Pat Brown

Went out for a rare weekday afternoon trip yesterday and got many bites. Lost two at the boat in the 2 range that I wasn't sure even had the bait when I set the hook. Water was the clearest I'd ever seen at this section of the lake, saw many 4-6 lb bass swimming off when I approached cover etc. Decided to go looking for dirtier water on the way in and found some - saw a big fish shoot out from the bank and aggressively follow my boat for hundreds of feet. She was darting this and that way and very visibly mad at me for being in the area. I threw my Zaldaingerous swimbait to the wood cover she came out of and caught her Just shy of 6 lbs - completely spawned out - but a great big bass! If you're only gonna get bit and land it once - a 6 lber on a big swimbait will do!!!

Jigs are pretty fun! I throw them pretty much every time I fish and have for years. I basically fish them like a Texas rig and sometimes they get smaller fish and t rigs win and sometimes jigs catch bigger fish and jigs win. Ya never know which is gonna be which so I tend to have both tied on 365 days a year and both get lots of bites and catch bigger fish. I like jigs when I want a more compact offering and I want a slower rate of fall. Jigs have a very good hook up ratio. Jigs come through a lot of types of cover pretty well. They're pretty dang sweet. I pretty much exclusively fish shad color skirts at this point and fish paddle tail trailers even when I'm flipping and pitching jigs a LOT. I don't fish swim jigs much but I do swim my jigs almost every trip - sometimes fish like a horizontal presentation and sometimes fish like a vertical presentation and heck sometimes I fish them right below the surface like a buzzbait with no blade. All the ways have caught me fish big and small! Enjoy!

I think bass will relate more to cover in shallow water when it's muddy and that sure is fun 🙂 Shade-brush-laydowns-sparse vegetation that intersects with structure adjacent to deeper water that is tight to the bank.

Bass seem to love high water. They push lil bait fish into the shallows and eat bugs and frogs and mammals exposed by the flooded habitat.

Had some fun this past week! Caught a giant crappie on a 10" ribbon tail and Jake got a PB redear sunfish! Some nice hard fighting fish in there - hopefully we find the big girls this weekend. 🙂

Yep that's the Aaron Martens one! That's my favorite one Picasso makes.

I personally am not a huge fan of the mega strike - the wire is super thin and they cast sort of like a potato chip for me personally. I like the Nichols stuff and original Lunker Lure or the Bert Deener offerings. Some of the Picasso offerings are also quite good. I'm partial to the Aaron Martens model. You can't go wrong with a strike King or Booyah from Walmart. Those things catch fish. Pricey but the Boogerman 1/8 oz buzzer is killer. Buckeye and Prototype and Accent are all good also. The key with any buzzbait is the mods. I like to uncrimp the arm and move the blade closer to the bend than they come stock to free up more of the hook bite. I rough up the contact points for the blade on the metal shaft and with the pop rivet. I make sure the rivet and blade contact points are flush. I crimp the rivet so it doesn't move. I hold them out my window on the way to and from the lake for a few trips. You can buy a 3/8 oz and use drop shot weights of your choice to make it cast better in a pinch and use bits of milk carton to hold them in place like a trailer hook. I use a trailer hook and a trailer and a skirt almost all the time and I find that almost always hooks the big ones and tempts them the best. Buzzbaits are all about the little tweaks.

Weirdly same. My dentist is not into fishing but his assistant loves to talk bass fishing with me - her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend take her out and she fishes and supervises etc. She's very intrigued by the whole thing!

The experience definitely made me more open to letting plastics marinate together in bags and then using them once they're good and weird. 🥴😂 I would call the color Salmonella Peas

PY - 1/2 oz Oyster Red Eye Shad with black stripe done down the back with marker and chartreuse stripe down sides with marker. 9 lb 3 oz. CY - 3/8 oz pegged tungsten flipping weight 5/0 offset worm hook green pumpkin Magnum Speed Worm that sat in a bag with red bug and got stained weird. 11 lb 5 oz. PB - (tied with CY) 7/16 oz pegged tungsten flipping weight 5/0 offset worm hook motor oil red flake Power Worm. 11 lb 5 oz.

I find that I tend to end up catching the fish that I'm casting my bait to more often than not.

Honestly - I like anything where Katy is catching bass with it. 🙂🙂🙂🤙🏼🤙🏼🤙🏼 Because I like when Katy's catching bass! It's like everything is right with the bass world when that's happening.

