LrgmouthShad

Really unique color. Pretty cool what's the trailer?

Hold the telephone what spinnerbait is that top photo

That’s a puddle Hey, thanks for your honesty. I appreciate your perspective I do keep wondering about Somerville. But I also feel that the same caliber of fish is at Stillhouse Hollow, the new lake I tried this weekend. And people catch em a lot better at Stillhouse. I kinda wonder why put in all that work on a hard lake when you can potentially find em faster in a different lake? However, I am very satisfied with the 7+lber from Somerville. Perhaps I need to look at it this way. Over a set number of trips, how many of the fish I am really after, the bigs, am I catching? Total numbers of fish disregarded. If my catches wind up being bigger at Somerville, it could be a reason to keep fishing it, even withstanding the skunks. But boy, it is painful. I swear I know just about every corner of that lake too

Well so now I’m curious. Do you think a lake like Somerville that I presume to void of largemouth bass, is actually okay? I should mention that tournament anglers, as of this year, do not do well on the lake at all. I found that out recently. There’s been two recent tournaments and in both of them, the vast majority of the field skunked, with no one catching limits. A better question perhaps would be why should I bother unless it has extremely large bass? And it does, by some accounts, have them. But nobody seems to catch em. Not of late. Am I to believe that by fishing only 1-2 days a week, I am somehow supposed to be better than tournament anglers? Anywho, I don’t think I should fish it since it’s Texas and lots of lakes have huge bass, but it does make me wonder if the lake fools everyone, including me. What do you think?

Okay, I got confused based on this

I don’t know how it is fishing currently and I struggled a lot on the lake in the winter, but if you are looking for a DD, Shearon Harris has a reputation as a lake for huge bass. You will have to deal with significant fishing pressure though

Meanwhile I couldn’t buy a bite on ol spinnerblade this weekend. I was ticking and pulling em gently through grass and I was thinking “how in the world am I not getting bit doing this.” Spinnerbaits in grass are nasty good

The lake I just checked out recently turns into a river called the Lampass on the lower end. Even though it is not blocked off at any point, the farther one goes down the river, the less boats one encounters. Now I’m not sure about the quality of fish deep in the river versus more towards the main lake, but if one was looking to avoid other anglers and pleasure boaters, that’s a great option. There’s actually a few great options for someone looking to avoid other anglers 1. Get into super shallow water at the backs of coves that are not easy to access. Best done with smaller watercraft like a kayak. 2. Use electronics and look for spots that may hold fish away from other anglers. 3. Find less pressured bodies of water 4. Get better at dock skipping or fishing the heaviest cover possible

I want to add something interesting to this conversation What do we think about “community holes” on large lakes?

This is such a great post, thank you sir. I agree with everything in it.

What are they doing differently? I’m actually seriously wondering now

We have a spare bedroom that I made my tackle room/man cave. I may share photos later. It beats what I used to do. I used to rig everything pretty much either in my room in college or on the garage floor at home. I spend 90% of leisure time at home nowadays in the tackle room. Pretty much only time I go into my actual room is to sleep By the way, I still spool reels from a reel box with a pen stuck through it

I do my best to look for stuff that I think other people could be overlooking I don’t go crazy about bait selection. That might be a mistake but that’s how I do it

Is bass fishing getting harder? I don’t know but if somebody catches a largemouth bass out of Lake Somerville, you might be the next KVD Darn that lake to hell. I had one good day and thought I was hot stuff. I don’t want to talk about how many consecutive skunkings followed. At least it’s good for catfish and white bass

A-Jay I’m really glad your hamstring is doing better @VolFan regarding lower body strength, I care about it an awful lot too. I feel I get more functionally from lower body training than I do upper body. Legs are the “wheels” of the machine.

Challenge: I attempt to keep bait monkey at bay while on a shift just sitting around at the office during memorial days sales ***Impossible***

Chatterbaits. I snagged and lost every one of those jokers. All jackhammers too

You had a great bag and a great big fish for sure! Would love to see a fish jump up 12ft to eat a senko, that’s awesome. The timing deal drives me nuts. Can fish all good spots, but if it’s at the wrong time for them all, you could walk away empty handed. And sometimes the windows are short.

For a period of time, I would sit on a spot and rotate through several baits before moving. Didn’t take long and I abandoned that strategy. I will go to a spot and throw one or two maybe three at most baits at it, and then I’m moving. But if I really believe there are fish there, instead of sitting my arse there until they bite, I will instead come circle back after fishing other spots and fish it again later Dude, talk about keeping it simple ?. That’s awesome. Mag II was 70% of my day, but you know I can’t resist throwing ol spinnerbait around a little

Thank ya! I'm stumped how to duplicate that into more good fish though, without first spending a lot of time graphing. So likely my last day tomorrow will be spent doing a lot of just that. Graphing.

April here was friggin crazy

Short for me is under 7'. I'm a young angler who has grown into the sport with 7' rods being called all-purpose. Nowadays it seems that the "standard" length is increasing even beyond 7'. So, I have two baitcasting rods under 7'. Spinnerbait and t-rig. The reason for the spinnerbait rod being short is simply for accuracy. The t-rig rod I like short because I want to help prevent myself from overworking the bait, and because the light, short rod is extremely comfortable to fish with all day long - much like I did today.

Press F to pay respects for our fallen comrade

Depth control Sometimes I reel with my rod tip almost in the water. Other times I'm up higher at about a 45. I'd say somewhere around a 20-30 is my standard angle.

Might as well post up my trip during the hour paddle back to the ramp Hey, first, please excuse my sunscreen face and gas station sunglasses. But today was real interesting. I caught two more dinks in precisely the same location as yesterday. Had a lot of little fish try to eat my worm there, but only caught those two. I’d been fishing in the same fashion for the whole morning so I basically decided that I was playing a little fish game and should try something else. Heres where it gets interesting. Yesterday I graphed something real interesting. It was an isolated hard spot in 19ft of water with some intermittent hydrilla. I fished it twice yesterday and no luck. Then I graphed over it today, didn’t see much too too much except for one very large solid mark. After I was done fishing some new areas, I came back to that spot, but this time I did not graph it. I merely dropped anchor about 40ft away, and went to casting. Third cast got the 4.5. I wonder if the mark I saw on my graph was this fish. Bait wise, the zoom mag II is once again asserting that it is king of summertime. Plum color variations are good. I like this lake! But it fishes a little weird. I’m finding that I have to look for the oddball stuff.