fishwizzard

I have been fishing 8lb braid on a 1000 Ci4+ all spring and summer. I have to watch for tip wrap when I miss a hookset, but other then that, no problems and good casting distance.

Very nice! I still have yet to catch a snakehead, what did you get him on? And yea, drifting around is annoying. If you are shallow a 6-8' fiberglass tomato stake will work great on most of the soft bottomed spots around here. For deeper water you can make a hillbilly anchor with any weight you can find and just sit on the rope to hold position. It does not work at all in any real wind or current, but it will keep me in the same spot in a breeze.

I have been dipping my toe into BFS stuff and really enjoy it. My main combo is a Phenix PHX682c L/MF rod with a either a Alphas Finesse Custom or a PX68, I am still trying to decide which one I like best. I also have a Kuying Teton UL trout rod and a Loomis CR721 IMX I use with the same reels. The Phenix is about in the middle of the other two rods and it is the one I fish the most often. I generally use it for small weightless/lightly weighted plastics, but also for small hardbaits from time to time. Weight-wise, I usually never go much below 3/16oz or much above 5/16oz. The rod is a hoot and while casting down around the lower limit does challenge my thumb, a DIY spool in either reel makes them both a lot more controllable. I actually had the Phenix out this afternoon to test some new lures. At the end of my time I tied on a 3/8oz jerkbait just to see how the rod could handle it. I whipped it out at random into the lake and this fella was nice enough to bite it. I have caught a few fish with it a bit closer to 3lbs and it handles them very well, the rod bends a ton but once it hits the backbone I can easily turn them and get them in quickly. I was using 8lb floro today and had no issue keeping this on from diving under the dock I was fishing from. I have only had a single stuck fish with this combo, I was pond fishing and cast into cover I had no business casting into with this rod, so I had to wade in to free her. But for open water and light cover, I have total confidence for anything my state can throw at me. I have a ML Majorcraft Go Emotion rod as well. It is a bit softer and a bit more powerful than the Phenix, but they are very close in how they fish. I had bought it for small jerkbaits and other hardbaits, but as it turns out the Phenix covers them well enough to make the MC redundant.

Thanks new best friend! What's your lightest and smallest profile jig? I would love to be able to find a jig+trailer that hits around 3/8oz total weight for a M spinning rod my wife uses.

On the topic of Ned Rig jigheads, I picked up a pack of the new Zman heads the other day, the ones with the ribbed keeper. I am really impressed so far. The keeper lets me thread a half-zinker on with no extra fuss and it seems to hold it very well. I have yet to fish them but I was able to take the plastic off and put it back on a half dozen times and it seemed to be just as tight as when I started. The hooks are still too big and heavy for my taste, but the keep seems like a winner so far.

I do the same thing in my kayak and I just only bring what I think I will reasonably use, plus a few more. I also will take them out and put them back in the clamshell at the end of the day if I remember. Also, some lures seem to be totally fine stored in a vertical box for a day, like I have never had a Rage lure deform from being in a plano. Keitechs get a bit of a tail bend but if you don't jam the compartment full they never seem to get really damaged.

Try the Easy Shiners in the same size and colors you are using now. They are still super soft, but they seem to be a little better then the Swing Impacts in terms of having the nose rip off the hook or the tails being bit off. They are crazy effective lures though, I fish them less often than I should for some reason.

I cannot find the a picture of the Baby Mence next to the full size one. Is the "stem" just shorter, or are the flappers smaller as well? If anyone could post a pick of them side by side I would be their new best friend.

I will be the odd man out who hates the fuji keepers. I fish t-rigged plastics 3/4 of the time and they are awful for that. Whatever this style is is my favorite.

I have a pair of sv105's, a zillion sv tws, and a sv103, all bought in that order. Skip the zillion and go right for the sv103. Other the the spool being a little over braked it is better (for me anyway) in every way then the zillion. It is going to seem heavy as hell compared to the sv105 but it picks up right where that reel leaves off and, as a guy with pretty small hands, palms way way better then I thought it would.

I have just succumbed to dropshot fever and it's all I have been fishing for the last week or three. I to was having a lot of trouble keeping fish on, but with a standard dropshot/wacky hook. Even the bass I landed were never hooked very well. I did some reading and gave the Gamakatsu/Roboworm hooks a try. I have been using the 1/0 and the 2/0 and thus far have landed every fish that has hit the lure. I have even had to start de-barbing the hooks as I was getting a large percentage of fish that were hooked a little too deep for my liking. I have been using 6" Robos almost exclusively and they mate up perfectly with the 2/0 worm hooks. I have some other hooks on order, some Gammie TGW dropshots and some Owner Downshots, but I am happy for now with the Robo hooks.

I almost prefer to throw a spinnerbait into snaggy cover over a jig, I swear they get caught up a lot less and when they do the wire has enough flex to let me pop it free. Has anyone ever made a pitching-specific spinnerbait? Heavy head, large colorado blade to slow the fall, something like that?

Hah, nope, I tossed him right back in.

I will say that a reasonable pair of polarized glasses is a game changer when fishing from the bank. I was amazed how many fish I started catching once I had a chance to see them before they saw me.

