Pat Brown

Every time I catch one fish right now I sigh to myself quietly and smile and say I got me another one of them pesky August Bass Fish to bite and feel accomplished. you’re killing it!

AGREE! it just ain’t how we (the tackle industry) want it to be mostly!

Copper Red Baits Ripple, Scum Frog Trophy series popper, Spro Bronzeye jr, Spro Pop 50 and 60 are about as small as I will go on a frog and they all work great!

She’s getting ready to lay some eggs 🙂 Beautiful bass and wonderful memory with the family!

When it’s calm and the water is clear and bass are well educated - a bass is seeing a 5” Zoom Super Fluke in Tennessee Shad. We gotta identify water and conditions and groups of fish that are less likely to instantly recognize their old nemesis.

Those Copper Red Baits frogs are super super sweeeet! Got me a hawg on the tsunami couple nights ago I haven’t had time to share - details on that one soon - nice fish as always. And love how much we love the frog! Frog brothers!

Gizzard shad are big predatory fish, and they roam around on the bottom by themselves all the time.

I have found if you can drop anything right exactly where it happened within 2-3 seconds it’s +\- a guaranteed fish.

North Carolina: Hank Parker David Fritts Hank Cherry Bryan Thrift gotta shout out KJ Queen and Brandon Card also. Tons of local hammers - too many to list and many names no one would recognize.

I just use heavy duty work gloves when the water has like poison ivy or harmful algae or tons of trash in it. They aren’t perfect but they protect my hands from infection and irritation when it floods or during the peak of the summer when everything is blooming!

Yeah a deep spawner to me is basically the fish that spawn more in the mouths of creeks/ in the drains and on the ledges on the way out of creeks. Deep is relative to water clarity and I merely think of any bass that isn’t spawning where I can clearly see it - as spawning deeper. Bass move around in schools a lot and then when they get to their favorite piece of structure the schools often break up into smaller groups and even pairs or individuals and I think water temperature and conditions and the presence of baitfish all contribute to their instinctive drive to either propogate or not. I have seen areas loaded with active beds where the females orbit and patrol the area and stay deeper and not just individual female bass sitting and staring a their beds or whatever we think of it as. It’s cool because when these angry moms feel a threat they investigate together and if one of the big girls notices somethin fishy happening at all she will often bite the stupider more aggressive one to deter her from taking the hook and bait. This is why we often say “you gotta make em react” My feelings are that fishing for spawning fish is mostly all we are doing most of the time. I find that in areas that bass spawn shallow they’re usually also spawning deep on that same structure. It’s not necessarily that some bass live deep and some bass live shallow although that does happen - I think it’s more like there’s only so much good real estate on any given piece of structure so the deeper areas get used as well as the shallow areas - nature abhors a vacuum and nothing is wasted. What’s REALLY interesting is when you get a spell of dirty water and a wave of fish feel secure spawning very close to the bank and then suddenly the clarity returns - that’s about the only time around here you see active beds because bass are trying to target that sweet spot where sunlight can still warm their eggs AND birds and anglers can’t see them super easily. Sometimes we catch them with their pants down for a couple days when clarity changes rapidly! Remember bass can see 3-4 x the water clarity roughly- if we can see 3 ft - they can observe us from 9-12 while we lob crickets at their eggs. If we are fishing less Than 10 feet of depth a bass glued to the bottom can watch you walking the bank where you can only see 3 feet down. My theory as to why these spawning structures get easier to catch on early and late in the day (especially sunny days) is that as the sun rises and the shade line develops it condenses active minnow and juvenile fish around their active nests and obviously bass hate that and spend that part of the day using a lot of energy AND eating (efficient) stuff around their nests *UNTIL* those baitfish are relegated to their deep haunts OR bury in the bank cover for the day and the bass can just chill until the wind picks up or clouds roll in and restart the madness. If the bass can’t stop killing infinite minnows it becomes a little harder to register Bazoo sneaking up and pitching a jig. On a sunny day - the calmer periods will have the big females condensed on the deeper sides of the beds watching for the return of the pest swarm and on cloudy days you will see them patrolling the bank cover edges - keeping the swarm at bay. On a cloudy rainy windy day - they might be chasing swarms off their beds ALL DAY LONG! Especially if the minnow have tons of food in that area they need. When bass aren’t spawning on structure around here - I don’t care how much they’re feeding or what time of day it is - artificial lures ain’t gonna work lol Even if they ARE on bed - if they study your bait for even a second or two they usually won’t bite AND if you cast to a fish more than once they know it’s a bait and really won’t bite. Reactions are key! My favorite time to catch them is when they first move back onto a good piece of structure after a period of roaming and rest - they clean house for a day or two before making nests! They get super aggressive! Not saying ALWAYS but a LOT of the time - the 3 days leading up to the new or full moon can be house cleaning 😉

Ice and an aerator and a small bucket and a drill should have you keeping minnows alive!

