Pat Brown

I like the Feugo, the SLX and the Speed Spools at that price point. Personally I think the Fuegos work the best for most short range stuff with heavy line. They seem to have a shallower spool which I like when the line constantly takes a beating and I'm gonna be making short range pitches mostly. The SLX seem to work the best for moving baits. I really like the drag on these and that comes in handy when ole big smokes the Jerkbait with light hooks. The Speed Spools are great all around reels and seem to be the most balanced. If you're only gonna get one, probably should get the Lew's.

Any time I put a long purple worm on my line. When I put a Rapala jointed floating minnow on. Daredevil spoon. These all remind me of fishing with my dad. He believed the Manns Jelly Worm in grape/firetail to be the greatest and only largemouth bait necessary (not really but kinda ?). When we would go up North to visit moms family in the summers, we would fish for Smallmouth and Pike and Walleye and Trout and really whatever was biting on Lake Huron...the Rapala floating jointed minnow, Daredevil spoon and the Storm Wiggle Wart all caught me piles of fish back when I was a kid and had no idea what I was doing. Miss those summers.

I fish multiple lakes and ponds in my state of North Carolina where it's almost like a switch goes on and they want a Texas rig and then the switch goes off and they want the jig again and it happens periodically throughout the year off and on and you've really got to just play around with the fish to see what's going on.

I personally feel the same way about jigs in general that you feel about t rigs but to an even greater degree. I feel that a jig truly weeds out a lot of the welterweights and zeros in on the giant fish holding to a piece of cover MOST of the year for me. I like to have both tied on because in general I find that they are usually gonna go for one over the other and if they're eating a jig, it's a good day to catch a giant.

The S Waiver gets bit by big fish. Had a giant, easily 8 lbs eat mine right by the bank but I'm really bad at setting the hook with glides and she got off. I then lost my glide a few casts later letting it sink too long away from the bank. I have more S Waivers coming. It's probably the best big fish search bait I've ever thrown. I saw 4 giants slowly follow it in that afternoon and any bait that forces them to give away their position is a win. Tackle warehouse has a sale on the Savage Gear Shine Glide in a shad pattern in 5.25" and it looks positively scrumptious ?

Caught an 8 lb 11 oz bass on a 6th sense suspending lipless and for shallow ponds it is now my confidence crank. Check them out. Between RES and Trap, gonna have to give it to the RES. Caught way more fish on them but I need to fish the trap more this winter.

I think it's a touch more abstract in practice. It's like: do the fish want a little ball of hairy tentacles or a long stick today? Sometimes you gotta throw a few things before you figure out what they'll bite and a lot of times it changes day to day.

When I first get megabass soft plastic swim baits (or any swim bait where the eyes are glued on), I just take the eyes off straight out of the package, put a dab of super glue gel on it and then put the eye back on and then it never comes off. It's just a one and done thing before you fish it out of the package.

I have caught the same fish 6 or 7 times in a week. This time of year, they are generally pretty locked down to the areas you catch them in. The big females are more transient but not by much, they still seem to move up into their spawning areas and then don't go far when they're done with a round of eggs. Edit to add: What I WOULD do in your situation: Make note or the clarity, sky conditions, wind direction, depth you were working your bait, structure and cover in the area and then keep your eye out for the same kinda thing on your home lake, no matter how subtle. A LOT of times, you can pattern big females this time of year and you'll find them all over a lake doing similar things in similar types of areas where the conditions are right for them to congregate.

I've started fishing a worm hook on everything as I like the hookup ratio better than I do with an EWG. With a worm hook I push it to where I can feel the tip when I brush my finger on the plastic and I feel like I never miss a fish if they have the bait in their mouth.

This is all too real. ???

I got really into jig fishing in the fall of last year and started catching a lot of big fish but I was also missing a lot of big fish and I started to lose confidence in the technique. Turns out, the hookset I learned to use up close for Texas rigs was utterly useless for fishing a jig, especially on longer casts. I have started pointing the rod at the fish out and away from my body somewhat and reeling all the slack out of my line and rather than snapping quickly, I do more of a crankbait hookset. I sweep firmly to the side and reel FAST and don't stop reeling til the fish is in the boat or on the bank or in the net. I have caught many of my biggest fish doing this hookset at the very end of long casts and at this point I have more confidence fishing a jig and setting the hook like this than just about any other technique for winching big fish in on long casts. Greg Hackney more or less showed me how it works on YouTube and it makes a lot more sense how he explains it. Edit to add: One key detail that made NO sense to me until I started doing it, was using moderate action rod rather than a stiff rod. It helps tremendously on sweep hooksets for penetration and keeping the fish pinned.

'LET'S GOOOOOO!' : popular celebratory or anticipatory phrase used by anglers when they successfully catch a fish or are preparing to attempt to catch a fish.

1/4 oz Siebert dredge brush jig in black and blue with the skirt trimmed up a lot with a Zoom super chunk jr in flippin blue or a Berkley small chigger craw in Labatt seems to work really really well for the small lighter weight presentation! Any color would work but I really like black and blue or some green/brown/orange/blue/red/purple (sunfish colors) combination 90% of the time.

I've been really enjoying the sixth sense provoke line and the Berkley Stunna line. All of the rapala offerings and smithwick offerings are also excellent. I'm trying to restrain myself and not buy the MB Vision line or Jackal Rerange line but as I build confidence in the technique I'm realizing that they're coming I'm sure of it! ???

