Surfcaster

I have a Bill Dance "Dancin' Lessons" tape from 1986 that I still watch and in that tape he said studies have shown that LMB develop no memory from being caught on a plastic worm. He called it the non memory bait. For other hard baits the bass will go two weeks before striking the same bait again. I do not know what studies he is talking about but if Bill Dance said it, it is good enough for me.

Our small club tournament starts at "Safe Light".

I know you will be fine with straight braid with no leader. I believe the fish do not care what color your line is or that it is attached to something they want to eat. Most bites are reaction strikes and there is enough broken off line floating in the lakes or hung on the bottom that the fish probably think it is part of the natural landscape.

Definitely switch to braid. 40-65lb.

x2

You may need a separate battery for cranking and engine operation. I do not own a boat but the people I fish with have more than one battery running their boat. Even the smaller fishing boats have more than one battery.

I don't know the size of the pond you are talking about, but I grew up on land with a pond about 1.5 acres and currently have a pond around .5 acre and I can tell you ponds this size go through cycles. I think it has to do with the food available to the bass. We had an enormous amount of small bluegill and shiners in my current pond a long time ago. Just drop a small hook with a piece of worm and you had a fish. You could also catch .5 to 1lb bass at times. Then for a year and a half the bass shut down. Then all the shiners were gone and the small bluegill. Then you started catching bigger panfish and then the bass started biting and they were all over 3lbs. Now the fish have normalized in my opinion for a .5 acre pond. I also believe you should harvest some fish every now and then. This is just my experience with owning ponds. A river otter got in our bigger pond one time and that thing cleaned house. We debated shooting it but the kids enjoyed watching it play. One day it was gone and so was the fish.

I have run into this same thing. In 1980 I got a Daiwa Procaster for my 11th birthday (after a year of nagging my parents). I wanted one because Bill Dance fished with Procasters. About 3 years later I felt I needed to take it apart and clean it. It never was the same. So I continued to take it apart and fiddle with it over the next few years. I lost a couple of parts and it wound up on the shelf for 20+ years. A year ago I had a local tackle store go through it and clean and install the lost parts, cost $20. Works great (for a baitcaster without 10+ bearings and only one method of spool brake). I still take my reels apart for general maintenance and I am much better now about getting things back together than I was when I was 14, but I make sure I have an exploded diagram of my reels and separate the parts to make sure they go back in the correct place.

I received one of those cooling towels as a gift last year and I keep it wet and on my head with my hat. It does a good job keeping me cool during summer tournaments or just working outside in the yard.

There was an article by Ish Monroe on the Bassmaster website a few years ago where he talked about how the straight shank hook was better than the EWG. It was not in that article but I think I also read where he prefers a hook with no offset. Just a plain ole' J hook. I am not a big Ish fan, but he made me rethink my hook choice. The big EWGs look impressive but can result in lost fish.

I like fishing line topics, even if it has been beat to death, because everybody has to use fishing line and every body has their opinions. I like Stren mono Clear/blue fluorescent. I do have braid on a couple of reels: Power Pro yellow on one and green on the other. I like to see my line. I was fishing in my canoe and a bass boat was about 100 yards away and I could see his line. Very high vis yellow, I mean it was like it had electricity running through it. He was pitching jigs. When he got close I asked him about his line and he said it was 30lb mono. I asked about the high visibility and he said, "do you think the fish care about the color of your line; I am looking for a reaction strike and the bass don't have time to see the line nor do they care." I think there is enough fishing line floating in the water or hung on the bottom that fish may come to think it is part of the natural landscape.

As a youngster in the early 70's I only fished in ponds and the local river, the only 2 colors I would fish would be black or purple. I did not see the need for any other colors because that is what the old timers always fished. As I got older and began to fish lakes more, I noticed most anglers using soft plastics are using some form of green. I try to use black or purple at times but I always wind up with a green pumpkin or watermelon because it just seems to work better. There is one lake nearby that a black/blue Senko will get some bites, so I get to use black with confidence sometimes.