Yes.

99% of the time I’m wacky rigging a trick worm! I fish it primarily higher in the water column and fairly fast and fish targets with it - I don’t really cover water with it. I cast it at good stuff and kinda pop it a few times and let it fall and maybe pop it a few times and let it fall and try to keep the work just in sight. Rod tip high. You can catch some nice fish doing this in the early summer.

In the fall sometimes as fast as I can reel!

that would almost certainly be an episode of Bass after Dark and probably one of the ones with lots of biologists on the panel! Maybe one of the ones about fish care?

I basically just try to always take the same picture with every fish within reason (sometimes wifey wants me to pose with a big fish for a nice picture - in those situations we are very careful to keep fish in the water when not being photographed. My wife is literally a pro so she’s quick when she wants to do her thing. for me it’s a selfie and I don’t hold bass out - plenty of them wouldn’t fit the space my camera allows for in selfie mode and I hate cropped bass pictures more than I hate when people long arm them lol Main thing is - this is for me and for fun and for family memories first and foremost and then sometimes to share with yall secondly. I’m not worried about perfection or other standards than my own - nor should you be!

Gertrude won’t eat a jig - she only eats lipless second Sunday of every month at 4 am on that little grass edge by the parking lot and only when mercury is in retrograde. Sally likes a jig but she just wants to move it not eat it. She eats worms. But only fat worms that are swimming SLOWLY 3 inches from the top of her favorite brush pile that sits on the eastern point of the submerged hump 1/4 mile out in the middle of the lake off the boat ramp and only 2 days before a new moon. etc etc etc every fish/day is different - you have to learn to efficiently say “that’s not it!” Others may disagree - when you have the right bait and retrieve dialed in you get bit everywhere all the time - when you don’t - you don’t. We are wrong and get lucky a lot more often than we are right so if you are serious - switch a lot til you start getting a lot of bites and then dial around that presentation to get bites to be fish.

when you fish a small enough pond you’ll have the big ones all named within a year or two and they’ll all be your “pets” One of the many reasons I advocate mastering *one body of water at a time* I have pet bass on 800 acre lakes! You know how outdoor cats roam all day and come back around for a snack and a cuddle when you get home from work? Public water bass are about the same - they just roam longer and kill things while they’re cuddling - sight fishing is the best way to get acquainted when they’re in the mood to cuddle. Is there anything to be learned from sight fishing? Try *everything*!!!

Speed up! (Not necessarily working the bait faster) you might need some moving bait style presentations and you might need to go REALLY fast. jerkbait, lipless crankbait, 1 oz skirted jig + boot tail trailer, super heavy spinnerbait with small blades etc OR slow way down - floating worm, neko rig, frog, Carolina rig etc. dead stick, barely move etc

Learning to walk the bank and identify the tiny minnows that hide right along the shores edge is half the fun of learning a new fishery and you’ll be surprised almost every time by what you’ve got lurking in there once you get down to brass tacks. Mosquito fish, yellow perch, golden shiners, sunfish, crappie, carp minnows, tilapia, trout etc - ya just don’t know til you start to pay attention to what you’re seeing. One of the many reasons, I’m a strong advocate of fishing one body of water until you know it inside and out is this kind of stuff! You can fish a pond that drains into another pond and literally the answers to these questions will be different for both ponds let alone two lakes in a town or something like that.

It seems like every other video I see about winter fishing is talking about how it’s a myth that you slow down and that has been my experience. I do really well with jerk baits and lipless cranks and heavy jigs in the winter time. when it gets really cold, the goal is to make the fish react. I heard recently on a podcast that the way we think about the relationship between lower and higher metabolic activity with regards to cold water is kind of incorrect and inverted as anglers. During the summertime you run your heat more and it kind of stresses the HVAC system out - this is kind of how Bass operate in the summertime and they do their best to lay low and save a lot more energy when it’s hot - this is why fish mortality is highest in the summer - you do a lot better with big slow presentations when it’s hot. When it’s cold, Bass are able conserve tons of energy and are able to move around much more freely and put on weight when they eat much more efficiently. This is the time to speed up.

I did one winter fishing slow and one winter fishing fast. I caught piles of fish and huge ones fishing fast and skunked for two months fishing slow. I recommend moving lures and covering lots of water and not worrying too much about water temp or depth.

I just fan it out or leave it stock - sometimes I’ll remove strands to thin it out but extremely rare. I don’t like how trimming it makes it stiffer - not helpful for how I fish jigs and set the hook.

I peg the sinker on both sides of the sinker and you can do all sorts of stuff with it like that!