jbmaine

I live within a stones throw of the Kittery Trading Post. Used to be we stopped in every time we went past and got something ( always need more Senkos, right?) plus Dicks, Cabalas, Bass Pro, plus online. It was the never ending story for us. A couple of years ago we spread out all the surplus tackle we had. Easy to see it would run past our lifetime. Now the only thing I can see buying are some replacement weighted baits, hooks. ( upcoming lead ban in Maine). Pretty much the Bait Monkey is a thing of the past for us.

I've seen them do that. But in this case he was waiting for me. He's a pic I took of him the other day with me standing outside on the back steps. If I'm working outside he follows me around the yard.

Our friend Tom. Either we adopted him or he adopted us, we're not sure. We throw him out a few seeds every now and again and he's been hanging around for weeks. This is our back sliding door. We keep a couple of beds there for our cats so they can look around outside. This is Tom showing off.

Here's and old pic of ours from some years ago in our old boat taken in southern Maine. I assume the Smallie I had hooked was from a bed, although it wasn't intentional ( as I remember), but all the light colored areas in the background were beds. Big clean circular areas in the rocks.

I love putting around the lakes during the spawn, just to see how many beds there are, as an idea of how the fish population was doing. As far as bed fishing, I have done it on occasion in the past , but I don't make a habit of it. Personally ( and this is just me) I find it a bit like FFS, in my mind a little too unsporting. I relate it to when I hunted birds. Shouting a pheasant on the ground was considered unsporting. You waited to shoot him in the air, on the wing, thus giving him a sporting chance.

Could be my experiences are the outlier rather than the norm. For example, one lake we fish has a nice dock at the boat launch. Last year a LM took up residence under it. We called it Fred. I caught it twice last year. All summer long fifty plus boats a day launched and recovered from that dock. Every time we launched, there was Fred. I can only surmise he was used to all the traffic. At least for us, he never swam off. I did have to look under the dock to see him though.

Hi all, I've fished for almost 70 years now and people say I have a better than average retentive memory , so lets hope I can put these thoughts in some kind of logical order. I've read many thoughts, ideas, and questions on what spooks bass. Pinging sonar, trolling motors, banging noise from boats, canoes, splashing turtles, all manner of things. In my experience, in fishing places with little human presence, the fish are more easily spooked by any disturbance we make. After all, they are not used to our presence. Anything out of the ordinary means danger to them. On the other hand, fish that live in bodies of water with a great human presence would learn to ignore most of the disturbances we make. They could not afford to wait until the lake was quiet to eat. They have to eat what they can, when they can. I can only use my own experience as a basis to put these thoughts out, but this is what I've experienced. I have fished places with little to none human presence and I can tell you just a paddle hitting the side of a canoe would shut the fishing down for an hour. I have also fished places with a constant human presence, fisherman, pleasure boaters, jet skies, all day every day. On one of these lakes I've caught bass in three feet of clear water , right under the boat. The bass watched me drop a Senko in front of it and teased it until it hit. My PB was caught on one of these lakes. Trolling motor going, sonar pinging, in six feet of water over a weed bed. It hit a spinnerbait five feet from the boat. I saw it come out of the weeds and nail my bait. Constant human presence made them numb to our noises. I guess what I'm trying to say is, from what I can see, fishing a out of the way, less trafficked area, it pays to be stealthy. Fishing more populated heavily trafficked bodies of water, not so much.

The last of the few, John Hemingway passed away in March. What hero's they all were. John Hemingway: Last surviving Battle of Britain pilot dies aged 105

Lets never forget.

I've towed people in twice. If you have the room it's nice to have a dedicated tow rope.

Birds around our place are really bright colored this Spring.

I'm in my seventh decade and life has taken it's toll. Don't move as far or as fast as I used to, and pain meds are part of my life. Guess you could add me to the club.

On a warm day the wind feels great , in the cold, not so much. Overnite tonight the temps and wind are supposed to drop. Temps down to 34 where we fish. Early morning at that temp any breeze stinks. As for actually fishing, the weather always dictates how and where we fish.

Gadabout Gaddis maybe?

I can't speak for other areas of the country, but in our neck of the woods the lakes have gotten much more popular since Covid. More people, watercraft, in a given area means much more care must be taken to keep safe. Situational awareness is even more necessary, and slower speeds must be part of it.

The faster you are moving, the less time you have to react. Seems like it's just time to slow down.

Our thoughts and prayers to everyone involved in such a senseless tragedy.

Back decades ago I ate just about anything I caught. Bass were ok, pickerel tasted good but had too many bones. My favorite freshwater fish to eat were wild trout, salmon, and I loved hornpout. Saltwater-- flounder, cod, and haddock.

True friends are hard to find. The older I get the less time I have to put up with " fair weather" friends.

We've had several Craziest times bassing. One year the missus and I stumbled on to the most concentrated area for LM we have ever seen , on a lake we fish all the time. It is a large cove of undeveloped shoreline and only worked in July and August from around 2 PM on. The water is shallow out from the shore ( 1-2 Ft) and bushes hang out over the water. We found that by skipping a weightless Senko tight to the shore under the bushes the bass were stacked up like cordwood. We averaged around twenty in a hundred stretch, the largest being over four pounds. We fished that area off and on for years and never saw anyone else fish there. Sadly the fishing in that lake has collapsed and we haven't seen that kind of fishing in some time. Same lake, again some years ago. We discovered an area about thirty feet deep, bottom flat with no features at all. One year ( and only for that one year) something there attracted fish. We found dropping a tube on the bottom and just inching it along was the key. We caught LM, SM, and pickerel, all together every few minutes every time we went. We still fish these areas from time to time but have not seen that kind of fishing in that lake in years. As I mentioned not to long ago in another post I spent years in the salt fishing for stripers. My craziest times for striped bass probably was thirty plus schoolies before 5 AM on a 7 WT fly rod.

We were fishing one of our usual lakes. A lake known for good sized fish. The lake the missus got her PB out of, a 7 LB largemouth. The lake is clear, vis to ten feet. We were fishing in about eight feet of water, could see the bottom clear. I had just hooked a smallie and was easing him up to the boat when he started going hyper. The missus and I both watched as a largemouth came out from under the boat and went after the smallie. This largemouth was by far larger than it had any right to be in these waters. Had it caught the smallie I've no doubt it would have swallowed it. We watched for maybe twenty seconds until it disappeared back into deeper water. I can't tell you just how large it was but the smallie it was chasing was 1.2 LB on my scale. To this day every time we hit this lake I'll head for that spot and make a few casts, but so far no joy.

I'm around six miles from the coast and around three miles from the Piscataqua river. Here's a shot of the weather forecast for my area for the next few days. 7-Day Forecast 43.16N 70.78W

Hi all, When we went to bed last night it was snowing out, ground was white. Got woken up this morning at 5:30 A.M. with the crashing noise of a thunder storm. Poring rain all morning, the ground is again bare. By mid afternoon rain had stopped and outside temps are pushing sixty. There was a time when such weather swings would be commented on as rare and odd. Not so much any more. This just seems to be the new normal around here. Anyone else seeing these weather swings often enough to be called the new normal? It sure plays heck trying to plan fishing trips around them.

I still have a yellow jointed jitterbug I fished sixty years ago . I still have a picture of me and a bass I caught on it sixty years ago, and sixty years later I still fish the same lake.

I've been using 6lb YZ hybrid ultra soft for over twenty years. Out side of a stray pickerel I've never broken off a fish.