Pat Brown

Swim Jig and Jerk Bait are making fish bite! Spinnerbait and lipless are close second. Soft plastics are about to be huge in the next week or two ?

I like to probe with crankbaits/spinnerbaits/swim jigs/chatterbaits and hit structure and try to get my bait in the strike zone as it travels down the drop. Caught many fish doing 90° casts from about 20 ft and bringing the bait back slow letting it fall and swimming or hopping or twitching it back etc. Sometimes they are under you while you're doing this though and that's when it pays to periodically fire a few casts parallel to the bank ahead of you just in case they're at the same depth as your boat and off the bluff rather than up shallow. I like a lipless crankbait for paralleling a bluff if it doesn't have too much wood, if it does, I prefer a swim jig or a lipped crankbait that runs just above the wood tops. Cheap down imaging can help sort all of this out very quickly.

Pre-spawn is back on like donkey Kong! Nice one on the 1/2 oz Siebert swim jig with a yum Scottsboro minnow on the back 4.5" I was working it quick just below the surface and she crushed it like a freight train. I set the hook fairly instantly on this one and was able to get her up and on the bank fairly quickly and then back into the water so she can lay her eggs in the next couple days. Her belly is looking nice. Happy to see the staging females moving back up with this warm weather! More to come this weekend hopefully.

Been super exciting watching Keith get recognized and shoot up. He's going into the classic with some serious momentum. Gonna be one to watch.

I tied on a jerk bait today so I guess add that to the list. I caught 3 and had 2 get off so I'd say my confidence skyrocketed with that one all at once! Here's my first ever jerkbait fish!

D Bomb Palmetto Bug Pit Boss Rage Bug Brush Hog Lizard These have produced fish for me and seem to get bit well in general when they want a creature. I prefer to fish a 1/2 oz jig and like to put most of these on as trailers if I can get them to bite that way but Texas rigged weightless or on a light Shakey head you'll get more bites in general.

Got them and my swim jigs sorted for a little while courtesy of my 36th birthday last week on account of not enough shad pattern swim jigs in my tackle box and a hankering to try the old new scounbug. Monkey appeased.?

I'd go with a Skeeter boat, FFS, side scan, 360, best power poles, live well, batteries, trolling motor/outboard money can buy, then I'd invest the rest in gasoline and stick my butt and all my gear in that thing and go bass fishin!

When you do a lizard on a jig, do you find it gets more bites and hotter water or colder water or it doesn't matter?

Here in NC we had a 'false spring' in February. We had daytime temps approaching 80 and night temps in the 60s for almost 3 weeks straight. Wanna know what happened? Pre spawn. Spawn. Post spawn. Yep. All of em. I caught fish in all three stages in February and it confused the daylights out of me. But I've done more reading since then and that plus this thread are helping bring it all into focus more clearly for me. They do it when they can as much as they can. Funny thing is this March here in NC winter came back with a vengeance (the boys at Redcrest got to see that fully!) and nighttime lows in the 20s have the water back in the low 40s and high 50s. Bass that didn't spawn are pulling way back into their pre-spawn pattern again and I wouldn't be shocked if we see waves of the first spawners coming back for another round in 3-4 weeks when the shallow water hits 56+ again for a couple weeks straight.

Bringing back fond memories with this thread for me. My family used to take me and my brothers up to Michigan to stay in a cottage that my mom's family owned up at the tip of the thumb on Lake Huron for summer fishing trips. We'd go up there and fish for Smallmouth, Largemouth, Musky, Pike, Walleye, Perch, Lake Trout, Salmon, Sheepshead /whatever we could persuade to bite with Rapala crankbaits and spinning tackle from our boat cruising around the rock flats and boulder piles in the crystal clear water. One summer, we got up there later than normal during what I can only assume was the smallmouth early fall feed. I remember maybe 3 afternoons during the two weeks we stayed where my father and my brothers and I strapped tackle boxes and nets and pliers for hook removal to our belts and waded off the bank into knee high water and cast our shallow cranks out onto smooth medium sized rock flats and caught Smallmouth in every cast til the sun went down. Literally I have no idea how many fish we caught. It was every single cast a fish between 1-3 lbs. Learned a LOT about bite detection, landing fish with treble hooks and also safe hook removal in those wild afternoons. I was probably 13 years old. I'd say that having experiences like that definitely showed me what fishing CAN be and sowed the seeds that made me a life long angler and eventually an obsessed bass fisherman. In my experience this far, largemouth fishing down South is the polar opposite of that fine memory, let me tell you. You work for those bites and better be prepared when you get em. I just know that if I had a day like that down here on largemouth I'd probably have a heart attack! ?

