TnRiver46

Good write up and good bass but…… even better catfish!!!

Sounds like early spawning activity to me, usually the only time of year when they just quit biting. It’s quite ironic as everyone is typically always looking forward to the spawn, IME it’s the worst time of year

@ol'crickety, I disassembled some pallets and nailed them back together with the boards touching for a walkway into my shed , works well but they are put together a lot better than I imagined 😂. I was crowbar and hammering for a while

I also like the looks of that tube

Somehow got a catfish double , one was hooked and the other just twisted up into the line a thousand times. They also had a branch interwoven into the mess

Thats what I was thinking, I can’t hardly break that line without a knife . Bowfin ……. So we can sleep tonight

Nice bass from the wife!! people do that all the time , I’ve got similar photos of two geezers with a lifted livescope troll across my bank casts over and over and over back and forth. I walked up and down the rocks trying to escape them but they just kept trolling back and forth a cast off the bank

@ChrisD46, I like it ! Been using it on two of my baitcasters for maybe a year or so. I have 50 lb for catfish/striper fishing with live and cut bait and also use it for large swimbaits and frogs/topwater/tx rig bass fishing. Last night I got it stuck on bottom and couldn’t break it, had to wrap the line around my boat paddle to do it. The boat just kept moving when I tried to break it normally

Beauties. I cannot catch fish on an underspin, regardless of depth 😂 . It’s the whole spin thing that always gets me

Zoom dead ringer is my fav worm, also never stopped throwing them (along with zoom u tails and ole monsters)

Amur Or did you mean the lake ?

Bugle mouthed pile of uselessness that catfish tho ❤️

Never tried myself but I would imagine absolutely NOT😂

Colorful specimens!

The fun begins when the original rapala makes it to the surface. No it does not have to be continuously twitched, the big ones slurp it when it’s just sitting still on top. OP: the differences in the x rap and the shadow rap are many. Like MN fisher said, the shadow rap sinks. Most x raps I’ve used suspend , have had one or two that wanted to float. The x rap is a fatter bait , shadow rap flatter sides. Seems like shadow rap might me slightly longer. The lips are a slightly different bait which gives them different action. The x rap has a wider jerk, they call it a slash bait. both of them are great but I’ve had several x raps explode inside a tackle box, keep them in the dark if possible

From what I’ve seen in Michigan vs home, there aren’t any similarities. Here the only weather that seems to matter is did it flood or did it not flood. Dead middle of summer 85-90 degrees you can catch a lot of smallmouth at noon in shin deep water. The water is never very clear and it goes up and down a few feet each day during most of the year. If it’s flooded it gets full and stays full while moving swiftly. Sometimes in spring when they are filling the lakes, the water will sit still. Other years in spring it’s totally raging non stop until it dries out in summertime. What you often hear professional fisherman say when they come here is fish don’t follow patterns. That’s obviously not completely true but it can be the case more often than not. Junk fishing can be a good way to go. the repeatable patterns I seem to remember are creeks that warm faster than the main river in springtime are always good, topwater is pretty good when it’s hot outside, and September is football season for SMB, not just on the gridiron. The sun/clouds/wind don’t seem to change the fishing results for me, I’m guessing that is because the water isn’t clear. I caught a striper in the 30 lb class April 4 2019 and my wife decided to top that with a 36 lb 44” striper on April 4 2020. They were many miles apart but the one I caught was trying to eat a skipjack and the one she caught was with a whole dead 1 lb skipjack as bait

I’ve run two stroke all kinds of things and never forgot the oil. And believe me I can forget all kinds of things: The only problems I have encountered when you leave a chainsaw sitting for about three or four years without using it.

See mick D post above

Short paddling session last night yielded only one tiny bass but lots and lots of skipjack. I posted their pics and video in the other species thread

Launched the ole canoe around 6:30, slow going for the first 30-45 minutes with only a tiny SMB, then the skipjack and white bass went crazy. The tails were all crooked on my tiny crappie minnow baits so I just ripped them off and the fish approved