Maybe he had an overstock of red worms and needed to move them.... I love the red colored baits; I have a pack of strawberry Jelly worms that I like to open up, look at and smell. The problem is if you are fishing the lakes around here (east/central NC) with soft plastics, the green colors just seem to work better.

I have a tape of the old American Sportsman outdoor show with Curt Gowdy. Curt and Sir Laurence Olivier was fishing for Tiger fish on a river in Botswana, Africa. In his British accent Sir Laurence said to Curt, "I've put my bait in 5 times already and caught nothing. Is that normal." Curt replied, "That's fishing." I have confidence that my stuff works, maybe not at a particular time and I have been around really good fishermen who will "zero" at times. When I am skunked, which seems a lot, I keep fishing.

When I was young (5 or 6) back in 1974 or so, my uncle gave me a jitterbug and told me this will only catch fish when the sun is going down or at night. 7 or so years later an article in Outdoor Life magazine opened my eyes to a new world of top water when the sun is high.

A friend of mine met Dean Rojas in Florida and asked him advice about top water baits, specifically frogs, and Rojas told him to use braid with no leader. He took that advice and his top water hook up rate has improved.

On the lakes around here, Jordan and Shearon Harris, green, brown, black and blue are the colors that dominate the tackle boxes and bags of the heavy hitters.

"There he is." And if I think it's a good fish, I usually follow it up with a Roland Martin, "SON."

It is Pen and Paper for me. When I'm fishing I use a pencil, because ink will smear if wet. I jot notes down if I must during a trip/tournament. When I get home, I recount the trip and record it in a notebook. One of the things I try to do is to note the weather forecast for the day and then note what the weather actually did. I also note my initial strategy, if it worked or not and if I changed strategy during the tournament and why. There is a good article in the Bass Resource archives about a fisherman who has won many tournaments and has kept detailed records of his trips.

I own a BPS Johnny Morris signature baitcast reel and a Daiwa Tatula. I fish in club tournaments and these reels perform flawlessly. They are better reels than I am a caster. I can only imagine how they would do in the hands of a professional. I also have a Pro Qualifier and 2 older ABU Ambassadeurs. They work great but are not quite on the level of the JM or Tatula.

I usually place a few soft plastics of the same color in a ziplock bag and add a few drops of Kick'n Bass to the bag the night before I fish. I also use Spike It garlic dip on the tails of some plastics. My fishing partner uses Bang attractant and he does quite well. It may be in my mind but I think scent and dip makes a difference. When my Kick'n Bass is used up, I will probably try Mega Strike.

We have a Cabela's and Bass Pro in the Raleigh/Cary area. I have been to the Cabela's outside Atlanta off I-75 and was not impressed, however, they had just opened and may not have been fully prepared. I noticed they had Stratos bass boats which BPS owns. I enjoy looking around at the "Big Box" tackle stores but I rarely purchase anything there. It gives me the opportunity to touch and feel a wide variety of rods and reels. I have found local tackle stores prices to be close to BPS and online stores regularly beat BPS prices

I would vote canoe. But it fits my fishing situation. I have an Old Town Tripper and we can fit 3 people (me and my 2 sons) if we have to. To those with outriggers on their canoes, do they get in the way when bringing in a fish. I have considered them on my canoe.

"The Larry Sanders Show" is one of my favorite shows. The behind the scenes look at late night talk shows made for great episodes. Also his early comedic stand up work is some of the best around. He will be sadly missed.

Big Carolina fan here. Oklahoma over Villanova and Heels over Syracuse. I have reservations about Carolina's ability to beat Oklahoma (or Villanova should they beat Oklahoma) in the championship game. If Carolina plays their "A" game for 40 minutes they are the best in the country, but OK or Nova' will be awfully hard to beat if Carolina starts out slow.