Captain Phil

Keep in mind that not all fishing techniques work in all situations or at all times of the year. Florida style fishing may not work well in a clear deep Northern Lake. Flipping and pitching work best in shallow water lakes with lots of cover and low visibility. It wouldn't do me much good to throw a NED rig In Lake Eustis. A giant bass would take my rod away from me and beat me with it. ?

Leave all your other rods at home... ?

Wow... I haven't fished Blue Cypress in many years. The first Club bass tournament I ever fished was on that lake and it was always one of my favorites. I knew old Joe Middleton when he was fishing tournaments. Cypress tree lined lake water is stained from the tannic acid in the trees. The bass in that lake are almost black. I'm surprised anyone still fishes it with the Stick Marsh nearby.

I have my best luck fishing cypress trees in the dead of winter. When it's cold, our fish go to wood. To keep from getting hung up on the roots, I use a weightless worm or a spinnerbait.

Great video about an issue that confuses many bass anglers. When I was young and first read about thermoclines, I wasted a lot of time riding around Florida lakes looking for deep offshore structure. I wore out my flasher and never found anything noteworthy. Here in Florida, most of our lakes are shallow featureless bowls with miles of nothing in deep water. Unless you are fishing a rock pit, 20 feet is about as deep as it gets. I'm not sure Florida even has thermoclines where finding grass is the key to finding fish. Add the fact that our water visibility is only a few feet and you can catch fish shallow even on the hottest days.

I don't use as much mono as I used to. When it counts, Maxima is the best there is. I'm always surprised that stores don't carry it.

When I was a kid growing up in South Florida one of my favorite spots was the outflow canal from a water treatment plant. Big balls of white foam would come down the canal that I assumed where from detergent. That canal was loaded with bass. Florida banned phosphates some years ago and you don't see much of that anymore. Back in the 40s and 50s the City of Winter Garden was pumping raw sewage into Lake Apopka and it was known as a great bass lake. The lake ecology eventually crashed and it's taken 70 years and hundreds of millions to get a bass to live in it. I don't worry about eating bass, I release them so I can catch them again.

Seriously! You don't think Everglades mosquitos are bad, try sandflies!

In all my years of bass fishing, I have never had a ball bearing swivel go bad. My spinner baits don't last long enough. They are destroyed by fish long before that happens.

Night bass fishing is definitely a young man's sport, especially if you are going to fish alone. I hate driving at night much less fishing. If anything at all happens, it could easily turn into a tragedy. When you are young, you think nothing will ever happen to you and you will live forever. Bad things happen and you won't...

I started fishing the Everglades at night when I was about 13 years old. My first experience was with an older friend of my parents who was an avid bass fisherman. His kids were too young to fish and I wanted to learn how. There were no electric trolling motors back then. We would take turns at the paddle. In the summer, we fished the old bombing range off highway 84, Sawgrass and what is now known as Holiday Park. This was before they built Alligator Alley. My mentor was a very experienced bass fishermen. We would launch our Jon boat around 2 AM and fish until 9 AM. We fished with a black Musky Jitterbug at night and a homemade buzz bait during the day. By the time I got my own boat, night bass fishing had progressed quite a bit. I fished the Everglades and Okeechobee weekly until moving to Central Florida in 1997. Everglades mosquitoes are not your average everyday mosquitoes. We tried everything to keep them off. We covered the gunnels of our boat with PIC insect coils. We doused ourselves with cans of Orange Cutter insect repellent. We coated ourselves with straight DEET until our skin burned. One time, we made hoods out of mosquito netting to put over our heads. All this did was make them mad. It's amazing the things you can tolerate just to catch fish. Did we catch fish? You bet! We caught boat loads of bass up to 8 pounds. We once had a night bass tournament out of Holiday Park that took over 100 pounds to win. It was during a drought when the game officials temporarily lifted the limits. Our best baits were large black plastic worms, black spinnerbaits and black Johnson spoons. One night I was fishing about 2 AM 20 miles down L67 by myself. I got a strike on the bottom with a worm. When I set the hook, the boat began to move. I fought whatever it was to the surface and a very angry 10 foot gator had my hook stuck in the side of it's head. Needless to say, I let him keep it. ?

There is always a lull in fishing action right after full dark. It takes awhile for the fish to adjust. If you start fishing at midnight, you will do much better.

Covid caused a huge bubble in boat buying. Our ramps have been totally maxed out on weekends for two years. Most everyone who wants a boat now has one, so why build more? We are coming to a time when you can get a real deal on a used boat. Boats are the first thing to go when times get tough.

I understand summer mid day bass fishing can be difficult. My point is, it's not impossible and certainly no reason to stay home. This is where tournament fishing helps. There are always fish to be caught and someone always finds a way to catch them. In 50 years of fishing tournaments, I can't remember a single one where no bass were caught and I have fished tournaments where anglers were struck by lighting, passed out from the heat and one where my rod guides iced up. That said, if you are fishing in a small pond without any cover or bottom structure, things are going to be tough. Unless the fish die off, they will bite if you get close enough with the right presentation. That is the good news. The problem is many anglers don't adjust to the conditions. They want the fish to bite the way they have always caught them. You have to think like a fish to catch fish. I think it was Tom Mann Sr. who wrote a book with a similar title. It's worth reading.

