kiteman

where i am, in a large metropolitan area, it's basically impossible to find anywhere to fish that is decent. either the public ponds are way overfished, the others are literally filled with garbage, or the ones that are probably awesome to fish are owned by fishing clubs that require a hefty membership and daily lake/pond fee to fish. if you're anything like me and live in a fairly sprawling urban area, i would start wide and look 20+ miles outside of your city and start there.

i use a low-vis gray 30lb braid on my rods, and i fish in somewhat clear (not stained) but green water. sometimes i use snaps on the ends of my line if i want to toggle between a crank, jerk, spinner, or buzz bait because it's easy to switch them out. i read a lot of people say when you do something like a carolina or drop shot rig you should use a fluoro or mono leader to minimize the visibility of the line, but in a way i don't understand why it's any different on those presentations then say a crankbait...line is line no matter which bait it's tied to. right? anyway if you have any insight i would like to learn your techniques. thanks.

I think the pond i fish at has a very heavy vegetation on the bottom of the bottom/bed but i can't know for sure unless i dive down. But in the shallower parts i can see a pretty heavy layer of some type of vegetation that is on the bottom. Is there any way to know what the bottom of the lake looks like aside from diving down or using a camera? I just don't know what else to do, and I feel like a lot of my jig/pig combos or texas rigged worms are just falling into the vegetation and disappearing in the weeds, and any bass nearby can't see them. I've tried to carolina rig, but even then i don't know how much of a leader to use and wind up getting the weight all caught up in the weeds to. I guess I'm kind of stuck and don't know exactly what to do! Thanks for any help.

I bought some of these not too long ago and just have had no luck in a pond where worms otherwise work great. I've tried to swim it on the top and texas-rig mostly, with the latter letting it drop to the bottom with a little bounce slow retrieve going on. Every now and then I'll feel a bite and then the lure is gone, most likely a small fish grabbing the tail. Curious if anyone fishes this lure and how you fish it that works. I like trying new lures but it really erks me when they take up space in my tackle box because they aren't catching any fish. http://shop.attackpakfishing.com/105-PADDLETAIL-Plum-10pk-PT01.htm

2 hours is about my max, even if i'm catching fish. i also usually start very late in the evening after work and only fish until dusk.

i feel like the place i fish i used to catch 3+lbs all the time. years later and 3+ is rare, once every 10 fishing outings. it has gotten a little pressure but i don't think it's that bad. there used to be so many perch there you could throw out beef jerky and catch them (no joke, i did this), but now i don't ever see perch, so i suppose something is going on. i live in the city and the fact that i can fish a clean pond and catch anything at ALL is amazing, much less 3+lb. i'd say if you are in a city and found a place that has fish you can catch, size does not matter. if you live on lake fork or something and you only catch a 3+lb every month and you're fishing daily, you probably need to find a fishing buddy who can give you tips lol. as others have said, size is so incredibly relative.

i will tell you this, small nibbles and setting hooks can easily result in your line getting tangled! i've set the hook so many times that i rip the lure out of the water and it gets messy tangled up around my rod. i read a lot of articles about setting hooks anytime you feel a bite and i strongly disagree. as others have said it's usually small fish nibbling. however if you see your line moving side to side but don't really feel a tug like a bite, it means your fish is devouring your lure and you need to set the hook. i've had this happen a lot and ended up with hooks swallowed in the gill or gut and resulted in a dead fish. at the end of the day your call, as someone else said hook sets are free. i am going for the big fish so the nibbles i don't bother with and reel faster to get the lure away from the curious smaller fish.

My family isn't far from Rayburn! I can't fish really at night unfortunately. Any veg tips you have I would love to hear. I only have a couple hours a week to fish so I don't have a lot of versatility in my equipment, so any advice you can give is much appreciated.

Very heavy vegetation, especially on the bottom. You can't really fish weighted lures, they just catch vegetation even weedless. I can't see any bass from the bank. Pulled in a 3.5lb about 10 feet from the bank with a frog in 2-3ft of water today and never saw the bass until I was hooked and had a good view. But honestly it's a mystery how to fish this for me. Nothing can penetrate the vegetation without being covered itself, and most of the lake is pretty deep. The water is very clear and if I see a bass usually it is away and running if I'm within 30ft.

