Pat Brown

My favorite popper is actually the one that you broke off the giant bass on! Can't really say enough good things about the storm. Casts good. Walks good. I can buy 3 colors for the price of one megabass pop max. Bass eat em. Buy some more Storm poppers! ???

The face on Finn after catching that walleye all covered in chocolate is straight up the meaning of fishing. You can close the book on that one. Looks like a day to remember for everyone.

Fun weekend fishing mostly offshore. Caught a toad on the Stunna during a shad spawn that happened at 3 pm on a main lake point. One of the best LMB fights of my life. Something about playing those fish with lighter line and thin hooks is just hair raising in the best way! Went out on the big lake and caught a bunch of smaller bass on the Jerkbait and ribbon tail worm and then on the way back in towards the end of the day, I tossed my spinnerbait beside a textbook submerged laydown and slowly worked it back and down the laydown and felt a big *THUMP* I set the hook and felt my drag slip and the water began to boil with a very large fish thrashing and I was convinced I'd hooked a giant bass. Turns out it was a super gnarly one eyed channel catfish, my largest catfish on artificials to date! That poor Siebert Spinnerbait has been through the ringer this week but still going strong ???

Reading this thread and the other thread going in the fishing gear section on pegging t rigs, I'm gonna peg my t rigs a lot more this summer and I'm gonna throw Carolina rigs a lot more around deeper stuff and see what happens! I'm excited to try it because I feel at the very least I'm gonna be more reckless with my t rigs pegged and I also think the c rig will force me to fish slower when I should be. Both are probably good things when targeting larger bass in the summer.

One style of jig forever? Probably the Siebert Outdoors arky style head. Skips well. Swims well. Drags well. Good in all forms of cover. 1/2 oz would be my baseline weight for getting deep and fishing shallow effectively. I'd pair it with a flappy thing in hotter water and a dead action in cooler water. Favorite worm is the 10.5" netbait c mac in redbug.

I like using jigs if they'll eat jigs because my size average usually goes up for the day if I can commit to the jig and get bit. If they want the worm or a creature I happily oblige and usually in the form of a t rig but I'm not opposed to throwing the C rig when the bite is tough!

For what it's worth, I do think you get some diminishing returns with really bulkier plastics and super compact plastics. Weight separation seems to kick in more with longer thinner plastics and more when I'm horizontally dragging which is most of the time with t rigs. I prefer jigs for the bulky compact one shot meal. I don't think there's a wrong way to do it. I actually do like pegging smaller weights with beaver style baits because I feel it helps to present them more naturally, especially if you're skipping them. But I pitch and flip worms or jigs 99% of the time.

Spinnerbait/Buzzbait/Chatterbait/Swim jig/Fluke/Walking Topwater/crankbait/Jerkbait/swimbait/glidebait/wakebait/frog etc etc When they're really eating baitfish, you can absolutely crush em with reaction baits and it makes for some of the most violent strikes in bass fishing. I usually try different reaction baits and try to narrow down my selection based on the conditions and area that they are feeding in and forage size color and profile and activity level and try to put the baits in the correct spots....just little details like that. ?

Almost never. It's something I only do when I'm throwing my bait directly into super heavy cover and can't afford to have my bait and weight separating. Which is pretty much never. I did it for a while and noticed significantly less bites probably due to a much less natural presentation.

Well let me clarify a little bit here. A draught is bad but here what generally happens is we get MAJOR thunderstorms that dump lots of water and cause major flooding and the water folks preemptively draw the lake down a foot or two so the surge doesn't cause damage or injury to people nearby. The couple days before those BIG downpours where the water is low can be very very interesting and in my experience they do NOT stop biting at all. They are after all generally getting ready for BIG low pressure fronts when this happens.......??

