fishwizzard

I fish a lot of 1/16oz spinners for perch and will add a small split shot maybe 12" up the line if I want it to sink faster and stay deeper.

Wow, thanks, that is perfect.

A coworker of mine has been singing the praises of a lure like this. He uses a Sluggo though I believe.

The Juniata looks like just what I am looking for. Can you recommend and access point in the southern Lewistown section?

Even that fails us sometimes. Today I literally bounced a Ned off the nose of a beded bass, it didn't even acknowledge it. I saw maybe 60 goode sized fish in a single mile, but only managed to get two to bite. Now, a Ned with the plastic cut in half is irresistible to large sunfish, so the day was not a total loss. But yea, I am doing just awful this year so far, with an army of dinks and only a handful of decent fish in a dozen or two trips.

That is one big cat. I fish the ned on a L weight rod and have hooked a few cats maybe a quarter of that one's size and they were all touch-and-go to land without beaking my rod. I love that little rig but I know it is just a matter of time before I hook a monster and break the rod.

I plan on asking the rod maker, but he is on vacation right now and I don't want to bug him.

Nice looking fish. My RG plan is being delayed by an unexpected work trip, I hope the nice weather holds until next week. I hit some local ponds yesterday while running errands. It was an endless sea of dinks hitting lures far far too large for them. Look at this little guy, while I admire his spunk, I got a little sick of them after the tenth or so fish of this size. I couldn't keep a lure in the water without some little bass throwing it's self at it. I finally got a casting rod out of my car and tried a 12" Jelly worm, but they would attack that too. I can only hope they stay this aggressive when they grow up.

That makes a lot more sense, thanks for the info.

It took me an embarrassing amount of time to clue in on just how much soft plastics weigh. I was going by rod rating and having a really hard time figuring out why I couldn't cast with reasonable accuracy nor get any retrieve other then "just crank the d**n lure back in" to work. It is a testament to how durable decent rods are that I managed to make dozens of casts with a L rod with a "weightless" 5" senko and never broke anything. You would think that it would be hard to make a two handed cast with a 5'6" L rod, but I am just that "clever".

Fair points. Right now everything is spooled with brightly colored braid so even a translucent leader would be better in that regard. I am trying to get away from leaders in general, thus my push to find a workable floro/hybrid. I also fish a fair bit of saltwater and I have started buying reels that come with a spare spool, so I can switch back and froth from braid to floro depending on where and what I am fishing for.

That is good to hear. I have a 2000 and a 3000 I want to put the #8 on and a 1000 and 500 I want to try the #6 on. I suspect it will be too thick for the 500 but I have been surprised a few times by SM when panfishing so I want a decently stout line on that little reel. I have a dumb hangup about using too light a rod/reel and too heavy a line, but I am slowly coming to my senses. Why would you not recommend the YZ as a leader line?

I have a 600y spool of #6 and #8 headed to me right now. My hope is to use the #6 on my L rods and the #8 on my ML and maybe a M. I spent a few months fighting with other brands of floro and this is my last stab at using it. If it doesn't work, then I have a few years supply of leader material on hand. On the advice of someone here, I already bought some line conditioner and currently have a 3000 sized reel spooled up with #6 Stren floro. The line conditioner seems to have made a huge difference and I have been using it to good effect for the past week or so. I have high hopes for the YZ when it arrives.

I am surprised to hear that a reel can be damaged just by getting wet. Where I am from most guys fish saltwater and give their rigs a rinse with a garden hose after every trip. I am pretty bad about remembering to do that and while some of my reels clearly need some attention, a simple relube has kept them all chugging along. I would like to learn to work on my own reels, but I once decided to totally detail strip a double-action revolver and that thing took me weeks to correctly reassemble, I can only assume that a spinning reel has smaller and more delicate parts.

I have tried the same idea, ~20-40' of floro on top of a reel spooled with braid. I did it on an UL rig I use for panfishing. My though was to be able to fish small jigs in super clear water all day without having to retie my leader or respool my reel. This rig does double duty as a white perch rig so I like to keep braid on it for that. It has never worked very well at all, either the floro uncoils and knots or the line gets snagged on the connection knot on the cast. I was also using very cheap floro so that might have been part of my issue. I have some line conditioner now and some YZ hybrid on the way to me, so I might give it one more shot before I just pony up and buy a second spool for my reel.

