SmallieScholar

I'm around Lewiston-Auburn so I've mainly been fishing the Androscoggin and Lake Auburn but I need to start exploring. What water are you fishing in the Sanford area? Thanks for the Keitech recommendation, that's definitely new to me! I picked up a few packs as well as some VMC swimbait jigheads yesterday and managed to luck into a few smallmouth on them this morning after the jerkbait bite slowed down. Excited to experiment more with finesse swimbaits.

Thanks for all of this advice, everyone! All of these developments are really interesting. Sounds like I definitely will need to pick up some ned rig stuff. The prominence of chatterbaits is an interesting development. I found a few chatterbaits tucked along with my old stuff but when I was fishing last they didn't seem essential, and even a little gimmicky. How times change!

Hi everyone, I'm new here (sort of: I was a pretty active member of the forum under a different name a long time ago). To give you a bit of background before I get to my question, I used to be an obsessive bass fisherman when I was young and got really into tournament fishing in my teenage years. I wasn't a wunderkind of any kind, but I was good enough to give the adults in my club a run for their money, win some cash in local tournaments, and do respectably in a few bigger ones. I intended to go to a university with a bass fishing team and to try to make a go of competing at a higher level, but through a series of events I ended up going down a different path: namely, to a college outside of a major city (with not much water nearby!) and then to grad school in another major city. Long story short, I went from eating, breathing, and sleeping bass fishing to not touching a rod for a little over a decade. Last summer, I finished grad school and moved to Maine to start a new job and suddenly I've founded myself surrounded by beautiful water. The other day on a whim, I dusted off an old green Curado and a box of jerkbaits and walked down to the local river and managed to tie into a few chunky smallmouth. Needless to stay, I've quickly become bass obsessed once again and have started getting the rest of my gear out of storage. (As an aside: I don't think my wife realized quite how much fishing stuff I've been hoarding in storage all this time...) This brings me to my question. I've been completely out of the bass loop since 2010 and I'm wondering: what's changed in the last decade that I might not be aware of? What new technique or gear trends do I need to know about that might not have been around when I was last chasing bass? Walking through the fishing section of a sporting goods store the other day I felt a bit like Rip Van Winkle just waking up from a long nap: everything looks mostly the same but also a little bit different. Mainly, I'm just curious to know what I've missed out on and what you all think have been the most "important" changes in the world of bass fishing in recent memory?