I think yesterday was one of those days that really really hammered home something you hear all the time but it's hard to internalize and practice with discipline: Throw what THEY want, not what YOU want. I am very guilty of the age old bass fishing act of hubris: 'oh yeah today is gonna be a jig day 100%' ....... aaaand skunk. ?? I am trying to be more 'fish the conditions/read the fish' and less 'oh yeah, I just KNOW this will work' about my approach and I never in a million years thought 'Im gonna whack em on a spinnerbait today...until the lake sorta showed me the clues. I had to be paying attention and looking for them though for SURE.

Had a really fun and interesting day on the water yesterday and felt like it might be cool to relay the info to you all! Yesterday Jake and I put in at about 3:45 after he finished his homework and chores after getting home from school. We only had about 3 hours to put something together having to be off the water at 7:30 by lake regulations. The wind was blowing out of the southwest into the rip rap and it was mottled sun/clouds. Probably my favorite fishing conditions. I have done amazingly well on jigs and on moving baits on days like these so we left the marina with Jerkbaits, crankbaits, swim jigs, pencil poppers and lots of other 'windy sunny' baits tied on. We fished the rip rap with squarebills and jigs and jerkbaits and didn't get bit and decided to make a bee line for a new hump I had identified earlier this week on Google Earth. The hump held less fish than I expected, which looking back, doesn't surprise me. Seems like more of an ideal winter hump being that it's very far from spawning locations and near the deepest water in the lake. We couldn't get a bite and made our way to the adjacent mainlake point. The point sticks out into the wind and the wind was blowing a healthy current through all of the flooded cover and immidiately I could see shad schools glowing just beneath the surface in the waters just off the cover all along the bank. Then I started to see bass come up out of nowhere attacking the schools like tuna in the ocean! I informed Jake, it was go time and be ready. We threw swim jigs, underpins, little swimbaits, crankbaits, jerkbaits, walking topwaters, poppers, Texas rigs, glide baits....worked them fast and slow. Could literally see fish eating around the boat. Then it finally dawned on me. Windy day. Sun. Little schools of shad. Spinnerbait. THIS was where the day began. With 1.5 hours left to go, I tied on my beat up Siebert Cosmic double white chartreuse willow spinner 1/2 oz where the skirt came off so I have to rig rage bugs to keep it planing straight up and down and I pitched it haphazardly to the nearest laydown. I SAW the bass ANNIHILATE the bait. First bass. Nice chunky 2 lber. Toss my spinner bait to the next piece of cover. Slowly rolling it by. BOOM! Same thing. Nice little 1.5 lber. We went down the bank in the wind where I saw boats and kayaks and all sorts of fishing happening and we got bit on EVERY single piece of submerged wood we brought those Spinnerbaits by. I jumped off more fish than I caught yesterday but boated 6 in one hour before we had to leave. It felt AMAZING to figure out the magical bait for the day and pattern it and catch a limit all in one hour. I even threw my spinnerbait at a stick that had washed into the rip rap that was just isolated and sticking up near the marina to see if I was crazy and caught one more before we packed up. Once we were on the pattern I tried to put other baits that theoretically should have worked into areas that I was getting bit over and over and over again on every cast and they wouldn't touch it and then I'd put the spinner bait in there and get bit again. It was the ONLY bait they would touch. Didn't catch any fish over two lbs and it only lasted an hour before I had to leave but I had an absolute ball!

Just bite the old monster down maybe 25% and it'll be awesome on a shaky head or just fish it full sized and it will work fine but might tear up the plastic on casts. I actually really like beavers and craws on shaky heads also.

I fish on reservoirs that only fluctuate during extreme downpour and they are drained while it happens back to their appropriate level. As a result I don't have much experience with flooded banks/cover but it seems like it would be more challenging than falling water. I find that while it's raining, areas the current is concentrated are great and areas the fresh water is coming in can also be great. When it doesn't rain for weeks in the summer, the water will fall a lot, exposing lots of bank that's normally under water. I actually find this makes the fishing easier in general. The deeper drops and shallow cover that are often a few feet beneath the surface become much easier to see with polarized glasses and shallow fishing visual targets can be very fun during low water.

