IndianaFinesse

Yes, you can get throw the wp's and swavers a medium heavy, I do it all of the time. The beauty of a medium heavy/fast action rod is that it can be used for everything, it may not excel for all of them but it does work. My best advice is to wait for a good sale, if you can wait till black friday/cyber Monday you could find that $200 rod for $100 without to much effort. Watch the latest sale thread for sales, and do a little poking around yourself.

Why didn't you like the curado 70 as much as the tatula sv?

I don't hardly ever change colors on the water, and when I do it's usually because I'm on a long run to a spot that has drastically different water clarity, since I've got time to kill anyways. I think I've spent more time proving to myself that color doesn't matter by swapping between a few off the wall colors (for instance the other day I rotated between green pumpkin, bubble gum, chartreuse, and white straight tailed worms on a shaky head-all got bit with the same regularity), than actually switching colors in an attempt to get bit more.

I agree about the importance of the nose sitting high and the tail low, it makes it easier to pop without moving it as far forward, in addition to have a better sound to it. I upsize the back hook enough to accomplish this, on the back I'll go either #4 or #2 (depending on the individual hook's weight) and the front gets a #6.

Thanks, which one would you choose for casting jigs in the 3/16-3/8 ounce range (mostly the lighter side) and t-rigs up to 1/4 ounce? I'm now a fan of rod tip watching and longer rods makes that easier.

Nope. Pop-rs aren't exactly super finely balanced, so a little more or less weight in the hooks isn't noticeable.

It doesn't matter where you hook it, there are no curves.

What model zodias do you have, and what's the lightest jig it can throw?

I have the same one, replaced my cheaper handheld rapala digital a few months back when that one started reading inaccurately. Very accurate and makes culling a breeze.

Bring a large dog, garrunteed to chase every goose out of the area. Some companies actually pay pretty good money for someone to bring a dog to their property to chase the geese away..

He better not have been caught in Indiana, cause it's literally illegal to get a bass drunk here

No good way of detecting slackline strikes, other than watching your line closely. My goal is to use hooks sharp enough on my jerkbaits that they can not spit it easily without hooking themselves in the process. I use nothing less than lite wire owner hooks and katsuages.

Thanks guys, watching my rod tip for pressure bites helped me catch 38 bass in 45 minutes today (all on shaky heads). I was amazed at the bites I was missing, and I use an Abu Garcia villain spooled with 8 pound braid so it has good sensitivity, but even with that I bet I caught at least five bass that I would not have detected otherwise. I definitely think longer rods would be helpful, I'm thinking instead of getting a 6'10" rod for jigs I'll probably get a 7'2".

Hard to the touch, maybe cancer? I don't know what it is, but I do know that I would not be eating that fish.

The fishing has been pretty dismal lately, but everything changed today. I only had 1hr 15minutes, one of those unplanned trips where I just hoped to set a couple hooks and relieve some stress. I started out fishing the shallows for the first half hour like the green book says, but with only two bass to show for it I moved offshore for the last 45 minutes. Boy I'm glad I did. It was completely insane, with 38 bass being caught in the 45 minutes left. That's averaging a bass every minute and ten seconds or something like that, I barely had time to start the retrieve before I got bit. Hands down the most bass I have ever caught in 45 minutes, I got one almost every cast with one stretch going nine bass in nine casts. The school of 14-17 inch bass had moved up onto breaks in 10-12 feet of water, particularly one brush pile set on a break line off of a point. I fished that same brushpile the entire time, just slowly circling around it to keep showing them different angles. Had to leave em biting, there's no way to know how long that movement would have lasted but I would have liked a crack at breaking 100 bass. Shaky heads caught all of them, but I think they would have hit just about anything I threw at them. Not a monster limit, but almost all of them were over 14 and about 20 were over 15 inches, with the largest going about 17.5". And this is on a lake that hasn't had a limit weighed in a tournament for over a month and a half!

Ned rig and shaky head, at least if you're only counting the times I gave them a fair shot. Sometimes I will only make two casts or something with a bait, not counting those.

The same reason you wouldn't call a pegged Texas rig a shaky head. Calling a rig something it isn't just creates confusion.

I'm not going to lay it out the way I have in the past. That has not gone over well with some people taking it as being unnecessarily nitpicky, as opposed to what my goal is which is to help people utilize the system as effectively as possible, and in an attempt to keep the true definition. I pretty much state in the Basics of the ned rig thread what jighead/plastic/line/rod/retrieve etc is generally accepted by the Midwest finesse community as being the most conducive to catching the most bass possible, in the conditions commonly faced by anglers fishing Midwestern flatland impoundments (which I also wrote about in the above linked thread).

I agree with team9nine, those hooks don't need much pressure to penetrate so why put them under the extra unnecessary force? My favorite ned rig rod is a 6'6" medium lite mod-fast, an el cheapo gander mt vortex that I bought for $13.

Cat's a fun lake, I usually head out there once or twice in the late fall. I haven't used much for crappie jigs in the past though, but that's all I'm bringing next time. The only issue I have with the ned rig is putting it down lol, sounds like this is a good excuse not to. I still can't seem to catch more than a bass or two per outing on the drop shot though, for some reason I can not seem to get that technique figured out. And I like other finesse techniques...

Is there a bass lure that would teach pressure bites similarly? I'm not much of a crappie guy, and the crappie have been so slow around here that the number of bites would be pretty low.

I make my own now on 2/0 and 4/0 owner light wire needle point hooks, but I used to really like the owner ultrahead shaky head with the screw lock. 1/8 oz. most of the time, but I'll throw a 3/16 or 1/16 occasionally. The list of worms that won't work on a shaky head would be shorter than the list of worms that do work, but the only two I still carry are the zoom finesse and full sized trick worms, and zman finesse and full sized wormzs. 4.5 inch worm on a 2/0, 1/8 ounce head gets the most use.

My favorite is the booyah baby boo jig with a zoom super chunk Jr. I like the bitsy bugs to but hate the hooks on them.

"Clear" is relative to that lake's average water clarity, it's different for every lake. I like it to be pretty murky in the warm water season, maybe a foot of visibility, and at least a couple feet of clarity in the cold water period. I can't hope for more than four or five feet of visibility in the here, but from what i've seen the clearer the better in the winter. Move up and down the reservoir to find the water clarity that suits what you're doing best.

During and for a little after being drained, the fish will move to deeper depths than they would normally occupy. Once the water level has stabilized, the bass will resume normal activity, and move back to more normal depths. Where they are found may (probably will) be different, fish the lake as if that was it's normal level. The bass may simply drop back to deeper breaks on the same structure, if available.