Pat Brown

I agree with Catt. Move out slowly from spawning areas (and fish the spawning areas for the post spawners!!!) and look for smaller schools of shad/herring/crappie/bluegill/baby bass/whatever and find cover on structure near deep water near spawning areas. The bass usually aren't far from that.

I think from now on I'm just gonna walk em up the bank and hope my line does it's job, and normally I KNOW that but tonight with that 15 lb I think my confidence was JUST lacking enough to make the wrong decision in the moment. She felt DD.

Lost an absolute giant tonight at the bank. Too big to flip on to the bank and when I tried to go in for her I gave her too much slack and she came off. She bit the swim jig. Not my first big fish to come unbuttoned right at the boat/bank but my first in a long time and she was the biggest fish I ever lost. Hurts. Just needed to share with people who understand these sorts of things. I'd have traded all my 4 lbers last week for seeing this fish out of the water tonight but it just wasn't in the cards. Sun was a little too low in the sky for me to really see what I was doing and I had my pole with 15 lb line instead of 20 lb line on and I think that was a mistake in hindsight. Also probably should have just risked it for the biscuit and tried to flip it even though it felt impossible. So many what could have beens. But I guess that's what keeps us coming back to the water! Gosh I'm glad its the weekend hopefully I can get some redemption between now and Sunday night.

I love the Zoom lizards and have done well on them this spring, but for Easter my parents bought my son a bag of locally poured 9" lizards and they are unreal underwater and catch the snot out of fish. I will be ordering more! https://www.deepcreeklures.com/ No affiliation and I don't even know where my parents found them but they're wonderful!

Around here in NC a football jig is great trimmed up a lot with a small trailer. I like Yamamoto twin tail grubs. Deadly in the summer time on the rip rap when the wind is blowing in. Shakey head is also working it's way into my arsenal and I have had success throwing it when nothing else was getting bit around rock. I think you had the right baits but working baits uphill from the bank in rock is treacherous! Maybe instead of finessing them, see if they'll hit something moving slowly/twitching quickly/flashing around over their heads. Light weight swim jig /spinner bait/Jerkbait could be deadly.

Yeah, I hear fellas saying they swear the spawn is gonna start any day now at the marina. ??? 'cant wait for the spring bite to turn on' Meanwhile I'm catching them off shore spawned out...and on bed. People can have all my spots, far as I can tell won't do most folks any good.

I think I'm getting better at recognizing a good time to fish slow on cast 1. In general I have spent more time fishing slow than fishing fast which is a new thing for me relatively speaking. I also think my concept of slow and fast have changed a lot. Fishing fast might be dead sticking a senko only in what I deem the sweet spot and then moving on where as fishing slow might be dead sticking a senko every 3 ft of the laydown. Slow and fast seem to have more to do with how thoroughly we fish an area than the speed of our retrieve or action of the bait. I do not subscribe to the idea that it is ALWAYS a good time to fish slow on the first cast, BUT I try to let the fish and the conditions speak to me every time I go out and keep an open mind.

I mean I make a bee line for areas where there aren't any boats hammering the fish when I get to the lake and that's usually how I go about achieving success. I have never in my life even considered idling up to someone and marking there spot/talking to them. Seems rude at best. Now if I see 5 fellas in 5 different boats parked for 5 hours down a bank on a flat and they all decide to pack up and go, I might mosey over there when it's rested a minute and see if they left any stragglers. Caught plenty of fish doing that. I do not think it's nice to get up on a person and fish where they are fishing. That seems like common sense but I guess people around here are a little more considerate than some of the hotter bass fishing states.

Sorta. I live in Greensboro and we primarily fish the two local lakes and they're very small relative to the number of people out there on weekends. I was mostly being good humored! Even a big lake, only 10-20 percent or so is gonna be worth fishing at any given time so I dunno, I just think it's silly to act like any spot is anything more than something you discovered. Even more so with the smaller (relatively speaking) bodies of water? To put things in perspective, I've been on lakes where it takes hours to move from on spot to another. You can fish all the good spots on my lake in an hour with an outboard motor. It's just not the same. Edited to add another facet: There are consistently people who act like you fishing the lake or pond at all is fishing their spot ???

You guys with your giant lakes! ??? Here in central NC, the lakes are glorified ponds and the ponds are mud puddles with parking lots and sidewalks. There are no 'spots' you can have to yourself.

My thoughts exactly. I have PLENTY of days where I glue a confidence bait in my hands and go looking for a bite. When I'm on them and they seem willing to bite, that's when I play around.

I throw a lot of bulky plastics (8" lizards, large beavers, 10-12" worms) with bigger hooks and I like heavier weights because they are easier to skip and cast accurately and maybe it's in my head but a relatively faster fall seems to get bigger fish to bite and it definitely makes presenting the bait vertically easier. I have used a lot of 1/2 oz bullet weights in my lakes. I throw 1/8 and 1/4 with senkos and smaller thinner profile baits but I don't throw those nearly as much.