I cheat. I can fish my topwater and jerkbaits and crankbaits on the same combo with 10 lb big game. I can fish my glide and my jigs on the same combo with 20 lb big game. I do typically just have 4 or 5 rods ready to go in the car/on the jonboat but I truly can just bring a tackle box and two rods if I'm determined to go that route (visiting friends/camping/fishing in a boat with lots of people)

Jig/Jerkbait/glidebait/crankbait. I fish all of it these a lot. I can't get enough of the bite on any of these but jig and jerkbait seem to get me fired up to start hunting for a fish the most confidently. Only reason topwater isn't up there is the hookup/land ratio makes it my least used technique, but when they're munching on top, it's in there too.

Black and Blue. Green pumpkin purple. Brown orange. White silver/gold. For muddier water I like bigger trailers with flappier claws and a slower bottom retrieve. For cleaner water I like a more compact profile and a faster fall with less flappy claws. For warmer water, seems like flappier is better and for cold water dead action seems to be better. Swim Jigs with paddle tails are actually my favorite way to present them and I'll fish those on the bottom/slowly swimming/fast and then pause/burning/waking through cover and around structure offshore and they typically catch the biggest fish for me. I like 4" swimbait style trailers like Yum Scottsboro Minnow, Xzone Swammer, 6th sense Whale, Strike King Rage Swimmer, Gambler EZ, Berkley Grass Pig. Each swimbait trailer has different amounts of thump/wiggle and I find the bass like thumpier tails the warmer the water gets and the more wiggly tails in the cold water.

If I landed every fish I got a bite from, wouldn't be very exciting. If I got a bite every spot I thought there was a fish, wouldn't be very exciting. If I knew exactly where the fish were gonna be every time I put the boat in the water, wouldn't be very exciting. Etc. I don't fish for checks or for food. I like to try to outsmart big apex predators and then do some amateur photography and then some conservation work. For folks like me, it's the unpredictability that actually makes it the most fun.

100% Doesn't happen much but when it does it really is not fun.

Those long ear sunfish sure are beautiful!!! I have kind of a hunch that when the carp get to spawning they kind of root around in the dirt a lot looking for places to make their beds and I think they kick up all sorts of good stuff that brings bait fish into an area which of course brings the bass ?

I feel like fish that have seen lots of chatterbaits and swimjigs would crush em. Matt Robertson, Gerald Swindle and Seth Feider all feel like old friends that I never knew. I had so many friends growing up that remind me of those dudes.

The blue tube of the super glue gel for 6$ is always in my tackle box. ??? If you like the elaztech material, you can make some fairly permanent jigs with those. Tiny dab of super glue gel right on the shank and then slide the bait down. It'll dry in seconds. Fish on!

I have never fished a scrounger and I betcha most folks round here also haven't. Might be time to try one out!

This was one of the funnest tournaments to follow in recent memory. It had everything. Tough fishing. Giant bass. Big names. Unlikely local heroes. Just everything that makes bass fishing great happened. WDJ is the real deal and he fished consistent for 4 days when no one else could. Just awesome stuff. So cool you got to go @AlabamaSpothunter! I Loved watching the rain pour down as they announced the winner and it was so cool seeing BP come back out one more time to congratulate Will. Christie and BMP are two of my favorite anglers but WDJ is one of the many reasons more people need to pay attention to the quiet little Southern states that aren't Texas or Florida.

Took Mama out with Jake yesterday and got her on her first good sized jig bass. Jake and I also caught some chunky fish on jigs and I caught 6 more smaller fish on jerkbaits all on an offshore hump yesterday. Meagan got her bass near the end of the day around a bluegill spawn in a shallow pocket on a Siebert Brush jig with a Christie Craw trailer (she wanted that 9.4 lb bass Christie mojo on the jig ?). Water temps were 78-80° in the major spawning pockets and 74-75° out on the hump and near the marina. Bass seemed to be mostly in that post spawn recovery mode around the lake.