MGF

I've never fished any of those places.

Me too. In our river I've caught bass, walleye, pike and musky on them. In fact I kind of got away from using them because I lost so many to the pike. All too often, on the pause, you see the slightest twitch of the line (if it's calm and you're watching close) and the line is cut clean and another $10 is gone.

I only wish that I had enough fishing days that moon phase could even be a consideration. When a free (fishing) day comes and weather and water conditions are, otherwise, tolerable I fish.

Another vote for the crawler.

ok for me.

Craws are no doubt important but I think the rocks might help attract baitfish too. There's one notable exception that comes to mind regarding soft vs rock. Some years we get some nice patches of eel grass. Often there are boulders mixed in but a generally softer bottom. I've pulled quite a few bass (sometimes schooling bass) out of holes in the grass.

I fish the same sections (floats) of the same river very often. Sometimes I catch brown bass in fast water and sometimes I catch them in slack. Sometimes they're on a seam. Almost always there is rock. There are plenty of soft bottom areas in the river but I don't often catch bass there...not often but it does happen.

I've done a lot of compass navigation including under water. Triangulation with a compass (not the same as the survey method) only needs two landmarks and a measured heading to each. The third point in the triangle is the spot you want to mark...where you are and where you want to get back to. The GPS on my Lowrance hook-5 doesn't seem very accurate. I messed with it quit a bit and decided that I had better keep my floats. I can use it to find a general area like to make certain I'm on the right point or in the right cove. It's nowhere near good enough to park the boat in position for casting to a small rock pile or something. When I want to mark a "small" offshore spot to fish I throw a floating marker. When my children were very young (30 something years ago) I had them finding on abject that I would hide out in a big field. I used to take them to the state forest and they would navigate with a map and compass.

Catching fish from the bank is easy enough if you can get to a stretch of bank that has fish on it...that's the hard part. It has been said that 90% of the fish are in 10% of the water...it's close enough. It's often hard to access the places that hold fish or cover nearly as much water without a boat

...or side scan and live scope mounted on 300 hp 70+ mph bass boats that have enough storage space for an entire tackle shop with talons and automated trolling motors that talk to the electronics and put you (or keep you) in the programmed location. It's what fishing is today for those who have the coin. Trolling, the way I do it is "old school" and doing it "the hard way". LOL

I don't crappie fish too much anymore but I've spent a lot of time trolling a two- jig rig. I don't see how it wouldn't be considered "fishing"...but you read all sorts of odd things on the net.

I like round bend and straight shank hooks for some applications but I always put off making online orders...just don't like to do it. These days it's hard to find anything but ewg in stores so I've been using them for just about everything...without any trouble. I will say that I'm not doing any punching using really large weights.

The cam action comes from the knot pulling on the shank as the the hook eye is jammed into the pegged weight. This all assumed that the fish has hold of the pegged weight. Without the peg and maybe in a more horizontal presentation (casting as apposed to flipping or punching) and there's a better chance that the bait and weight get separated and the "cam" thing becomes moot.

I caught a lot of river brown bass last year on a 4" finesse worm on a 1 or 1/0 ewg with a split shot 18 - 24 inches up the line. I sized the split shot to just nick the bottom as the current bounced it along.

There have been many that have worked really well for me but I keep changing things up. It seems like everything goes a bit cold after a while. Some examples... A wacky rigged stick and a NED rig would be two examples. I still catch fish on them but nothing like the action I was getting a few years back. So many people watch youtube and read these forums that the water is absolutely saturated with every bait that gets popular. I really think that it takes something a little different after a while.

I don't think it ever hurts to use a snell knot. It might be needed more in the case of a large pegged weight. There's a lot out there concerning when to use straight vs offset round vs ewg.

Another vote for the live crawler Carolina rig...basically what it is, right? I read "lunkers Love Nightcrawlers" when I was a kid. I used to keep crawlers all summer and I've caught just about everything on them. I still have a worm blower although I didn't always use it. The one "problem" was that the panfish/little fish could be a problem. You hook a big fat lively crawler once through the nose and some dink takes it piece at a time. LOL A drop shot has become a favorite panfish rig for me and I don't know why it wouldn't work for bass.

Of course...and as a measurement/automation guy from way back I agree. But, sometimes the silly superstitions are kind of fun. For example, I always heard it said that it was "bad luck" to ski behind a fishing boat. Though it was never specified I always figured that it meant that bad things could happen if you try to fish a half ounce double willow blade spinner bait while towing a skier. I think we could write the equation. I've seen several people really get rattled when this particular trait of the universe is pointed out to them. I still hope to catch a fish on the first cast...why would I make the cast if I didn't want to catch a fish.

