OCdockskipper

Great bag!! Interesting contrast between the 9.10 and the 8.77. The latter is nearly an inch longer, but over a 1/4 lb lighter. You can see the girth differences on the ruler, the 9.10 takes up nearly the entire width of the ruler while there is substantial space on the 8.77. Neither fish looks fat nor skinny, the 9.10 is just thicker for a longer amount of length. The two 8 lb fish I caught this July were both over 24" (61 centimeters), so it seems like the 8.77 is normal for her length while the 9.10 is the unique one. Hope she has a good spawn next spring.

Thanks for the info Onvacation, I appreciate it. I have a portable Hummingbird depthfinder that I believe will fit in my luggage, I am planning on taking that with me. If you go to lake 35 and see a dude from California in a rental boat sitting on that creek channel, that will be me

I am assuming the domestic goose wearing the cowboy hat was caught in texas...

Speaking of which, did you have to do time for the assault charge or did they just put you on house arrest?

I was fishing with a friend of mine and he caught a bag of grapes. When asked about it, he replies "I kept the bag & released the grapes".

The Delta Smelt is on the Endangered species list for the same reason the gnatcatcher (a bird) and the El Segundo blue butterfly are - to be used by one group of people in an attempt to control the actions of another group. The coastal portion of California, from Oregon down to Los Angeles, is hyper liberal. The population in this area is large enough to create legislative & bureaucratic action that affects the more moderate & conservative portions of the state. They will use anything, including animals improperly placed on the Endangered species list, to enact their agenda and create havoc for those they oppose. They have no interest in protecting wildlife, otherwise they wouldn't have pushed for a solar farm near the Nevada desert that was killing birds to the tune of 100 a day for the first year of operation http://www.desertsun.com/story/tech/science/greenenergy/2015/04/23/ivanpah-solar-plant-bird-deaths/26273353/ . I was born in Southern California, have lived here over 50 years and watch as what was once a wonderful state is being destroyed from within. You may have visited here, but with all due respect, you are blissfully ignorant of the politics at play. What you perceive to be actions to protect the native wildlife are anything but.

Or when they ask you what you are using. Not "If I may be so forward & you'd be willing to tell me, what did you use to catch those fish?". No, it is the demanding "What are you using?" as if you are in the middle of a deposition. If they had any wits, they could look on the end of the rod & figure it out.

I fish them deep in the same ways Scaleface does. My user image is of a Red Eye shad that had been choked while hopping it deep.

Great information, thank you very much. With that amount of grass & hydrilla, the boat rental with the electric motors sounds like the way to go. When I looked at the area in Google maps, it looks like you can drive from lake to lake. I rented a small SUV, so that would make it easy to haul the electric motor, battery & gear if I switched lakes. Have you noticed any difference with the 3 catch & release lakes (16, 31 & 32)? I wondered if those 3 lakes received less pressure? Again, thanks for the info.

I expect ignorance from others on the water who don't fish. I have a kayaker on my lake who regularly paddles between me and my casting targets, he just doesn't care or does it to see if he can tick me off. All I do is say "Feminine hygene product" in a normal voice after he passes, loud enough for him to hear but not loud enough to make it appear I am speaking to him. My patience with fishermen who lack etiquette depends on their age and/or skill level. I'll give kids and extreme newbies a pass and try to teach them not by yelling at them, but by setting a good example of giving other people room. The two worst situations from people who know better were both on Lake Mission Viejo while fishing with a buddy. Folks there have no issue cutting you off multiple times as you moved down a bank. When I say cutting you off, I mean pulling 10 yards in front of you to fish a particular spot as you approached it. Then, after you change direction and go a different way, they do it again at another spot. You have to wonder if it was karma that an algae bloom killed 90% of the bass in their lake. Sorry for the fish but it couldn't have happened to a more deserving crowd.

I will be in St. Louis next month (September) and will be staying across from the August Busch Memorial Conservation Area for a few days. I have been doing some research on the lakes & ponds there, but had a few questions for those who have fished it quite often. I'm not looking for specific lures, techniques or spots, but rather want to get a feel for what the lakes are like in order to decide which gear to bring. If you have fished them in the past, I'd appreciate any input you could give in regards to the following: Are most of the lakes similar when it comes to depth, structure & cover or do they vary quite a bit? What is the predominate form of cover and is it dense or sparse? How accessible are the shorelines for most of the lakes? Can you fish most of the perimeter or are you stuck with designated fishing locations? Do the shorelines vary in depth & rate of drop off or are most of them the same? If the latter, what kind of depth are we looking at? Thanks in advance.

