fishwizzard

I only change lures when I get bored. Usually I go out it is to try a specific lure or technique, so I will fish it until I get bored, at which point I am not going to gain anything by forcing myself to keep going, so I change up to something different. Rarely do I go out with just "Today I wanna catch some bass" as a goal, it is almost always "Today I wanna catch some bass on a dropshot" or something like that. I usually go out with whatever lure/technique I want to work on and maybe two other options, something very different then my "target" lure. So if I am going out to fish t-rigged worms I might bring a spinnerbait and some paddle tails along as well. If I am not catching on the t-rig and get sick of counting rocks I will switch up to the spinnerbait for a while to see if that works before I go back to the worm.

I have tried a tackle backpack or two and they both have been pretty uncomfortable even compared to a REI store brand hiking pack. I currently use a small sling (holds a single 3600 box plus a handful of hard baits and a little misc tackle) for short trips around a lake or pond and use one of my hiking packs if I am going more than a mile or three. I also never set my bag down and fish with in on, so comfort is very important to me.

Went out this morning and gave the dropshot a good try. About 10-12 casts in, this guy grabbed it and ran hard. I don't have any long spinning rods, so I was fishing it on a L/MF casting rod with a PX68 spooled with 20lb braid to a 8lb flouro leader. Not ideal, but it was what I had at hand this morning. The first bass was a blast, it took a bit of doing to land her as the hook was had just barely caught the corner of her mouth. I got a drink soon after, then had, almost back to back, two good hits where the bass ran with the lure for a dozen seconds but when I tried to get a good hookset the rig came flying back to be both times. I was using an Owner #1 wacky hook and a 6" Robo, rigged like this; It came through muck and branches really well, but I felt like I was missing fish and switched over to throwing the Robos weightless on a 1/0 worm hook and managed three more bass, but nothing over a pound. I am going to stick with bank dropshotting as I feel like it works a ton better then a t-rig on muck-bottoms. I think I am going to try and use my 1/0 worm hooks for dropshot so I can keep the rig weedless but give the bass a little more hook to stick themselves on.

Oh man, that spot around Widewater has some monsters in there. The rest of the canal is pretty full of dinks up to 2-3lb fish. Go back in the MD thread maybe two years and start looking for posts by "FriedLemons". That dude has pulled some amazing bass out of the canal. It is one of my favorite spots to fish, but I live far enough away that I hate taking the gamble to drive out there without knowing the water level.

Yes, I like how a light steel weight will act as a nose protector for larger plastics. My favorite is a 1/16oz steel weight in front of a Rage Menace, it still has a great action and slow fall, but I can rip it through weeds without killing the plastic in a few dozen casts. As for how much I carry, I use a small "daily pill" holder, so I carry as many in each weight as will fit in the small compartments. So maybe 10 @ 1/16oz up to ony one or two 1/2oz ones. I would love to find a small pill holder with better/more secure latches, but I have yet to see one for sale.

Welcome. If you are in Potomac MD then you are in a great spot for bass fishing. You have access to some great smallmouth spots (the Potomac and it's tribs) and some good to great largemouth spots (the canal and Clopper/Seneca Lakes).

I think they have both hardnose and normal worms in the 8" size. http://i.imgur.com/9NqDUPf.png

That reel looks like the car from Knight Rider in the best possiable way.

So one of the most infamous episodes of Bar Rescue was about a place down the street from my friend's house. http://gazettereview.com/2017/02/piratz-tavern-update-happened-bar-rescue/ I hated the place and found it super annoying, but some of my friends loved it so I got dragged there every few months. The food was very very hit or miss and the drinks were pretty bad, but so strong that I could give them a pass. While the place had issues, it was packed most every Friday/Saturday night and was pretty full most week days. They could have used someone to come in and fix their menu and look at their general business practices, but the "makeover" was just the dumbest thing ever. They had a niche and as annoying as it was, people loved it and flocked there.

Oh, you have the Hardnose ones, I have the regular ones and they suspend/very very slowly sink. I have always wanted to try their hardnose flukes, but have never remembered to order them.

Interesting, I has assumed the 8" would still float to much to do anything other than twitch on the surface. Right now I use Producto Tournament worms for my 8" worms and they are really high floaters.

