Pat Brown

That's the kind of fish you catch on a full moon in North Carolina. Not going to lie. 🌕😎

Well...there goes keeping how good the bass fishing in NC is low key! Kyle with a 10!

Cool to see em fishing the outer banks. I need to try the Neuse River this summer for sure when I visit my folks in Marshallburg! Go Kyle! I feel he is one of the best to ever do it and it's nice to see him winning one!

My experience is that big bass don't stop eating but they do get smarter. I'd say they're eating more food more often than any other size class on the pond but they're very dialed in on whatever it is they want to be eating and very difficult to distract or fool with artificial lures on most days where they're in eating mode. I think basically the smaller fish are eating *everything* and not just the types of things that bigger bass would want to eat and this is helpful for balancing the ecosystem. You definitely don't want only large bass on a pond. But those midsize ones are definitely the ones that limit the growth potential of your big fish. How much you care is entirely up to you? Catching 13 year old 4 lb fish is just as fun as catching a 2 year old 4 lb fish. It's just that releasing the 2 year old fish - it will probably get bigger before you catch it again - the 13 year old fish is done growing. In general the easiest way to not overthink this whole deal is keep medium small fish that look off. Big eye balls. Thin tails. Concave bellies. Big gashes or lots of sores etc. It isn't hard in a day catching 13 fish ranging from 1-5 lbs to know which one or two I would remove for the betterment of the lake etc. And realistically - the rate that the people who keep fish catch bass is basically zero here. I think you just gotta get a feel for the body of water and then you'll have an idea how best to help it along.

Been donating lil unhealthy looking runts and trash fish/panfish to hungry folks back at the marina every trip out! It's very appreciated and it helps my big girls.

Mepps, Rooster Tail, Road Runner, Beetle Spin!

Beaaaaast @N Florida Mike - that's one of the best I seen you pull out of the church pond!

Had a pretty crazy week! Caught some big ones and some small ones and some not bass and I brought an abandoned ultralight rig back from the dead and caught my first fish shaking a crappie jig at a small pond near where my son's soccer team practices and that was incredibly fun! Looking forward to the weekend fishing!

Amazing person. She won a tournament on the Spro frog in 22 while having chemo treatments. If that isn't pure grit and love of fishing - I have no idea what is. Terrible loss.

I select the line for the cover - not necessarily the bait. Different line does different things in terms of bait action which is a whole nother vector that can be fun to play with. Short answer is there is no proper line for fishing jigs. There's lots of proper line for fishing jigs. You got a figure out which one is proper for you fishing jigs. 🙂 Here I'll give some context. If I'm only fishing a jig in choked out Hydrilla - braid would be the obvious choice and probably 50+ lb. If I'm fishing open pebble banks with occasional twigs and very isolated stumps and small rocks here and there - I could go as low as 12 lb big game and be fine. If I'm flipping my jig into a tree on a point in 10 feet of water and I'm using a 1 OZ jig and a 7'6 heavy rod - 20 lb big game would be the line of choice. If I'm only gonna be swimming a jig at a pond where there's only dinks and the bottom is mushy snot that I need to stay above and I'm using a very light jig with a very light wire hook, I might fish it on a spinning rod, take off the weed guard, not use a trailer and shake it like a crappie jig for bites while reeling it back and not give a hoot.

Buckeye Buzzerk or Lunker Lure 1/8 oz are both great - take any 1/4 oz and put a 1/8 oz blade on it also. The dera is very uniquely small - recommend a trailer hook and very light line and spinning rod for that one but it catches everything that swims.

Hey there - neurodivergent angler here. I'm autism spectrum and ADHD. It must have been hell on my poor father but hey, I turned out alright! Just be patient - be kind - be whimsical. Remember fishing is about making something our own (I have to remember this with my own son!) and as fathers the best we can do is stay out of the way sometimes. When first getting started - I liked to look for signs of life - help my dad pick lures - count birds - help watch for stumps - anything I could do to be a part of it and stay engaged. Take lots of breaks. Bring snacks. Bring soda. Give big hugs and make sure you remember to laugh and be a proud dad. Worms and minnows and live crawfish are fun for young eager minds to hunt for and catch fish better than 1,000,000$ worth of bass pro shops premium tackle. Let him get a feel for bites and casts and locating and catching fish with live bait and maybe panfish or something to that effect and he will feel the adrenaline rush that can easily lead to a life long passion! Good luck and keep us updated! -Pat

This year I'm trying very very hard to be resourceful and use what I have in creative ways. If I buy something at this point it's probably line or hooks or weights or jigheads or something to that effect. I have baits I can catch fish with that I am good at using for most situations - the only thing I need to be spending on my fishing at this point is time. It's kinda like music - all the gear in the world isn't gonna practice your instrument and make you a creative person. Fishing is something we do - not something we purchase. I'm gonna try to really live like that the best I can this year!