No, you don't have to be a strong swimmer to go out on a boat, just realize that by not being one, you are then giving control in an emergency situation to someone else. I am not an expert pilot, so I realize when I am on a plane, I have ceded control of my destiny to someone else. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes me think "Do I really have to get on an airplane to make this trip?". I want to be on & around water as much as possible and I don't want to have to rely on someone else's skills if something should go wrong. Therefore, I chose to do what it takes to become a strong swimmer in order to keep that control with me. Different strokes for different folks...

Can you imagine what that fish will try to eat when he gets over 5 pounds? Keep the kids & small pets out of the water!!

I had a double hookup on a jointed jitterbug once. The only way I thought I could get both fish in the boat was to lift the lure up by the lip. As I did, the fish on the bottom pulled the screw out of the lure and escaped. Since the tensile strength of the plastic used in making jointed jitterbugs is 28.5 lbs, I deduced that the second fish weighed 29 lbs, which was kind of odd because it was about 12" long. Aren't most knots rated at 80-90% of the line strength? If the new leader broke in the middle, that means that section of the leader was the weakest point. Weaker than either knot (lure or leader), which most likely were in the 6-7 lb range. So, maybe there was a manufacturing defect in the line. Maybe a no-see-um bit the leader, weakening it. Maybe the bass had a set of clippers in her back pocket & snipped the line when you weren't looking (Big bass are smart). All very interesting...

California, Texas, Nevada, Arizona, Florida, Utah. Was at a lake in Tennessee, but didn't have any gear, so I started tossing some small frogs caught along the shore into the water. Had half a dozen blowups.

It works with largemouth, smallmouth & spotted bass. I have never tried to lip any other fish, they usually have teeth or their mouth is too small.

The trick with this is to press one of your fingers on their stomach. It immobilizes them similar to pressing on their tongue.

Exactly. And don't kind of just reach in, once you go, commit and lock on. Plus you end up changing how you hold the dink about 4 times while unhooking them. I'll shift from pressing on their belly to immobilize them, to grabbing them by the head, to sliding in a thumb on their tongue, basically working around wherever the hooks are. I bet those poor dinks are sore all over by the time they are released

I don't think the OP is asking about the the lake best known by the public. Instead, I believe the question is about describing the characteristics of the lake that you know best. If that is indeed the question, then let me start by describing my home lake as a shallow (12 ft max), bowl shaped development lake (i.e, a lake made in order to build a housing development around it). It is small (100 acres or so) with a retaining wall around the entire perimeter. The predominant cover is boat docks, but not the style you see on most larger lakes. Instead of floating on the water or having pier type supports, nearly all of these docks hang out over the water similar to a balcony. Some are inches above the water, others are over a foot above, but they make great places for the bass to hide under or around. Throw in broken concrete from the retaining wall and some bass become homebodies at some of these docks. Vegetation is nearly non-existent except for some Bushy Pondweed (actual name) that starts growing in the 3 to 7 foot zone in spring, maxes out in summer and dies off in fall. The yearly changes in amount & thickness of pondweed then changes the locations that I find many of the fish every year. Another factor that changes the locations of the fish from where one might expect are the two dozen or so aerators placed in the coves & main lake. The oxygen & current created by these often draw baitfish & predators, especially in the summer & winter.. Most fish caught here are on bottom bumping baits, with the Ned rig and Wacky rigged stick-baits leading the way. The fact that these two baits work well for skipping as well as around the pondweed help their production. Most of the fish are dock oriented, but where they are positioned (roaming near the docks, positioned in front of them, hidden underneath) is dependent on the time of year, time of day and weather conditions. Moving lures will have their days when the conditions are right and can catch more than the slower alternatives, but that is not the norm. Best of all, despite have thousands of people living on the lake, most days when I fish it, I have it to myself. Very few people here fish, those that do are just tossing hot dogs off their dock for catfish or would prefer to go out on a cattle boat in the ocean. It is really odd, I am never out of sight of at least a dozen homes, so I never have any secret spots, yet me & 1 other person are the only ones that fish it seriously (and half the time we fish together). That's Southern California for you...

