Pat Brown

You can always ask folks at the marina/local DNR fisheries biologist folks - often they have an email on your states page and they love answering questions usually.

I try to make @LrgmouthShad aware of this juice but he insists that he will be keeping his plastics separate. 🥹 I caught my recent 11 and a quarter pounder on a mag speed worm in green pumpkin that had sat with red bug for too long and looked....odd. I have given up on worrying about color - I just hope the fish like what I'm throwing cuz I'm throwing what's on sale/what I have - bleeding together or not. 😂🥴

This is about all there is to say. It's a thing you gotta be aware of every moment of the day when fishing.

Yessss! Beauty! We had a nice time yesterday evening before a big storm hit. No giants but fun. Flukes and floating trick worms got it done. Lost my first bass on a wakebait but it wasn't super huge so I'll survive. The bite was so cool though! Saw the fish come up from super far away, bite and then swim with it before I even registered what was happening! Today we hit another spot and had a field day. @FishTax saw life all over his trail cams and warned me to be on the lookout for big fish - he wasn't wrong! 😛 Jake with a 6 yownder to start us off this evening on the merthiolate floating trick worm! Zoom probably gonna sell me about 6 more bags of those this spring I'll tell you what! Here's one that's definitely post and pre spawn for you Katy! Note the belly full of eggs and the extremely bloody tail. She been spawning and she bout to spawn. @Swamp Girl A few nice ones on the mag speed worm and fluke for Papa and then I make a long cast with my speed worm and feel a tick at the end of the cast as it's falling. I know what that means and I gather up my line as fast as my curado 8:3:1 will go and we got us a 4.5 lber! Gorgeous fish that just got done laying some eggs. Jake rounded the night out with another nice one and we caught a pretty toad. Best 5 were dangerously close to 20 lbs from the bank after school tonight 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

On the boat, 6-8 hours. On the bank 1-3 hours depending on commitments and time of day and how good they're biting and all that.

Yeah I can keep everything clean and work the cover and feel the bites much more efficiently with 3/8-1/2 oz pegged tungsten out front but that's magnums - the regular I feel like 5/16 would be fine for a pegged heavier weight.

I will only say that pegged 3/8 oz works better *for me* fishing in heavy cover and clear water personally. Dunno why. I been experimenting a lot and I just get more bites when it's all one unit for some reason. Seems like I always do better with faster ROF with any bait also.

Buy green pumpkin speed worms and a black marker 👍🏼

Big game has my heart. 20 lb for heavy cover. 15 lb for medium cover and moving baits like lipless or spinnerbait. 8-12 lb for spinning rods and Jerkbaits and small cranks and stuff. Braid for frogs and buzzbaits and backing.

@casts_by_fly - for what it's worth, I have seen exactly what you're talking about. Happen back and forth all summer long around here. Fat bass show up. Fat bass leave. Fry gaurders are hanging out with fry. Sunfish move in on the beds and spawn. Sunfish guard beds and fry. Fat bass show up. Sunfish leave. Fat bass make beds. They almost get to where they are tagging each other out on new and full moons - not even exaggerating. Bass like to spawn where deep meets shallow Katy. You may just have extremely good water and your fish don't show much wear and tear ever. We think of spawning as a visible and shallow thing and that is not always the case. I have actually been told by local biologists at my lakes that ***the bass that spawn shallow*** (not all do!!!!) around here tend to occupy the shallows in waves and they have observed 3 major waves at the end of the winter/early spring, when spring really bursts and beginning of the summer but often times as temps come back down the whole thing happens again and fall is more or less spring again for LMB around here. And you have deep spawners that follow no rules all year round 100% and there are many more of them than we realized and 'deep' could be a place where it drops from 3 FOW to 7 fairly quickly and they spawn in 7. It's not like the abyss necessarily.

Dang Clayton you're an absolute hammer! Congratulations dude!

I do not find that bass being ragged is a sign that the spawn is over at all. YMMV Usually has more to do with water quality etc in my experience Also bluegill spawning does not mean it's over at all here. YMMV A bass being 'fat' doesn't mean it hasn't spawned many times already. Or that it isn't currently spawning even! Not all post spawn fish look ragged and not all ragged fish have been spawning. There's lots of fun diseases fish can get etc. Sometimes skinny fish that are ragged are full of eggs and have diseases and can't hunt well - they're still pre-spawn. Sometimes fat healthy clean looking fish just got done laying her eggs and didn't get roughed up and has been loading her face with perch all day. She's still post spawn. Just sharing those tidbits to offer another perspective. Again might be different up north - don't know.

Find the slightly less clear water 👍🏼 It's somewhere! It's a start. The main reason clear water is tough IMHO is that bass will not be a lot of places. Find heavy cover/heavy shade/10+ feet of water etc. Usually if your lake is a flooded river or creek - there's a mouth of the original creek and that area tends to accumulate silt and be dirtier than the rest of the lake - good place to start. I actually don't really worry about clarity much for bait selection per se - unless the fish are very conditioned and don't bite treble hook baits. I use clarity more so to help me determine how deep and how heavy the cover I need to target is. If all I had was a crankbait - I would have just thrown that crankbait and covered water and hit shallow targets that give bass a good spot to hide from birds.

