are concentrated, and current keeps them cool and oxygenated. Great time for bank-hopping, wading, or floating a river. Many rivers have better and more numerous bass -- both lm and sm -- than a lot of people realize, and they are often underfished.

Yes. Deep weedlines occur at the deepest spots that enough sunlight can penetrate to the bottom for plantgrowth. Usually a dropoff or slope to deeper water where the weedgrowth just ends. With pondweeds/cabbage and milfoils, you often get a "wall" of vegetation coming up to, or nearly to, the surface that faces deeper, more open water. In the lakes around here, this is usually around 8 to 17 feet of depth, depending on water clarity. This a classic summer pattern in northern natural lakes, where many largemouth (though not all, of course) will decamp to this area as a "summer home", using it as hiding/feeding/resting spot. Being "object-oriented", they naturally gravitate toward changes and transition points, so will often be found right on the line of weeds, just inside, or just outside, and at varying depths.

I did well with a bunch of techniques, but a few stand out. During the prespawn, I crushed them shallow on a weightless Yamamoto DShad. Once post-spawners started showing up, there has been a transtion to topwaters (buzzbait and frog) and texas rigged creatures either pitched to shallow cover, or worked along the deep weedline, around 8-15'. Broke my PB twice, once dragging a t-rigged lizard on 15' deep shelf, and once pitching a Rage Tail Space Monkey into thick shoreline spatterdock. That's for largemouth. I've only caught 4 smallmouth so far and haven't had much chance to target them yet. Hoping to get on the rivers for some more bronze over the next month. I'm expecting a popper, rage menace, 3-4" keitech, and senko should do well.

Every jig I pitch or cast, I swim back for part of the retrieve. I tend to think bodies of water are so individual that the only way to find out if a jig pattern is effective is to experiment with it. Water environments are different from place to place based on clarity, stain, substrate, types of vegetation, rock, wood, and other kinds of cover, natural or manmade. Therefore, the color shades, hues and tints present in the water can vary immensely from one body of water to another. Baitfish and crayfish tend to take on the colors of their surroundings. Thus the colors that best mimic a crayfish, bluegill, shad, or shiner could actually be quite different in one place compared to another. So you should never feel weird about trying something off the beaten path for your own waters.

I looove making my own skirt patterns, but I much prefer to let Mike do the powder painting, and just buy the painted heads. Get the skirt-making tool thing from Fishingskirts and use it with rubber collars. Once you put the skirt on the jighead, tie some wire above the collar. Eventually, the rubber collar will rot and fall off, but the wire tie will stay.

Eh. I'll let you guys try them all out and in a year you can tell me what's good.

I am at peace these days, secure in the understanding that I probably don't need to master every single lure or technique. I view all lures and presentation techniques as potential solutions to one or more fishing problems. But they are almost never the only solution to any problem, nor are they guaranteed to be the best or most efficient solution to that problem. Many lures and techniques I do not use often because they are simply unsuited to the biggest problems I tend to face on the water, or I have other options that already solve those problems effectively. I don't drop shot very often because I rarely encounter any situation where suspending a mostly motionless small bait off the bottom vertically is the best way to get bites. I rarely use lipless crankbaits because most of the vegetation I fish around cannot be effectively "ripped" through without a sturdier platform than my kayak (I actually find floating-diving crankbaits a lot more useful around vegetation) I try new things when I can see how they might solve a problem I have faced. If successful, then great. I'll probably add them to my repertoire. If unsuccessful, my interest in continuing to use or "master" them depends a lot on how big or frequent the problem is, and whether I have other solutions.

The best candidate for my "home water" is not technically my most frequently-visited, but one that offers the widest range of experiences and largest variety of environments and habitats I get to enjoy on a regular basis. It is the body of water that is both the the closest to home, and the farthest away that I fish: The Grand River. The Grand is Michigan's longest river, at 252 miles, flowing mostly east to west, and emptying into Lake Michigan. I have floated, paddled, bank-fished, or waded much of it's lower 100 miles. The closest access point is 7 minutes from my house. The farthest I visit with any regularity is about an hour away. Of all species of fish known to swim in the state of Michigan, about 2/3 can be found in the Grand at lest some part of the year. Tournaments are held pretty frequently all summer in the lower sections, and KVD has said that the Lower Grand was one of his favorite places in the state to fish tournaments when he was coming up. However, if anything, it remains underfished for bass for much of its length. Upstream of downtown Grand Rapids, the Grand is a classic smallmouth river, with rocky substrate, and alternating riffles and runs. Downstream, it widens and slows, approaching Lake Michigan, and merges into a network of swampy backwaters and flooded creek mouths (the bayous), with acres and acres of weedy, brushy largemouth habitat. How does it rate? That's complicated. Trying to compare the Grand River of Michigan to Lake Fork or The Delta or Mille Lacs or Okeechobee ...or "Lake Mederchuck" for that matter is silly, so I won't. The Grand not a "destination". It's easy to get skunked, as there's a lot there's a lot of unproductive water and the fish move around a lot. There is no consistent, clearly identifiable lair of giants, although quite a few master angler qualifying bass (21" and up), both largemouth and smallmouth, are pulled out of there every year, all along the lower sections. The most common experience is to catch "a few" - maybe even "a bunch"- that are "pretty good". Pick the right place at the right time, and you could have a 50+ fish day, mostly keepers with multiple over 4lb. And for this area, that's pretty great. Ultimately, as someone who likes variety and challenge, wants to avoid crowds and have a good chance of catching some nice fish, with a reasonable chance at a PB, and all close to home, I have to give it 5/5.

Green pumpkin - purple (my favorite for weedy clear water) PBJ (Dark Pumpkin - Purple; favorite for darker, less-weedy water) Watermelon - brown - chartreuse (kind of a variation on "summer craw"; I like it in murkier, algae-stained water) Amber/Pumpkin - brown - orange (favorite for clear rocky rivers)