I will take the hint and head to the river today after work. I have never had a problem with chatterbaits hanging up before, its pretty annoying as I really like them. I am still pretty new at bass fishing and thus far I don't have any real skill with cranks or jigs, nor do I really have a good rod for either. I do have some creature baits I can try to toss at cover though. My early fishing was all for panfish, perch, and pickerel, so I am just now coming around to the idea that I might need a rod heaver then a ML

Is that the micro or normal sized 1/8oz jig? I have a few of the micro ones and have never found a really good use for them.

Hi, I am going to be heading up to SE/Central PA to pick up a rod I had made and would like to make a overnight trip of it. I am looking for suggestions on a place where I can do some wade fishing for SM. I don't know the area at all other then "somewhere on the Susquehanna river", but I would love some advice on a good wadeable spot to access it. I will likely be going next weekend and making a two day trip of it. Thanks.

Spent about 90m at Walkingfish yesterday. Did a quick lap working a fluke to check out the pond. It's a nice looking spot with some really decent looking habitat. I didn't get any hits so I went and grabbed a casting rod to work a chatterbait around some of the larger fallen trees. I lost two of the dam things in maybe 15m. I am so used to fishing either from a kayak where I can just paddle over and free it or bank fishing mucky ponds that I was not paying enough attention to wood while retrieving. I then switched to a spinnerbait and lost it trying to make a fancy cast beyond my abilities. So now that pond owes me $25 worth of bass and I am going to collect it at some point.

I have some vague plans to start making my own inline spinners so that the loss of each one hurts less. I did some rough math over the winter and it looks like it will take maybe 100 spinners for me to break even and start actually saving money. I do have a decent stash of grubs though, I might switch over to those next time I am at the Pax. What weighs do you use (both spinners and grubs)? I prefer smaller profile lures, but with the current I don't think they ever get very far down.

Governor's Bridge is so convenient for me to get to I cannot resist trying it. I can usually catch a couple of dinks and a decent fish or two in the smaller pond but have literally caught two bass (or the same one twice, they were only like 3 casts apart) in 2.5 years in the main lake. It looks like such perfect habitat that I cant give up on it. I also keep trying to fish the Pax but between the current and eternally stained water, I never have much luck.

I have wanted to catch one for a while now, but have never managed it. I didn't know they were in the Pax river, I fish the Bowie/Crofton stretch pretty often but between the muddy water and current, I loose about 5-8 lures for every fish I catch.

Anyone been to Walkingfish pond in Crofton lately? I have the fluke bug and am thinking of stopping by on the way home from work. I spent about 10 hours at Governor's Bridge yesterday and aside from a 12"er right at dusk, it was a total skunk. I worked the upper and lower ponds with a fluke for the first half of the day, then went around again with a Ned and small swimbaits on a 1/16" jig. People were pulling trout out all day but I couldn't get the bass to even swat any anything I was throwing. I am going to try a buzzbait and some smallish spinnerbaits next time to see if they want more noise. Does anyone else fish here? I also found the oddest rig in the muck. It was a medium lipless crank, with a thick mono main line, then the lure tied on like a dropshot hook, then maybe 16" down were two 2oz bank sinkers tied on. I cannot figure out what the heck someone was doing with this thing.

When I was stating out I received a bit of advice from an older guy I met at a local pond. He said that an inline spinner will catch anything that swims, but that I should be prepared to lose "a couple a dozen of them" while I was learning to cast and steer them back in. He recommended buying the cheapest ones I could and fishing them in a stump field until I could steer them through without snagging. I took his advice and did loose quite a few, but I began catching a ton of sunfish once I learned how to work them slowly. I have never caught a LMB on one, but have caught a bunch of schoolie stripers on larger saltwater spinners. They are one of my favorite lures to throw and I should really get them in the rotation more often.

I ended up with a few bags of GY hula grubs that IU have never had much luck with. I am going to try them this year with the legs cut off and rigged like a Fat Ika. A "Skinnyfat Ika" maybe?