Dunno if they really stop or start more than on an individual case by case fluid basis. They're not robots they're animals. 😏 When they feel like making babies they do and sometimes they do it many times and many places with many fish and some fish never spawn and some fish spawn once or twice in the spring and call it a day - I think most big fish spawn as often as they can and that is much more often that we had previously believed. Basically a fish that is post spawn is also...pre spawn....again? And will soon be spawning and then be post spawn and then they will be pre spawn.... etc. Fish by fish thing. If you don't wear polarized glasses you will never see a bass on a bed - in clearer water they generally spawn in up to 'your water clarity x 2-3. If you can see 6 feet down they could be spawning as deep as 20 feet down etc. Basically they are done spawning when they lay their eggs and they are making more eggs as soon as they lay their eggs. Maybe up north the bass all drop eggs and then swim around until the winter but I sincerely doubt it. Here you might catch a fish off a bed in 1 foot of muddy water near the marina and then catch a pre-spawn fish up the lake on a point and then catch a skinny post spawner in some vegetation all in the same day. You'd get a different answer from each of those fish huh?

Dang - that's a bummer! 🥹♥️ I will happily liberate you of them if you absolutely insist. 😎😎😎🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

Mrs Meagan decided we better change *AFTER* we fished for 45 minutes at the house in the back canals 👍🏼🫡😭😂

Yeah the popping style spro walks easier than the pointed nose frog. But both do things the other won't and I use the 65 the most. It skips like a dream. Comes over wood and through vegetation a lot better. Bigger hooks mean you land bigger fish more of the time. It also walks super easy for me but I think the pop 60 walks a lot easier for a beginner. My 12 year old son would agree with me! He struggles to walk the 65 sometimes and the pop 60 walks itself (his words!)!!!

We went to the beach for an old friends wedding this weekend! I remember nearly 20 years ago - fishing in the canals behind Tom's parents beach house - I was very curious if they were destroyed by Helene this last year or if they had anything alive in them. I knew I wasn't going to have much opportunity being that I was a grooms man in the wedding and had most of the weekend booked up for social events and wedding related activities. Well we get to a good break point the day of the wedding before we have to change and folks in the wedding go back to the beach house for lunch. Jake and I see our opportunity of course and of course at this stage in our fishing journey - we are curious about one thing and one thing only - do these canals have largemouth bass and do they eat spro frogs? Well I make my first cast from his backyard to a ledge where I can see sandy bottom washed out by current and line my cast up with a nice big piece of wood under a shadeline and start walking my frog out. About one foot in front of the piece of wood - my Spro Pop 60 in Freak gets absolutely demolished and the fish swims towards me and I miss the hookset. We proceed to catch a mess of largemouth over the course of the next hour - providing entertainment for the people changing into their wedding garments and eating lunch - also blowing Tom and his families minds simultaneously - they had NO idea there were bass in the canals! Jake got his personal best bluegill at 14 oz - just 2 shy of a lb! He also got the big bass for the day on the floating zoom bubble gum trick worm - about 4.5 lbs! We answered the age old question: YES! Canal bass eat spro frogs. 🐸🐸🐸😍😍😍

Okay so these are getting discontinued and I like them a lot and a local shop has a bunch near the coast 🙈🙈🙈🙈 Dang monkey!

Boring answer but it's the truth. Spro Pop 60 without any hesitation. The pointy nose frogs take a little more refined rod twitching. The popping frogs want to walk side to side.

When I really commit to the Magnum it just wows me almost every time. They aren't always on it but when they are it's a big fish bait 1000% Gotta figure it's +/- functionally interchangeable with a 7" soft swimbait of extremely fancy and expensive hand poured nature - at least to a largemouth bass. And a lot more versatile and weedless and I reckon 'subtler' and more 'natural and random' somehow? I dunno I fish em a lot now!

I agree. I am specifically referring to offset round bend/worm hook - I don't use any EWG style hooks with worms personally. 3/0 is my choice for the regular size but 2/0 would work fine - it's a pretty small bait compared to the Magnum size.

If that don't bring a tear to your eye this morning. Gaw-lee! Katy - beautiful and deeply relatable. Thanks for enriching the fishing experience for us with reminder that it's about more than the tug!

Keeping it in sight rod tip high near surface and even waking or breeching periodically - little twitches - set the hook with the reel! Mega fun stuff.

Well - it's been more fun fun fun - the spawn is finally getting to where it's more waves and less full on all the time and I'm super happy to see it. One thing that really lets you know it's fun time - catching a frog fish. It's been a struggle. Since the 9 lber in March I've lost a lot of the ones that have eaten it well and also gotten uncommitted bites and it's just been slow getting that topwater thing rolling properly here. Well we have 3 days in the high 70s and low 80s with lots of rain and low pressure and stuff usually starts to...happen. I fished a mag speed worm in the rain and did pretty well at the super pressured spot. Well we hit a spot we haven't been fishing much this year and I nailed a nice 4 lber and Jake got a couple nice keeper size fish. All caught fishing the floating worm - zoom no salt added merthiolate trick worm wacky style - a technique that has been absolutely deadly this spring for me! Well, it rained off and on all night and Jake had practice scheduled right before a thunderstorm hit and I brought my frog and my floating worm to the retention pond. Caught the biggest fish we have caught so far out of the small retention pond on the Spro Pop 60 in the Speck color but I painted a red throat and chartreuse stripe down the center to make it look like a baby sunfish or something. It worked! 5 + on the frog! She inhaled that thing! Heck of a fight. Huge head and shoulders and a big mouth. Definitely an older fish and had she been pre-spawn would be a absolute meatball. Beauty. The storms got crazy fast and I managed one little guy on the floating worm. Can't wait to see if the frog thing keeps getting better with the warming trend continuing all week. Makes me think I need to get up in the dark and fish that popping spro nice and slow 🫣🫣🫣