Great question. For largemouth, I'm not sure but it is probably a lower number like 4 or 5 because I will often cast to the right or left of the main target after a few fish in a row. I like to know how big an area the school covers and see if there are any larger fish hanging on the perimeter. Often those casts come up empty and break the streak, but I was in the boat when my buddy caught an 8 lb largemouth doing just that. We were picking off some 12" - 14" fish in front of a dock on consecutive casts, when he suddenly shoots a cast 30 feet to the left towards a different dock and gets hit before the Roboworm touched bottom. I wonder if the big fish was looking at the school of smaller bass as a potential meal and couldn't help herself as the lure dropped in front of her. For smallmouth, it was probably near a dozen this past September on Lake Powell. Found a school off a point & was making long casts with a Redeye shad. Twice in that span I hooked fish who threw the lure while jumping only to have a second fish hook up as I then continued the retrieve.

"Hammered it" or "Hit it like a freight train" for moving baits or when a big channel catfish grabs your lure. A much more subtle "There he is" for bottom bouncing baits.

Had a unusual catch this past Saturday. I came upon a dock that was about 25 feet wide jutting out about 15 feet from the shore with a boat moored to the front. From the right side, I skipped a weightless wacky Senko a good 20 feet under the dock, so it was actually closer to the left side. After it settled down, I went to pop it up and found that it was hung up on something. There was no way I could access it from the right side of the dock, so I stuck the rod about 3 feet into the water (to clear the boats propeller) and moved my boat to the left side of the dock. The idea was to give the lure a tug from the opposite direction in hopes of making it come loose, but as I was working around the dock, I realized there was a weed bed along the front of the boat. So now my line is sawing through & collecting weeds as I move left. I can feel the lure is still snagged, but there is about 1500 lbs of weeds (or so it felt) hanging on the line. I give the line a guitar strum and feel the lure pop free, only to then the pop,pop,pop of a fish struggling on the line. I start reeling in a bass, who ends up with this mess of weeds around his head and when I landed him, I found he had been foul hooked on the bottom of the jaw. Apparently this poor guy was just minding his own business, watching this snagged senko on the bottom, when it suddenly came loose & hit him in the face. He then got dragged into a mess of weeds before being unhooked & released. He probably has an unusual story to tell his friends...

Like Bluebasser86, I rarely snag with the Zman heads & hooks. When fishing near weed beds, the lighter 1/15 oz won't penetrate far into the weeds & pops out with just a little resistance. If you are getting hung up, my guess would be you are using too heavy a head or too large a hook.

After a horrible season in the B.A.S.S. fantasy fishing competition, I finally have a tournament where I am doing well. I went to the leaderboard section to see how my scores for The Potomac are stacking up and what would need to happen the next 2 days in order for me to win the $3K Basspro gift card. As I was scrolling through the overall scores for the year looking for Potomac scores higher than mine, I noticed something strange. Currently places 312 thru 572 all have the same year total of 8536 points, and each of those 250 contestants have the exact same score for each and every tournament, including the Classic at the beginning of the year. My guess is that these were folks who signed up to play and never filled out a lineup, so their rosters were autofilled (a new "feature" this year). I think this makes the stats for the game kind of meaningless. With over 25,000 entrants, this means that a good portion of the players who are in the top 2% aren't even playing, their rosters are just being autofilled. I liked it better when you got a 0 if you didn't fill in a roster. I do realize it probably doesn't make a difference in the long run, being that there are just two winners per event and one overall winner. It would be fun to see B.A.S.S. try to explain what they were going to do if 250 entrants who hadn't set their rosters in months all tied for first in one event. $5 gift cards for each??

I fish because it gets monotonous to, uh, "hang out" with supermodels day after day, hour after hour. After all, I don't have an endless supply of duct tape & rope and the lake is on the way to the hardware store... I think of that a lot, how things would be if fish catching became a skill that ensured ones survival. I would have to raid a BPS as the riots began to make sure I had a lifetime supply of soft plastics.