About 95% of what I through could fall into those categories. That would include many different types of jigs and a bunch of different ways of fishing a worm. Heck, for the most part, my paddle-tails are trailers but it's just a different shaped worm anyway. My boat is small so I generally carry 4 rods...once in a while I pack a 5th but it really gets in the way. I own a few more but they aren't in the boat. If I'm in the canoe I carry 2. Last year I took 3 on a couple of trips and it was a real nightmare. Before folks start showing me pictures of canoes or kayaks with a bunch of rods I've seen some of those rigs. When fishing my river I spend a far amount of time slipping the boat/canoe under low overhangs. The rods have to lay flat.

Guilty feeling can be detrimental to your health. It might be best to just send that stuff to me.

When I was a kid we used to take a family trip to northern Wisconsin every summer. It wasn't unusual to get a week straight of cold and rain. What we used to hear was "You should have been here last week". I'll be 62 in a couple of months and I put up with enough discomfort at work. Fishing needs to be enjoyable. The weather is just part of the overall package. The other day I visited a dam where you should be able to get some SM, walleye or even some stripers. All I found were people. Only one group caught any fish that I saw and they had the one spot that looked pretty good. There was a little bit of a point and a nice current break with a big eddy behind it. They had obviously been camped on that spot all day. At that they were catching dink sauger. I fished for a little while but decided that my back yard is a more pleasant place to hang out. LOL

Too much equipment has never been one of my problems. LOL

The comments about springs got me thinking. I was a long time cave diver but I never became much of a hydrologist like others I knew but some observations regarding springs. The underground aquafer will remain close to the average temp for the area. Florida caves are seventy something deg F while Missouri (along rt 44) are mid 50's. I saw the Missouri springs vary by a few degrees from winter to summer. I never noticed that in Florida...at least not to the same degree. I never had any way to measure dissolved O2 but I used to dive a spring (and associated cave) in Missouri where the lighted cavern zone (where light from the entrance can be seen) was often loaded with fish...pan fish, trout and small mouth bass. On occasion some of those trout and bass would follow us 900 feet back into the cave to depths greater than 160 feet. There must have been a fair amount of dissolved O2. this was a "spring" which means that all the flow was out. The water comes from far away and deep in the earth. LOL so I don't know where the O2 is coming from. This spring formed a run which fed a small river. Another Missouri spring I used to dive emerged into a reservoir in the Mark Twain National forest. The entrance was at about 30 ft but was a spring run feeding the river before the reservoir was formed. The interesting thing here was that the lake vis was usually near zero...I mean can't see your hand in front of your face "zero"...winter was a little better. The spring water was very clear...colder than the lake in summer but warmer than the lake in winter. There was a sheer drop at 20 ft just above the spring entrance and this was about where you could see and feel the line between the clear spring water and the lake water. I know I saw fish there but I wasn't doing much fishing during those years and do to the nature of those particular dives had things other than fish watching on my mind. That cave was a very deep dive and that ledge at 20 ft was last in a long line of decompression stops. In the shallow parts of that cave 30 ft to 70 ft I saw piles of dead fish...looked like carp. It's a spring so the flow is out...they had to intentionally swim in against the flow. there was also decomposition. I'm not really sure what that tells us about dissolved O2. Looking back I wish I had paid more attention to the fish or even combined the diving and fishing more. I saw so many fish, so close and so easy that I lost interest in catching them for a time. Sorry of this wandered too far off topic but I'll bet at least some of you would get a kick out of having the bass follow you for a change. LOL

I use a snell knot when attaching a hook with a bent eye (or no eye). It's also popular when t-rigging using a pegged weight as when punching. Originally hooks didn't have eyes. Believe it or not some folks still make hooks by hand and the shank just has a flattened/widened portion at the end of the shank. Such a hook is attached by a snell knot tied around the shank of the hook. The widened portion at the tip of the hook is all that's required to keep the knot from sliding off the shank. AJ's post shows two of the several methods of tying a snell.

I don't like doing all the work in the dark that's required to be fishing early in the morning...though I love to be out early when it's possible. I usually don't head for the ramp until I have some daylight. I catch a lot of fish in the middle of the day, especially on the river. It's often late in the day when I get to the spot (s) on the river where I'm catching the fish anyway. That's the way it is on a river where much of it is too shallow to motor. You get there when you get there.