My advice is to learn how to put a lure where you want to put it. All the knowledge and gear in the world isn't going to catch you a bass if you can't get the lure where it needs to go. By all means learn as much as you can at the same time, but off the water casting practice will allow you to put that knowledge to use a lot faster and save you some money. Take a 5g paint bucket lid or something like that and put it like 20' out and cast at it until you can hit it every time, or at least until you can understand why you didn't hit it on a specific cast. Then move it back 10' and do it again. Keep moving it back until you are missing more than hitting, then move it back closer in until are hitting almost all the time again. It is a lot easier to find 30 min to cast in the yard then a few hours to hit the water.

I fished for the first time when I was like 35. I do event setup work and often my bigger shows end up with a day or two at the very end where I do is stand around and watch other people work. The official name is "subcontractor management", but mostly I am there to wave to the client and fill out forms if a forklift hits a truck or vice versa. It's a pretty sweet gig, but it can be super super dull if you are stuck somewhere with no/poor internet and hours in the sun to keep yourself entertained. We don't (usually) sub out to idiots so rarely is there ever an issue and as no one ever likes working with their client looking over their shoulder, I keep my distance and just poke my head in every 30 min to look around. So I am in Florida watching some guys take down a huge double decker tent. This will take three days. After a day and a half one of the groundskeepers, noticing that I was just doing slow circles around the park in a golfcart, asked me if I fished and told me about his "secret" dock in the park next door. Having n nothing better to do I walked through about 300-500 yards of mangrove to a little lagoon. There was a crude dock made from plywood and 4x4 posts. I could see like 12' down and saw these huge fish swimming around. I remember thinking "I wonder if I could catch one?". So I rooted around in my jobox and found some nasty old mono, a tiny safety pin, and a 3/8" hex nut. The next morning I took a bit of chicken from dinner and headed to the lagoon. I somehow tied up a dropshot like rig and tossed it into the water. And a fish (a mangrove snapper I later learned) bit the hook and I yanked the SOB right out of the water! The hook wasn't set, I literally jerked like a 1lb fish right onto the bank. I picked that fish up and I instantly knew that every second of my life before this moment had been wasted. Fishing was all I wanted to do. It was all I had ever wanted to do, but I didn't know it before. I flew home and immediately googled up the nearest tackle shop and drove over. I told the clerk that I was hot to get fishing. He began to ask questions, but I butted in and explained my sudden revelation. When he stopped laughing he sold me a cheap bottom-fishing combo for perch and catfish and said to go out, catch a few fish, then come back once I had an idea what I wanted to do and we would sell me a some proper gear. I went out and caught the smallest white perch in the world and I have never looked back.

Oh man, I had totally discounted that type of cap, I was looking for this style; @Bobby Uhrig, the people are crying out for flip-caps! Heck, add a flip-cap, put a racing red stripe on the tube, and sell it as the "Pro Edition" for a buck fifty more!

The only thing I hate about it is the reel seat. I have never found a way to hold it that doesn't cramp my hand a little after a few hours. But that is super subjective so don't let it deter you, but for sure put a reel on it and play with it before you take the tags off. I have the 6'8" version but iirc the blanks are the same.

This a great way to put it and I feel the same way. I also really enjoy the act of casting and working a lure. I will not say that I like it enough that I don't care if I catch bass on any given day, but I would rather cast and retrieve all day and skunk out then catch dozens of fish sitting there watching a bobber. I love buying new lures and gear so I can play around casting and working it. I do think I would enjoy competitive fishing, I have never managed to motivate myself to make time to do it. Every year I am like "next year is the year I start!" but I never end up doing it.

If you know the size you want you can get hundreds of them for a few bucks on ebay, just avoid fishing-branded ones and they become super cheap.

I dislike braid as feeling/hearing the leader knot tap the guides is like nails on a chalkboard for me. I do use it on spinning rods that I use for plastics as it does give more casting distance (I use 8lb on my ML and 15lb on my M) and more importantly, I like to be able to see my line for deadsticking/no-feel presentations. I tried to move to straight floro for a bit but I was not 100% happy with it so I switched back. I think I am going to pull the braid (one advantage of braid, it is super easy to take off a spool and save) and give floro another go soon. I just hate the sound of that knot makes. I really dislike braid on casting reels, but am going to give it a good try soon as well. Man, I tried white Sufix for a while but it maybe stayed white for two or three trips max. I fish a ton of small ponds around here and so many of them are tea stained my line would turn brown super fast.

I have a Light action Recon 2 casting rod rated from 1/16-3/8oz. The lightest things I regularly throw on it are lures like this; 6" Robo w/ 1/0 hook J-7 Rapala Both of them will fully load the tip. A 1/16oz inline spinner (which weighs a bit more then 1/16oz) will load the tip a little, but not super well. I really like the way the rod fishes and was thinking of having a custom spinning rod build on the same blank.

Man that is really cool. All I have ever found was a Shakespeare combo that someone threw into the woods. Rod was fine, the reel was just amazingly backlashed, especially so for a spinning reel.

You joke, but before I got serious about bass fishing my go to lure was a Hula Stick rigged on a 1/16oz - 1/0 jighead. I didn't glue them on then and quite often when I missed a hookset I would pull the HS off the jig and re-rig it through the middle, throw it where I got hit, and shake the hell out of it as it fell. It worked a lot of the time. I just tried to think like a baitfish that just got bit and was dying.

I apologize if this is old news as it is from July, but it is interesting how almost all the points that they make are exactly what the experienced guys here have been saying every time this is brought up. https://zmanfishing.com/cms/chatter/8-most-common-ned-rig-mistakes/ Also, there is this bit sure to please @Darren.