Those look absolutely amazing. Love the bulk of the body and the tail. Bet that thing THUMPS.

You and me both brother. I cast my 8" glide on an offshore hump sorta 'just for the heck of it' and it got CRUSHED. Let's keep tossing em. Got a vast assortment of swim jigs and skipping jigs and tungsten flipping weights on the way from Mike Siebert so you know the big girls are shaking in their boots right now ?

I'm very very fortunate to have a tough rugged outdoors woman who loves to bass fish almost as much as I do. My son is also included. Fishing is a blessing. Family is a blessing. We only get so much time on this earth. I'm thankful I get to enjoy life's blessings all at once!

I feel like pitching and flipping need to be discussed along with skipping and roll casts because to me, mastering these 4 casting techniques is the key to shallow water bass fishing success. I feel I personally get the most mileage these days out of roll casts for short accurate quiet target casting around/under/into shallow cover. I feel like I can be more efficient and accurate and be a little further back when I focus on good roll casts. I like flipping on beds a LOT. Not really a more efficient way of repeatedly presenting a bait to aggressive bed fish. Pitching is good when I'm picking apart partially submerged or fully submerged pieces of cover where I need a more vertical presentation. Skipping is obviously king anytime there's something you need to get a bait back and underneath that is low to the water. I think that pitching is one of the best exercises you can do to develop cast control that will help with more advanced techniques like skipping underhanded roll casts.

I usually just give em what they're biting well and then adjust if they stop biting or move. Probably something to do with how conditions tend to create patterns and bite windows for certain baits across the whole lake. If it's a good jig day one place, unless weather and conditions are rapidly changing in real time, no reason it shouldn't be in another etc etc.

One thing you can do sometimes is take some epoxy and fill the hole where the water is coming out. (usually where the hooks are leaving the frog on the under belly IME) Then you drill a very tiny hole in the top of the frog so that it will collapse when a bass eats it. You might get a little bit more use out of the frog that you spent your hard-earned money on. I have done this a few times now and the frog's last a LOT longer. Beyond that, I'm a big fan of the Strike King Poppin Pad Perch, but I like to bend the hooks out a little bit. That product seems to be pretty good about resisting filling up with water but after a few fish every frog will fill up and sometimes you just got to do some quick tackle surgery to get more use out of it.

We got 7 today and I'm proud that the biggest one came off shore on the Berkley Stunna! 4.3 lb Jerkbait beast. She hit and I thought I was hung and then she proceeded to peel my drag and swim around the boat and into the trolling motor and she jumped 3 feet into the air 6 times (my son counted ?) on the way in. She fought like a smallmouth and on the Jerkbait with the lighter line it was the best fight I've ever gotten out of a largemouth and the biggest offshore fish I've ever caught. I caught all of my fish today off the same offshore hump and Jake got all his off beds on the lizard. We saw a million boats just parked on the beds not catching anything and we joked that we would go back through there and catch em when they all left and that's literally what we did. Just cast from 50 feet back and dead sticked his lizard and caught every single buck those anglers missed. Proud dad! Best 5 just shy of 14 lbs with off shore kicker ain't bad for a windy day when the lake was getting absolutely hammered up shallow. Gonna keep trying to dial in my deep structure fishing and hopefully this windy front doesn't absolutely reck the fishing this week. Tight lines to all!

Those lakes are on my short list to try! I got all sorts of lakes and ponds I drool at on Google all over the state. Lake James has got my attention right now with it's ultra clear water and mixture of large/small/spot/hybrid bass. I love having lakes and ponds super close to my house that have big bass! It's a blessing to be sure!

Google Pixel 4a It's got a great camera which I use for work....and play ??

Got to the pond after the soccer game this afternoon and managed another lunker on the glide bait. The glide has quickly become a confidence technique this spring!

This weekend I participated in my first small pond tournament amongst friends and I was able to get big bass with a beautiful 4.1 lb largemouth on the Siebert 1/2 oz dock rocker jig with a orange and green scounbug on the back. I would have won the tournament if I hadn't lost a good one on the lipless and two more on the jerk bait, but that's life. Thankfully my son walked away with it and the Bass Pro Shops $100 gift card so I'm a proud papa.

It's my favorite shallow crankbait around wood when the water is warmer. It seems to come through laydowns better than any crankbait I've ever used. I can't comment on the efficacy of it in grass but I've never liked any lipped baits in grass.

Put my buddy Ty on his PB largemouth today on a glide bait I gifted him at the beginning of the trip. Caught some nice smaller bass but this 4.25 lb beast was the highlight by far. Saw some 6-8 lb monsters that I plan to go back for this weekend ??