I'm just wondering if you had perfectly round 10 acre pond with no structure (or the same structure) exactly around the entire pond, where no single point in the pond was much different than any other point, how many more fish will you catch in a boat vs. a bank? I guess the obvious answer is if you can only reach 15% of the pond from the bank with your gear then you are not catching 85% of the fish in the pond, but I don't know if that's really true since maybe the fish are more likely to be closer to the bank than in the middle of the pond. Or maybe it's the opposite, or maybe it just depends on the circumstances. Maybe the question is if you only bank fish and can't boat a 10 acre pond, what percentage of all the bass in that pond will be accessible from the bank over the course of a season? Will some of them never come close to the shore, and therefore be completely uncatchable? In a massive lake of course boat fishing is going to yield exponentially better results, but I wonder about smaller ponds just how many bass you will never be able to catch because you just can't even reach where they frequently are hiding.

i have no idea what the water temp does? understand your comment about baitfish, but why is it just now happening this year? not enough food in the deeper water? surely there are bigger fish that are deeper out there that i'm not catching?

I've seen and caught a lot of bass in the 2-3lb range just sitting in 6-12" of water near the banks. Its 100+ degrees here and in past years I was catching fish that size in deeper water. Now I am using square bills, worms and craws in the deeper water and not catching many good size bass at all. Is there any reason for this behavior? It seems the heat would make them want to stay deeper so they are cooler. Any recommendations on lures when bass are behaving this way to try and catch the ones that might be deep (and lazy)? Surely they cannot all be in the really shallow waters.

I've been bank fishing this 10 acre pond for some time. The biggest I've caught are 4-5lb, but mostly 1.5-3lb are the most recurring big ones I see. LOTS of little guys. The water is green and pretty darn clear, but there is a lot of heavy vegetation. The areas I can cast to are only 8-25ft deep, but the bottom of the pond is probably covered by at least 5ft of thick vegetation. If I throw even Texas rigged weighted plastics and let them sink to the bottom, the weight or bottom of the hook gets caught in the vegetation and I pull up a bunch of weeds. It's really thick stuff down there and I've even lost square bill cranks in that stuff even with a 30lb test. I'm pretty confident there are some fish lurking in or around those weeds towards the bottom (plus I'm in Texas where it's hot so I bet some big ones stay deep to be cool), but once the lure gets crap all over it I'm sure it no longer looks appetizing, and fishing it fast enough to keep out of the vegetation is probably too fast for the big ones. Also the jig/pig is nearly useless because it always gets vegetation clogged on it. People always say to fish slow, but if I fish anything other than a square bill crank slow, it just gets completely covered in weeds. Square bill slow is what I've caught the biggest fish with, but usually in winter or early spring time, not summer. So, how should I be fishing to maximize my catching of bigger fish? Would a Carolina rig with a 5ft leader keep the plastics just above the vegetation be a better presentation that i can also (maybe) fish slower? Or should I just be fishing the jig/pig and all my other texas rigged plastics quickly/slowly enough to keep just above the thick stuff and just hope i get lucky? Any advice or tips you can provide will be helpful. Thank you.

i actually like this answer the best of all, because if it is true it makes me try new lures, fish new ways and outsmart them. but at least if this were true i could know they are still out there, and as long as they are there then the possibility of catching them is always there as well. but obviously my concern is that the big ones are simply not there anymore, and if the midsize to large ones are still there, they will soon be depleted as well.