Y'all thought I'd gone and left didn't ya? Not a chance ??? let's start with big fish and story time! This past week was Jake's spring break and a lot of cold rainy weather broke and gave way to some big long stretches of 75°+ days with 50°+ nights. I knew they were gonna be pushing up shallow and reckoned we better commence to flipping and that's just what we did. Lake was packed to the gills today. All my gold spots were loaded with boats. Improvised and hit a channel swing bank that was sitting in the wind. Hit the first horseshoe shell bed and anchored and started flipping the heavy stuff. Caught a 3 on my second cast. Jumped off a 2 on the way in. Slowed my heart down and had a snack. Put a Zoom mag UV speed craw in sapphire blue (my previous plastic got destroyed by the 2 lber) on my hook and flipped under a green over hanging tree that stuck out as odd. BOOM. The line was GROANING. She pulled me under the boat and I thought she was 10 when I first saw her breech. If she'd been 5 inches longer she WOULD have been 10! One of the best catches of my life and I got to share it with my family! More fish pictures from the past week to come. They weren't all dinks! -Pat

I would say those are bigger than small and smaller than giant and that's usually a pretty safe size for targeting big bass in general. A big crankbait is 3 and 1/2 in long. I think any bait that's about 3 and 1/2 in to 5 in will get a big fish's attention. I think profile and action are more important than 'big' but really, really big fish do seem to come up and inspect really, really big baits and it's interesting because you kind of figure out where they live when they do that. ?

You better believe those big girls have preferences and when you find em it's nice to have some options! ???

Big spinnerbait, big glide bait, big soft plastic swimbait, full skirted black and blue jig with a big blue trailer, Swim Jig with a full size trailer, big jerkbait, lipless crankbait, big lipped crankbaits, Chatterbait with a big trailer, magnum soft plastics on shakey heads and Texas rigs. I used to think you could go too big until I started throwing big glide baits. Fish just reveal themselves to you and then you can figure out how to get them to bite.

Well that's fair. I guess most tire companies just make tires. Hard to re invent the wheel sadly. So maybe, companies are just trying to sell products at prices people will pay? That seems like a reasonable assessment.

I must have some kind of amazing luck because I enjoy my reels from all these companies. I feel like all of them make incredibly competitive products that will help anglers boat the fish they're after and most of the things we like or dislike is just personal preference. I will say, at 83.50$ per reel, my Daiwa Fuego 8 speed reels are hard to beat for me. They need a little love out of the box, but I do that with any reel I buy anyway and these feel super nice for the money to me. Lew's and Shimano and Abu make great reels also. I think that for most businesses, it's difficult to be competitive and scale your production without manufacturing overseas. Research and coming up with the design is more what the companies do these days. They have to sell reels and I think they know they'd sell a ton less if they had them made domestically and charged what that would need to cost.

All the times Ive seen the NC state record LMB jumping on my home lake for starters....bald eagle doing battle with an osprey over a large fish in mid air....giant circular double rainbows forming when a storm passes...a duckling get eaten by a large female bass....big snake getting smoked by a big bass.....the time I popped my bait out of a tree and the tree turned into a fog of hornets that stung me and chased me away (I'm a LOT more careful now making accurate casts around old dead trees ;)) This one time I was paralleling the bank in super muddy water from maybe 50 ft back off the shore casting into the shallow water and working my baits back. I wasn't getting bit much and had my eyes locked on the bank looking for signs of life. It was a particularly sunny warm day after a stretch of colder rainier days and I was having trouble figuring the fish out. They were supposed to be spawning or close to it but I knew the weather might move them back a bit, still I persisted. At some point during our slow working of that bank, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of gold maybe 20 ft from the boat ahead of us where we were slowly moving and I turned my head away from the bank and towards the glimmer in front of the boat instinctively to look to see what it was....what I saw I couldn't believe! Staring back at me were probably 12-15 large female bass suspending inches below the surface in 8 feet of very muddy water like a fleet of submarines all literally TRANSFIXED with me flipping that bank. As soon as they sensed I was looking at them, they all swam away in unison. It was one of the coolest things I've ever seen and it leads me to believe bass are much smarter than we give them any sort of credit for.

The matte translucent finishes seem to get crushed the hardest with jerkbaits for me. On the Berkley Stunna I believe they are called 'Stone Cold' and 'MF Tennessee Shad' and they both get crushed. I fish super muddy/stained water and they still seem to be excellent colors even though the rule is translucent in clear water. For crankbaits I usually go for a black back chartreuse sides/translucent shad/red craw/whitish shad/chrome shad and select those for the conditions mostly. In NC I find the black and chartreuse works the best in general.

Something happens when fish move shallow in the spring time where they hit jigs a little less good and hit plastics a little more good. Why? I don't speak bass and I've never gotten a straight answer out of one....but it's a thing that happens everywhere as far as I know. The jig bite usually comes back with a vengeance for a nice little while in the post spawn when those big deflated females start going wild on the bluegill beds and then comes back big time in the late summer/fall/winter/pre spawn transition and holds out until they move up shallow to spawn again. All I know is it's a great time of year to get out your weirdest soft plastics that you normally leave buried in the tackle box and tie one on.

I am learning right now that the Jerkbait is a good bait to learn if your fish get fished for a lot. Maybe add that to your tackle box on the day you hit the water again. I have had good success this spring with floaters, suspenders and sinkers fishing them fast. I really like the Rapala Rip Stop and the Berkeley Stunna.