Black Hawk Basser

Berkley Chigger Craw - Rigged weedless on bottom, top, or in between. In open water or heavy veg. It's an awesome jig trailer, too.

Spinnerbaits with a lot of thump work well for me. 1/2 oz double Colorado is my first pick. There generally needs to be either clouds or wind for it to work best. In more bluebird conditions, a slow rolled 4" or 5" swimbait on a belly weighted screw lock hook may be a good choice.

Sounds like a chore. My home lake gets very weed choked and it does get very difficult. I would consider trying a different place!

Sometimes you have no choice but to fish for neutral or inactive fish. That is the state they are in the majority of the time. I think of it in the same terms as humans. We aren't constantly eating. There are times when we just aren't hungry or are resting. But if you put a yummy looking donut in front of me, I'll probably eat it, even if I'm not looking to eat. To me, that's like putting an irresistible little plastic bait right in front of a bass. It will be an easy meal that they don't have to burn calories to capture. To up your odds of having active, very catchable fish to target, go during dusk or dawn, or when it's very cloudy or windy, or both. You've established that it is a small pond. You should be able to fish every bit of the pond to see if you can gather an educated guess on where the more active fish may be during the given time period that you're fishing. And more often than not, we all have to drag a bait through thick cover to get to many of the fish we're after. As @Wizzlebiz said, you can't force them to bite what you want them to bite. You have to adapt to what the fish will go for at that moment.

1. My belief is no. Do they see the line? Maybe. Does it hinder them from biting? I don't think so, most of the time, in most of the waters we fish for them. 2. I almost always use fast lock snaps or the Fastach clips for crankbaits, and some topwaters with trebles. I catch plenty of fish while using them, and that's enough to allow me to keep on with it. 3. I believe chumming is illegal in Iowa, so I've never attempted. When I was a kid, our local lake had a tagged carp contest every year, and I remember tossing lots of sweet corn out as chum before I knew better than to follow regs.

I've caught a ton of smallies hanging a crawler under a float, right below dams.

I was just going to say that the biggest difference is the degree of difficulty for catching bass is modest compared to many other species. 90% of the die hard anglers around here are after walleye, and I'd bet they put in more time per fish than anybody chasing bass.

I've gone to Manitoba twice and fished exclusively barbless per regulations. It was 15 years ago, but I don't remember losing many fish; even though I was a novice compared to my skill level now. I had a near miss with a small catfish shaking a hook into my thumb the other day. I will try to go barbless occasionally and see how it goes.

I will agree, way easy to walk. And you can keep it in the same general spot for multiple twitches. Only complaint: After quite a few strikes, mine has gotten to where the body of the bait doesn't want to stay in its normal posture, and I have to manipulate it to get it back to normal. It kind of gets "flattened" against the hook.

Last resort for me is a 4" Zoom Finesse Worm in a purple hue, weightless.

Not a catch, but this was a crazy sight. A friend and I were wading the local river and came upon this flathead just chilling in 4" of water. It seemed that he was trying to get to a side channel in the river and got a little mired in an ultra shallow spot on the backside of a sandbar. I grabbed ahold of its tail and it thrashed its way upstream into deeper water. I've never seen such a fish, 10+ lbs, just basking like that with 2/3 of its body OUT of the water.

Why wouldn't you use the spinning outfit to cast light stuff? ?

I also hold the jig by the eye with pliers. If I cannot do that, I use a broken off tip of a toothpick in the eye.

I always use a duo lock snap when fishing cranks. Sometimes also when using topwaters with trebles, or jerkbaits. Sometimes I may not want the snap with a jerkbait that I want to keep neutrally buoyant. I don't think the snap affects the catch rate at all on a quickly moving bait like a crankbait.

I always use a trailer, either a boot tail or a fluke.

I have somewhat performed this experiment inadvertently. There have been times where I was wading the river, and lost multiple crankbaits over the course of the excursion. I don't really ever have multiples of the same bait, so I'd have to try a new color/brand almost every time I'd lose one. I have found that in this situation, with smallmouth, the colors have not mattered very much. Body style, size, lip shape, and diving depth probably have more to do with their effectiveness or lack thereof. Getting it and keeping it in the strike zone is paramount with any lure.

I learned that no matter how hard I try to catch smallmouths here, I always end up catching more walleyes. I need to try more topwaters.

I started with one technique, cast out and reel in. I remember using some of my grandpa's rattle traps in old abandoned gravel pits a 1/4 mile from my hometown. I also remember being deathly afraid of losing them. I don't think I tried any bottom hopping stuff until I was 18-19.

I'm another righty that casts with the right hand and reels with the left hand, both spinning and bait cast.

I'd say their most normal jerk bait is a Husky Jerk. It's a classic that's caught me a ton of fish, many species. I love the #6 X Rap on the local river for smallmouth and walleyes. Both baits suspend but sometimes one needs some tinkering out of the box to get it to be neutrally buoyant.

If you get scared half to death twice, do you die? It's not strange to think about sleeping 8 hours a day, but it is strange to think about sleeping 4 months out of every year.

No, that certainly will work. But you'll probably find that the toad alone will garner more bites, as it is a more subtle/natural approach. You also can run the weedless rigged buzz toad across the top of the thickest of weed mats, which you certainly cannot do with a buzz bait.

Agree with this. But bass don't eat salad, so I bet there can't be much on the bait to get a strike.

I fish the two in entirely different manners. The fluke gets ripped and jerked aggressively and erratically on top, and stick worms get the lift-fall near bottom.