well the whole thing really wasn't meant to be rude or forceful no matter how it came across. usually exclamation points in casual writing should be taken as "i mean this comment lightly/jokingly/etc" and that's all i was trying to do...playfully title my post so that it got attention. well at least i got the attention thanks though for all of the responses. several people keep referencing me on how to keep a good population in a pond and pull out the small bass, i know all that but not sure how much my efforts are going to assist the situation. also as i mentioned before there is no such thing as slot limits in a private pond, at least not this one. if anybody is catching and taking home, they are doing so at their own discretion as no park rangers monitor this pond or anything. i understand it would be good to talk to those who are also fishing there, but i've only seen a couple and one catch and releases and another said he throws everything under 10" back and keeps the big ones. i actually casually told him once he should try and throw the big ones back since they are the ones reproducing and are more fun to catch than eat. but he was super redneck and the next time i saw him out there he was taking several bigger ones home. so i know for a fact some people are taking them, but how much or how many i am unsure of and also unsure of the eventual fate of the pond as whole. i will say that pond used to have a ton of perch, like there were so many it was not uncommon to hook one just by reeling in and catching it's body. i know someone was taking 30+ perch home a day because i caught him doing it once, and in the last 6 months i have not seen or caught a single perch. i don't know if it's possible one person could take thousands of perch from a 10 acre pond in less than a year, but there are either very few or none left at all when the population used to be thriving. needless to say where i'm going with this is that some of the people who do fish out there have absolutely no respect or care about the ecosystem status of that pond and are seemingly completely OK with fishing the pond dry. that doesn't sit well with me but i don't know what i can do other than talk to the people that run the joint. talking to the guys that fish themselves doesn't seem to get me anywhere. lastly i'll add that i would love to fish other ponds, but there simply aren't many where i live. don't want to get into all the details but you either have nasty city ponds that are way overfished (literally one of the few places people fish here a guy saw a dead body floating in about a month ago, that's how limited my options are), or you have situations like this which are private land and getting access is very unlikely. i lucked out for now, but hate to know it may not last. so the easy thing would be to pack up and go down the road to the next place, but the next place i could have access to that actually has fish may be more a myth than anything.

Well i'd like to move away from the "it's not your pond it's his" thing, because it isn't exactly his pond, he just works there. Owners are old, he takes care of the place, etc. so it's not like the guy spent $$$$ on the property himself, but still of course it's nice to know him and get to fish there at all. and all i was asking was just a way to politely address the concept of him regulating fishing there. it's a private pond, so there are 0 rules, no limits. for all i know 2-3 other fisherman could be taking 20 bass home a day and at that rate in a few years there will be no fish there at all. the fact that i've already noticed a decline in fish population tells you something. i just don't know what's going on when i'm not there, and wanted some advice on a polite way to have the discussion with this guy that could potentially have him tell his other buddies to be careful how many fish they are taking. thanks for pointing out smaller bass going helps the bigger ones get bigger, i have read about this and agree. and there are a lot of smaller bass in there that i catch frequently. the problem is a lot of people where i live think you throw the small ones back and keep the big ones, since they provide more meat. they think the big ones are close to the end of their lifespan and the little ones are just getting started. they clearly don't understand how long bass live or how long it takes a bass to get "big" but unfortunately that is the redneck philosophy where i live. so while i would HOPE people are taking the small ones and leaving the big ones, my experience has been different, and that's why i am concerned. i've caught several in the 4-5lb range according to my scale, but it has been months or even over a year since i've caught them. i'm afraid they are gone already. maybe i'm being dramatic though.

To make a long story short, I fish on a 10-acre private pond and the owner let's a few others fish as well. Many of them catch and release but I'm not convinced they all do. I've noticed a decline in the fish population, especially the bigger ones. The owner doesn't fish much so even though I've told him to tell others to catch and release, I'm not sure he gets it. Short of trying to buy the d**n land from him, is there anything you guys think I could say to him that might convince him not to let others take fish home? I don't want to tick the guy off and lose my fishing privileges, but I also don't want there to be no fish in the pond in two years either, so I feel like there has to be something friendly I can talk to him about that may make him enforce more catch and release? Thanks.

Yeah it was a wacky rig here as well.

Its too late for consumption. I've heard of them living through this trauma, and I thought I would try to let it live. It seemed so, but I don't know the likelihood of them living after a gut and gill hook? I will add after the hook was out it did not appear the gill was damaged at all. A little flesh was on the hook, but I think it was part of the throat.