No one that I know enjoys fishing when it's so hot you have to worry about heat stroke. That's a different problem than the fish not biting in the middle of the day. How far north do you have to fish for the fish to stop biting at noon? For a number of years I went fishing for a week on the Canadian side of Lake Erie. We caught smallmouth bass and walleye all day long. We never got to the ramp until 9 AM and were back for dinner at 6. For over 20 years, I fished Lac Seul in N Ontario every August. The bigger fish we caught were always in the middle of the day. While there may be exceptions, most fish don't own a watch. If you aren't catching fish, there are two possible reasons. 1 - There are no fish to be caught where you are fishing or 2 - You are not making them bite what you are using. Both of those things are under your control.

There was a time when I believed you had to be on the water before the sun rose to catch bass. My son and I were known to leave in the dark and come back in the dark. One fact is certain, the more time you spend on the water the more fish you will catch. In the summer, it is more comfortable to fish early and late. The fish don't care what time it is, all they do is react. When the water warms, fish being cold blooded become more active. If it's too hot, fish will move. I have caught bass flipping in 93 degree water. The biggest lesson I learned from fishing tournaments was this, "Someone always finds a way to catch fish".

My biggest fish of the day are normally caught between 11 AM and 2 PM. I don't even launch my boat until 9 AM.

My goto prop bait is a Devil's Horse. There are many small modifications that anglers have done to these baits over the years. The Devil's Horse is made of wood and has soft tin blades that are easy to bend and shape. For years people have been changing the pitch of the blades. You can affect the movement and action of the bait in this way. You can actually reverse the pitch of the blades without removing the front and rear screws. Be careful when removing these screws as water can get into the hole causing the screw to pull out or split the bait. Another thing you can do is change the hooks. I use #6 Gamakatsu hooks on mine. If you change the back hook to a #4, the bait nose will tilt up and the rear blade will throw more water. Some people put split rings on the hooks. I don't as this can cause the hooks to tangle. These baits work best with heavier line as the front blade will tangle if the line is too thin. Another reason to use heavy line is the Devil's Horse is a big fish bait that needs to be thrown in and around cover. There is very little you can do to a Devil's Horse that won't catch fish. It pays to experiment.

I would buy it... ?

Roland's method is easy enough to tie. Pretty much any snell knot will do the same thing. It's the way the snelled hook reacts behind a concave end bullet weight. He shows you this in his video and it's eye opening. I wondered if it would make a difference with a live fish? It does.

About 80% of my summer bass fishing is done flipping and pitching. I started this about 25 years ago when we moved to Central Florida. I am always looking for ways to improve and recently fell into something that has made a real difference for me. One of the problems with this style of fishing is hooking fish. No matter how careful I am, it seems the hook sometimes misses the fish. I have lost some large fish in this way. Switching to braid made a significant difference. Our water is murky and the fish are in deep cover, so I don't use a leader. The big change was in the knot I use to tie on the hook. I use what Roland Martin calls a nine times Snell knot. Roland has a video on YouTube called "The Perfect Setup for Pitching and Flipping" that shows this knot and what it does. Using this knot makes the hook always turn up in the perfect angle for penetration. When I watched it the first time, I couldn't believe I missed this all those years. It sticks the fish first time ever time. Try it and see what you think.

Keep it the way your grandfather gave it to you. I turned one of our bedrooms into a bass fishing theme display place. Thankfully, my wife tolerates my antics. I still have the first reel I bought at 16 with my own money, a Pflueger Akron. My reel collection includes a 110 year old reel given to me by a friend before he passed. His father used it when he was a child. I don't collect anything that doesn't have meaning to me. You can buy old reels all day. You can't buy the memory of your grandfather.

I've posted about this before. I actually fell out of the boat twice one morning when setting the hook on Lake Okeechobee. My wife still laughs about it today. ?

I never fished with a steel fishing rod, although I do have one in my collection. Supposedly, steel fishing rods were made from surplus tank aerials left over from WWII. The worm rods we used were fiberglass initially. The rod to have in the 70s was a Lew's Speed Stick with a pistol grip handle. If you had an Ambassador 5500C reel bolted on, you had the best there was. Graphite rods came out in the seventies. I owned one of the first in our bass club and I believe I paid $200 for it, a fortune at the time. Back then, worm hooks were nothing like the hooks we have today. They were mostly long straight shank hooks with two 90 degree bends near the eye. Wide gap bends hadn't been developed yet. The big difference was the steel they were made of and the way they were sharpened. They weren't sharp when they came out of the package. The steel was soft and points dulled easily. Even when filed, it took a hard yank to get one to penetrate. If you hooked over 50% of your bites you were doing good. Most people just let the poor bass swallow the bait. Modern laser sharpened hooks are light years ahead of those old hooks. Modern low stretch lines help too.

I am a big fan of Power Pro. It's my go to braid. With all due respect, it has some negatives. One of them is cast ability compared to mono, especially for someone new to casting reels. Braid casts different, especially if your cast is long and your lure is light. When you get a backlash with braid, it's the Gordian Knot of backlashes. I have lost football fields of braid trying the pick them out. One reason for this may be that I have been using mono for 60 years. Perhaps if I started with braid my experience would be different? I don't want to get into one of those braid vs. mono discussions, but there is a significant difference in how those two lines cast. If I was going to teach someone to use a casting reel for the first time, I would load the reel with 20 pound Big Game. When they felt comfortable, they can switch and experiment with other lines.