MGF

I think it's hard to make good only fishing on the weekends this time of year. Things are changing fast and you don't get much time to figure things out. Now I have to skip a weekend or two and it could be full blown winter before I get back out. If it gets too cold I'm not going back out. LOL My best time is summer. I see changes in my river and locations and methods need to change too but the changes are smaller...and I HATE the cold! This working stuff stuff can really put a damper on your fishing.

I catch them in slack water sometimes but other times I get them in the fast water. We don't really have "deep water" in the middle of the river. LOL

The river is low enough that I haven't put the boat or canoe in for the last two weeks. Caught a few small bass last week while wading. Yesterday I tried a lake that I hadn't fished this year and the wind blew us right off the water. Water was low and areas that are usually clear were completely socked in with weeds. I guess the fish are still in the lake but I didn't see any signs of life.

We had rain in the morning and I think the high temp was supposed to be about 50 F. The rain was forecasted to end and the wind was supposed to be about 10 mph (not bad). We went. We no sooner got out and the wind picked up to hurricane force. I spent about an hour trying to fish but I don't think I got in a single cast that stood a chance of being productive. My wife quit fishing after just a few minutes. She bundled up and tried to enjoy the fall colors and the interesting sky. Fishing is supposed to be fun and I don't have fun when the weather is so lousy. We could have taken in the fall colors and the sky in the backyard and it would have been a lot less work. LOL I should have gone on Saturday.

I don't know if they really fight harder but they use the current.

White bass is my bet. The broken lines and the body looks deeper than a wiper. I think the surest way to tell is the tooth patches on the tongue.

Did you ever find any fish? How about an update?

Wow no replies. I grew up fishing the Illinois river but I still can't really help. We used to fish the area around Starved Rock for the sauger and white bass runs. I never fished it for smallmouth or largemouth. If I were still in the area I wouldn't hesitate to go out looking for smallmouth. As far as hazards I don't remember anything specific but it's a river so it has the same general hazards of any river. There are areas of strong current and there are a lot of ways to get yourself in trouble. Of course there is the ever present risk of hitting a log or rock with your boat or motor.

I can't argue your logic and, in the larger picture, the cost of buying a few isn't that much. Over the years I've just naturally trended away from the more expensive baits.

I might need to win the lottery first. LOL

My fishing has changed over the years so I have a lot of baits that I just don't have a use for very often. An example; I used to do a lot of fishing on lake Norfork in Arkansas. There was one year in February that we were catching everything on what we called a "long billed" Rebel. I don't know what it really is because that many years ago and I didn't keep any of the boxes. I bought a bunch of them. Anyway it's a fairly deep diving minnow shaped crank bait. No days I mostly fish a shallow river and shallow weedy lakes. It's funny. I don't think my cousin who lives there has gotten on such a bite since. still I keep them. I just got thinking about when that actually was. My son turns 35 this month and it was before he was born. My grandparents had just moved down there and my uncle was looking for a business to buy. I don't really have large stocks of very many things but I have hard and soft baits that are very old. Sometimes I find them and put them in a safer place and sometimes I go fishing with them.

I only have a handful of bladed jigs and I really haven't worked with them that much. I have one that was given to me and I think it's by strike king. All the others I have are the original zman chatterdbait. The main sticking point for me seems that the blades don't want to start vibrating. I think the zman original is better than the strike king but I notice on all of them.

I think that color is usually one of the least important aspects...but GP sure seems to work well in my river when the water is clear. The GP TRD definitely out performs the other colors we've tried. I've always done well on black jigs. Black with a little blue is ok but some of these new jigs that are more blue than black don't work as well for me. Believe it or not I've always done well on yellow jigs too. Of course I've caught lots of fish on purple worms and white spinner baits. Shad colors. Right now I'm catching fish on shad colored flukes. So I think GP is a great color sometimes but we all know that we can do well with other colors too.

I don't think I could pick one. As soon as I start to feel dependent on a specific bait I want to find something else that will work as well. I did good on an archy head jig, tube (fished a couple of different ways), split shot rig with a zoom finesse worm, fluke and a couple others.

I've only been fishing my river lately but there is plenty of likely looking bait almost everyplace. Seeing bait does not insure that you'll find active bass. I'm not suggesting that it makes sense to fish where there is no bait but bait is only one key to finding bass. There's more to it than finding food. I could take you to a boat ramp today that will be covered with minnows just about the size the bass are spitting up. There won't be any bass though. The bass have better places to ambush bait and there's bait there too. Finding bait is only part of the puzzle.