He swallowed my senko. I felt a twitch in the line but there are a lot of small ones out there that do this all the time and never get hooked, and when I set the hook it usually ends up flying right at me and gets all tangled. So I wait for a better sign he has the lure. Anyway after the twitch there was nothing, no line movement, no more twitches...Few moments later the line moved sideways slowly so I set the hook. Good size fish, 2.5lbs or so, as soon as he came in I saw he was bleeding. The hook was in his gut and out through a lower Gill. I thought ah crap, he's going to die. Stuck my fish pliars up the other side under the back Gill and flipped up the hook and got it out almost immediately. I hurried to the water (was on a bank) and held him there for about 20 seconds when he started moving away. The front of the pond is really vegetation heavy and he didn't go far before he was stuck in think algea. I have him 20 seconds and decided I needed to pick him up and take him to an area further done with few weeds. Well when I went to grab him he jumped out of the water into the shore area. Exposed I went to grab him again then he jumped again and dove into the thick stuff. He was gone. I stayed there fishing for about an hour and never saw him float up, so a good chance he'll live? Also I remember pretty quick after in the water, he seemed to stop bleeding. Hope he lives to fight another day! What do you guys think?

So I am in Texas and 2 years ago found a gem of a pond I bank fish from and by last summer I was catching 4+ bass an outing after one hour or two and went out twice a week for the last two years with the same results fairly consistently. The pond is private property that I had permission to fish on, but it had views fr the local rural housing and picked up some outsider pressure also fishing it. I saw a lot of fish go, and even so I was still catching. Eventually I think most of the randoms were driven off (even though I'm convinced a few still come late at night). Unusual enough, my biggest bass have been this year, I'll go on a drought and catch nothing, then in a span of a few weeks I caught a 3.9, 4.5 and 4.9. I mostly fish square bill cranks and worms. Texas rigged crawfish work well sometimes but the jig and pig is the most useless bait I fish out there...They just don't like it. I am 100% certain I don't catch as many fish this year as the last two years, and I've gotten better at fishing. So either people are taking all the fish or the fish are getting smarter? It's about a 10 acre pond. Also it has no structure at all either, and lots of water moccasins so there are really only a few places you should be fishing from (only a few I fish from, maybe not the local poachers!). Also it has crazy weeds, from 20ft out from the bank to probably 10 feet off the bottom. I constantly lose jigs or cranks getting caught down there and on a 30lb braid. I don't know if I should be fishing with deeper baits/weights with heavier line or what (from the bank the deepest I can cast is probably 35ft)? Any insight you can provide would be great. I will tell you I only get 3-4 hours across 2 days a week at most to fish, so I usually have snaps to change lures vs constantly cutting and tying different rigs. So while I'd like to do drop shots or Carolina rigs on top of the other stuff each outing, with my schedule I may not have the time for all that. I usually throw a bait 5-10 times and if I don't catch I move on. I know this isn't a great practice, but until this year my method has always worked on this pond. Thanks everyone!

if you've ever ventured into a bass pro shop or cabelas where they have the big fish in the large tanks, you'll see the big bass usually just sitting there in one spot. i think the same happens in a pond or lake when the big bass are lazy, especially in cold water, and you basically have to drop a lure they like on top of their nose. otherwise the smaller, more aggressive fish will typically win out on a lure that's not in an immediate big bass' vicinity.

man, i thought the same thing! i tried fishing it fast after that with no luck. but i'm talking really really fast, like so fast i wouldn't think a big fish would go for it.

a pond i fish at, about 2 years ago, had so many perch it was crazy. i mean i would catch perch on massive crankbaits the same size as the perch themselves. there were a few times i would even hook a perch in the tail, clearly it wasn't trying for the bait it was just that there were so many it was easy to catch one like that. fast forward a few years and there are zero perch in the water. i know one guy was taking like 30 home a day, but in a 10 acre pond where there were literally thousands of perch it seems, i can't imagine he caught ALL of them. it's really bizarre. what could make perch disappear? do you think it's possible the guy taking 20+ home a day literally caught so many that there were no longer able to reproduce?

a pond i fish at all the time has really, really thick, slimy, mossy weeds around the banks. i've been trying for the biggest bass out there, bought a few big swimbaits and such. no luck with those, but yesterday i was reeling the swimbait in really fast around the weeds (so it wouldn't get stuck) and not 5 feet from the bank a giant bass jumped out of the weeds/water to try and get the swimbait i was reeling in so fast. it didn't get the bait, unfortunately, but i just got to thinking what the heck should i be fishing in those weeds? obviously fish are there, i just don't know what to fish. i've tried frogs but that doesn't work. i've tried to drop in jig/pig, but that just gets caught in all the weeds. suggestions?