What size Jelly Worm were you using? I have used the 6" on shakyheads or neko rigs and while I have have tried the 12" ones weighless, I have never gotten a hit.

Thanks for the info and sorry about your cuff! I mostly fish L to M casting combos so I am allways on the lookout for new presentations I can use them for.

I have four reels with SV spools and while I have backlashed every single one of them, they are all far far more forgiving then the non-SV spools I have used. You definitely still need to use your thumb but a mistake usually only costs you a few loose coils rather then a huge snarl. I cannot commeny on how the Tat SV fishes lighter lures, but I believe every Diawa reel "family" has an Ray's Studio finesse spool that will fit it, so if you need/want to go lighter in the future you have an option cheaper then an entire new reel.

I'm left-handed and as a young man I learned to use pretty much every carpentry and most metalworking tools out there "wrong handed". When I was into sport shooting it took several years for me to get used to shooting left handed, my inclination was use my right hand. But when it comes to fishing reels, I am so left-handed it isn't even funny. I took my young nephew out fishing for a few days last week and as he is a righty I switched a few of my spinning reels over for him. Whenever I would try to show him a casting trick or help get a lure unsnagged my brain would shut down soon as I picked up the backwards combo. Even just burning a lure back in across the surface felt as awkward as trying to recite poetry backwards.

Someone recommended the Fenwick smallmouth elites to me because they have comparatively short butt sections, which is a huge plus for kayak fishing. I have a pair of the MH/F casting rods and a 5" senko (3/8 oz) is about the lower limit and a 1oz total weight jig is about the upper. I have also fished lipless cranks, larger spinnerbaits, and small swimbaits on mine and they all fish fine. For $80-100 I like them a lot, far more then the St croix Premier rods I have owned.

I have a ML Okuma Citrix travel spinning rod that sells for around $100. I like it and it is decently sensitive for a multipart rod. The reel seat is very minimal, which seems really polorizing among the friends I have loneded it too. Also look around ebay for Fenwick Smallmouth Elite rods. They are a discontinued line and are amazing for the $80 they ususaly sell for.

This would be my first question as well. I have a medium travel rod and reel that I keep in my car at all times and take with me on all my work trips. My tackle is very minimal, a bag or two of watermelon w/ red flake senkos, a pair of 3/8 lipless cranks,a whopper plopper 90, and a white/chart spinnerbait. If I'm traveling somewhere specific for work I might throw in an other lure that seems appropriate, but for the most part I felt those four seem to cover a huge percent of the situations I might encounter.

I have switched to single hooks on all my sub-1/4oz cranks and am slowly moving the rest of my cranks over to them. I switched all my small cranks over because I got sick of super-dink white perch and sunfish murdering themselves trying to eat a crank half their of size. I didn't really experience hook up issues so I want to move everything over to singles. It also makes releasing pickerel much easier for both myself and the fish.

I am a 1/4oz Dock Rocker w/ Dredge hook kind of guy, but I think my next order is going to be some 3/8oz Brush jigs.

Have you guys tried one of those swim jigs with a blade attached the hook, kind a like a trailer-hook would be on a spinnerbait? I threw some of the blades I keep rigged up for MJ rigs on a swimjig one day and got a bunch of followers and a hit or two. But I didn't have a good way of keeping the blades on the hook, so after I lost my fourth or fifth one I gave it up. I keep meaning to pick up some of the premade way trailer-blade jigs, or at least rig up a better way to retain the blades, but I have yet to get around to either.

I keep meeting guys around here who swear by dropshoting from the bank, but I have no confidence in it and the few times I have tried have been a total bust.

What kind of tackle are you throwing those on? I have a couple bags of hula grabs I'd like to use for river fishing but have never found a weed-guard jighead with a light wire hook that I was happy with but those Boss jigheads look intresting.

I feel it's a little unsportmanslike to catch them in the trees, I only ground-fish for squirrels. In all seriousness, I started reading this site about two years ago and have learned a ton. I also have a ton more tackle piled all over my office, but I think that is just a coincidence.

Look, with just my arm I can't throw a jig way up into a tree so when it happens while fishing it's clearly the rod's fault.