20 rods = option paralysis. They call me Mr Rictus when I got more than about 6 on the deck 😂

Nice try buck-o I ain't given up my honey hole! 😉😉😉 Juuuuust messing. I have fished in NC, SC, Michigan, Texas, Florida and California. Adding Vermont to the list this summer and maybe a stop or two along the way. Mostly fish central NC public water.

I've retired lures and then pulled them out of retirement and retired them again! I generally save lures attached to special memories or special fish.

I skunk all the time - fishing has been the toughest this spring of the past 4 years without a doubt. When it finally got to rolling it was much better but it's still slow. We are way behind where we were the past few years and I can only imagine it's worse up North.

Two that really stand out in my memory: the dark purple grape Mann's Jelly worms with the fire tail and the way a fresh bag of them smelled when we cracked it on the water together. The little hollow frog and crawdad lures he had. He had very old school hollow frog and crawfish frogs that we never fished and I always wanted to throw because I thought they looked cool 😂

Dang that's a really really good one. What an awful bait.

Probably my favorite soft plastic straight tail worm ever? I mean it just straight gets bit and catches monsters. I fished it a LOT weightless wacky and Neko weighted (I just use cheap finishing nails you can buy 1,000 at a time at hardware stores and shove them in the worm tail when I want it to fall a little faster and more vertical and let it weightless when I want to work it more like a topwater.

Been talking to @FishTax and @LrgmouthShad about how I have no confidence in all black frogs. We all agree I just need to go ahead and commit to them more and see what happens etc and after an hour with my trusty tropical white Spro Bronzeye 65, I look to Jake who is wrecking them on a tiny live target frog with a hand made skirt I did for him and realize smaller is probably the ticket anyway and tie on the black Spro popper. Normally I trim the legs very short but I joke to myself that I'm after a big fish and leave the legs long. We walk past the boat house at our favorite ultra pressured pond and the bugs are swarming the surface of the glassy water and me and Jake are talking and laughing and I'm sort of slowly walking the black popping spro back gently with long pauses and literally 5 feet from where we were talking and laughing my frog gets toilet flushed into the abyss with a sickening thunk that immediately informs my unconscious mind that this is a mondo behemoth and my rod is suddenly over my shoulder and I'm feeling the instantaneous load brick wall down into my rod blank and I know she's hooked good. I start reeling and I feel the familiar feeling of my reel turning and the line going away from me and then she breaches and then she breaches again and again and again all literally 10-15 feet in front of me. I tell Jake calmly to clear the area and I start walking backward and holding tension and because it's been raining for 3 days straight the bank is flooded enough for me to pull her straight into the wet flooded grass And vegetation and lip her. My black Spro pop 60 is gone - full length tails and all - and with it - my lack of confidence in the Black Frog is gone too.

Woooooooohoooooo! Yeeeehawwwww! Hot diggity! You're on fire! 🔥 🔥 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Wow literally basically same. At this point those lures are rusting for me. I occasionally get one on a bladed jig but I know that fish would have bit a swim jig faster and I might have gotten her bigger sister first.

I think objectively a 5 lb fish is big because they fight harder than most 8+ lbers I've landed. They seem about as smart as most 8+ lbers. They stretch your 15-20 lb line to its limits just like 8+ lbers. They break you off on finesse gear routinely just like 8+ lbers. AND when you see them come up - that's about the size where they get your heart beat up a few ticks in a hurry. I don't think it matters if you're in Mexico or Japan or Africa or California or Connecticut or Florida or Texas or Maine or Alaska. A 5 lb black bass is a big black bass that has done some damage and been through some stuff and you should be proud of that catch!

I get warmouth and rock bass and tilapia sometimes at a couple different spots and I gotta say - they're fun when you can land em! Better than lure stealing pike and mudfish encounters or super slimy catfish that try to hurt me and wreck my boat.

Absolutely! I like fishing straight braid for finesse and power fishing the bottom and for topwater when I'm fishing in vegetation. In general I use big game for wood and rock and sparce vegetation and braid for frogs and buzzbaits and backing on spinning rods. If I was going to fish in Florida for a couple weeks in May, I might only use braid on everything. Some people fish braid for everything all the time because they simply prefer it. Some say fish can see it in clear water but I haven't found that to matter much.