The biggest bass on the lake get harder to catch later in the prespawn, but I would say that the Lions share of the normal run of the mill 'hey that's a big bass' fish and also the 'good ones' and 'dinks' make their move up when it gets a little warmer than it is right now most places and that's when it seems like the 'lake is on fire' for most people. The real prespawn begins when the water is still very cold, but it only really begins for the extremely opportunistic and experienced large bass. And you're mostly gonna be getting 4 or 5 bites a day up shallow but they're likely to be doozies. For us down in central NC, the vast majority of the middle to small size bass are fairly cautious and lazy and don't really get going on beds til water is in the 60s for a good little bit and because water is fairly murky in our lakes, the surface/shallow temps DO matter. The interesting part is, bass seem to spawn here until it's basically almost fatal for them to spawn (90 degree water temps) and then there's a second pre spawn and spawn cycle in the early fall and you'll catch bloody tailed fish all over the lake until it's below 50°. Around here it seems like bass just spawn like wild fire if the water and weather permit and will do it spring summer and fall (and even late winter for the giants!).

Swimbait/Shaky Head/Lipless Crankbait/drop shot are baits I plan to throw a lot more this year. All four baits seem to be great for fish that don't want to bite and I like those kinda baits ?

I thwarted a chunky bass with a shaky head and a Berkley Morning Dawn Bottom Hopper during a front yesterday and I was especially proud of myself for this achievement! I cast at the copper drain thing at my local pond and she hit real hard on the fall and it was a nice fight. Going out on the boat today for some post frontal pre-spawn bass fishing. Maybe get a good one?

I think that the weight of the jig and the action of the trailer and the overall profile seem to be the key components with just about any jig. I've caught bass swimming football jigs, brush jigs, flipping jigs, arkie jigs and finesse jigs so I don't think the eyeballs matter a whole lot but I do appreciate the angle of the line tie in relation to the hook point on most traditional swim jigs which are sort of a grass jig head with eyeballs. I let conditions determine color but if they're on a swim jig bite, they'll usually eat most colors most of the time in my experience. There are times where they're keyed in on bluegill or shad or crawfish or when the water is super clear or super murky. I try to adjust accordingly.

What is the make and model of the battery you got to try? Definitely ready to stop using lead acid batteries and you have peaked my interest. Thanks! -Pat

One thing to consider in this debate is that you can always use a dye with green pumpkin black flake to add color accent but when you have glitter flake in it, you're kind of bound to that color to some degree.

I think it all works pretty well. Generally when we are talking jig trailers, I like to have trailers with flakes if the skirt has flakes and I like the trailer without flakes when the skirt has no flakes. With worms I like flake if it's sunnier and less flake when it's darker out. Dunno why, just a confidence thing.

Yeah it's what I pick up when I'm out of town or need a quick respool. I love the 12 and the 15 of the basix. Excellent line period!

In North Carolina, I have a few bodies of water I rotate and each one presents differently throughout the year and each one fishes a little differently. Really helps hammer home the age old wisdom that what works one place won't work another place on any given day. I fish a smaller pond with a nice flat hard bottom with very little cover or structure. There is a dam and some inflows and a couple docks and a steeper bank with more wood cover/laydowns/submerged brush. It's about 4 ft deep max and most of it is 1-3 ft deep. I have caught my largest bass out of this pond and people swear it holds no fish. It is very difficult to get fish at this pond but I have discovered through a lot of work that there are tons of small medium large and giant bass in this seemingly innocuous featureless small public pond. On this pond it seems like the bite windows are very narrow and obvious if you fish a lot and identify them and the forage is very abundant and specific and failing to at least match the activity level of the forage will result in very few bites. I fish a small lake that has tannic water and is loaded with dense patches of hydrilla with lots of good hard rock edges and lots of cool wood cover along the banks. This pond has lots of good 20-30 foot channel swing /bluff banks and has a nice rip rap wall near the dam as well as some bridges and road beds. It's a blast to fish in the spring time. On this lake I like to target those deep grass-rock transitions and the shallow complex cover spots where rock and wood and grass and openings all happen around shallow and deep water. I also like targeting Lily pads in the spring and early summer time when they become more prominent. Skipping jigs and swim baits under heavy overhanging shady leafy outcroppings can be VERY productive in the summer when it's HOT and SUNNY. I fish a larger lake that is more on the stained to muddy side with the deepest parts averaging around 15 ft deep. It's flatter with a nice reddish stain from the mud and run off. No vegetation but loads of submerged brush and laydowns along the banks. Lots of cool underwater humps and shoals and some cool hidden creek channels. There are some nice rocky points littered with under water stumps and some nice bluff walls loaded with deep brush and fallen trees. This lake fishes the best of my 3 main bodies of water 365 days a year and I catch my best size and numbers on average. I primarily fish jigs around wood on this lake.

At that age I'd just hand him the rod when you set the hook on a little one and let him fight it in and let it go.

Bryan Thrift did an amazing job remaining consistent and getting big bites around docks with his swimbait. A great representation of what NC has to offer. Bass fishing here is tough but rewarding and Thrift is a master. Met Brian Latimer and talked with him quite a bit at the expo and he was one of the nicest dudes ever! We chatted SC fishing and the spawn down there. Congratulations to Bryan Thrift! Well deserved win at Redcrest representing NC!

7 ft spinning medium heavy fast rod with 8 lb mono. Caught a lot of giants on this set up in April and May of last year!

Jigs and cranks produced during the coldest times this year.

Bluegill Flash is the preferred flavor of giant crappie and shad feeders if you stick a 5 " paddle tail on the back side and reel it super slow. ?