I don't know. I haven't fished anything at all this year except for my little river but...even in the river the bass are spitting up minnows and chubs and I'm catching them on flukes. If I were on a lake trying to figure it out I guess I'd start by finding pockets or creeks with lots of bait. They tell me that the "fall transition" is all about bass corralling baitfish anyplace they can.

I catch a lot of river brown bass on jigs, ned rigs and tubes...crawdad type stuff?...but this past week it's been flukes.

My wife had hers done last September and they just told her it's half way blocked again. Getting old is NOT for the faint of heart. Good luck! PS that's what ended our season early last year. She went in the first week of September and by the time she was up and around the weather was lousy. Here's the thing though. She was having little strokes and they got her in just in time. What I'm trying to point out is that things could be a lot worse than just missing out on some fishing. Get well soon. The fish will wait.

I don't get to fish many ponds but by what I do fish I'd say that a pond is a special case. First of all I can cast to every inch of the pond I fish. The fish didn't move because there's no place to move to. Forage? It's sunfish, maybe a couple of minnow species and the occasional frog (haven't seen many of those lately). It's a muddy bottom with weeds that come and go. I'm sure there are crawdads but I've never seen one. So what changes? Mostly just how the fish act and how much/often they feed.

Most of my fishing is on a small mostly shallow river. I depends on what the water level is like. If it's low my trip is a one way float and I stop fishing as soon as it's too cold for me to stay comfortable for the 4+ hours it takes me to get down river. Some years we've had nice weather and we caught fish into December on hard jerk baits and, basically, the same lures I use through the summer. Ned, wacky, tubes, floating and sinking Rapalas and the suspending Rapalas. Last fall I had a blast with a double fluke rig but the weather didn't let me fish very late into the fall/winter.

It really depends on what the cover and bottom are like. The only small pond I fish has a pretty soft muddy bottom. I think a texas rig would sink out of site. There are enough weeds and sticks that I don't throw any real snag prone baits. I don't know that I really need a search bait on two acres...my pond is actually only one acre. I move around and fish the entire bank and I catch fish all over but I already know where the "better" spots are. Also, I've never seen shad in a body of water that small but small sunfish and whatever kind of little minnows. On small ponds I try to stay quiet. I walk quiet, fish ahead and when the water is clear I even squat down low. Baits: My most productive has been a wacky rigged senko type worm as long as the weeds aren't too thick. That's something that changes through the season and from year to year. If that's grabbing too many weeds I go to a TR worm either weightless or a split-shot rig. I have caught bass using a heavier TR and dropping it right into the heavy grass that's flooded or overhangs the bank into the water. I've done pretty well with a swim jig. I haven't used a soft jerk bait there but I don't see why it wouldn't work. I haven't used surface baits much there but, again, I would stay on the quiet side...a hard floating minnow, frog, small walking bait, popper or maybe a torpedo.

What kind of water?

I'm in NW Indiana but I'm near Winamac so not familiar with the lakes you mention. I have a lot of lakes close by but I wouldn't know how to catch a LMB from the bank because the public access is so limited with most of the shore line being private property. Need a boat. When I leave the boat at home I wade a river. I wade because, again, public access is limited and not always where the fish are. There are a few access sites where there is access to larger portions of the river like the state parks. They say that 90% of the fish live in 10% of the water. That means if you pick a random spot on the bank odds are that there aren't any bass there. For many years I was an avid diver and I cruised an awful lot of fishless water. Sometimes I can't help but chuckle when I'm fishing and the bite is tough because I know exactly what it looks like down there. I would really look at the rivers and creeks. Check this out for a guide to public access. https://indnr.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=79b2d75076774c248adcd918f699753e

I might be interested in some Zoom worms, super flukes and tubes.

I catch many times more smallmouth than largemouth. But, I live near a fairly decent smallmouth river and my wife and I really like being on the river. We have a lot of lakes close by but we really like the river. I guess there are a lot of reasons but most of the lakes here are primarily lined with houses where the river is much more scenic. There are areas where there houses but lots of stretches that are wooded with a lot of wooded islands. Along with the fishing we see a wide variety of wildlife. we've camped on islands in the fall and gone the whole trip without seeing a single person...and some of this river is just minutes from town. Another obvious reason for the preference is the lack of harassing speed boats and other fast noisy machines. While I love the hunt I fish for fun and diversion. Jet skis buzzing around gets me thinking evil thoughts and it isn't any fun. Someplace I read that you can't step into the same river twice. It's true. Every flood or even a change in water level through the seasons makes it like a new place and it's not the same from one year to the next.