The Brush Mata Jig from Siebert comes with a hybrid silicon and living rubber skirt and he leaves it COMPLETELY full - it's bad to the bone. You can leave them completely untrimmed and thread a big salty chunk on there and it catches big fish without trimming when they're in the mood for that super big profile.

I've caught fish with lots of stuff on the snipers - I mostly just use old t rig plastics 🙂 Can't go wrong with speed craw/rage menace/super Chunk/swimbait etc. I usually just bite off some plastic on longer plastics to make the whole thing more compact. That's about it!

My favorite currently by far is the @Siebert Outdoors grass jig and don't sleep on the 3/4, 1 and 1.5 oz heads!

As slow as I can but you know I'm on some juice if I'm holding position or cutting it off completely. 🙂

Josh Jones Oliver Gny Ty Pig Patrol Geoffrey the King Ben Milliken Brandon Burks Kyle Hall Jimmy Zinker Damian Thao (watch his double digit frog compilation and prepare to have your mind blown 🤣) Probably forgetting a bunch but these came to mind and I've learned a lot from all of them!

Might be time to get a 10" soft swimbait or glide bait out! That's a great story! Hope you catch her.

I always trim every jig skirt. How much depends on my goals. The minimum is just trim the tips of the strands to creates a little bulk and randomness to how it hangs. Mid level I will kinda trim it down to where it's very close to the hook shank maybe roughly 1" and then flair a few strands out. And then sometimes I really want it compact and that's when I will trim the skirt up to the hook shank and really poof it out with my clippers. I have skirt tying stuff and constantly tie my own jig skirts and do new skirts on old jigs so I really don't mind doing it at all. I have many jigs that are approaching 5 years old that have caught a bunch of bass on them and I still use because I mess with skirts!

Topwaters getting follows is often how I learn where a fish hangs out.

Just addressing the part where you said you don't trust all the scientists saying selective harvest is good. It's nuanced. I don't think people should keep overslot fish and if people are breaking the law, by all means report them to the game warden.

Basically slot limits are good. Like 12-18" for example. That's a nice one. If you're worried about a body of water or your local fishery, best you can do is contact your local DNR and ask what they think on the matter. I still think the long and short of it is looking down your nose at folks keeping fish is a choice but it's basically cultural. Looking down your nose at folks releasing fish and not catching fish for food is a choice and it's cultural also. I try to just practice compassion and tolerance and reserve judgement for very unique situations where I can specifically see harm being done.

The concept of selective harvest is merely selecting for bigger fish and helping the biomass distribute more evenly amongst the bigger fish so they can continue to grow before they reach their growth potential at about ~6 years old. You don't have to do it if you don't want to. It's not really anything new or bad. In fact in Japan govt efforts to completely wipe out bass merely produced the current world record Florida strain bass by essentially culling out lake Biwa. Don't keep giant fish. Don't keep small itty bitty fish. You will help bass by keeping more of the midsize fish every year which tend to be females that eat a large percentage of the available biomass in a body of water making it very difficult for the apex fish to get bigger than pretty big. Or just go fishing and let them go. That's the beauty of freedom. The point is people keeping bass are almost certainly helping a fishery unless they're doing something incredible! Remember 60% of all the fish on any body of water die every year. That's a statistic I've heard over and over again on lots of places and I believe it. It doesn't matter if it's us that kills them or a tree falling on their head or old age or starvation or whatever 60% of all of the fish are going to die. The best we can do is try to encourage the big ones to survive as anglers.

There's too many of them in my poor old brain for this thread but yeah you could say I'm an accuracy by volume guy when it comes to successfully landing big bass 🥴🥴🥴 Okay okay....I got one for this thread that really is a pretty good one because it's the day my son lost the first double digit bass we ever saw before I even cared or knew what a double digit bass even was. For this one we are gonna have to go way back to when Pat only had two spinning rods and threw a crankbait from Walmart 90% of the time and even trolled it. Maybe 2018-2019...before COVID and before the serious bass fishing thing really happened for me. We were known at that point in time to do monthly trips out on the local lake just for whatever was biting. At that point in time I think we had all of 3 largemouth bass racked up in total between the 3 of us on our home lake, a handful of decent sized crappie and a few catfish under our belt for all our efforts up to this point. Well it was a hot summer afternoon and we hadn't hardly left the marina. We had made our way west of the marina and we were trolling our crankbaits along the deep edge of that bank back into a shady pocket - mostly to escape the blistering sun and maybe have a little on the water picnic. My son Jake was all of 7 years old and very happy to be trolling a fancy new orange crawdad crankbait that grandpa got him for Christmas!!!! He just knew it was gonna catch him something just like dad! We are making our way up to the point outside the pocket we are heading to and the crankbait that I'm trolling gets hung pretty bad. We spend a few minutes trying to free it and have to break it off. After the debacle is over I retie and tell Jake to cast back out and I reposition us and head over the point and back into the pocket. Now Jake says he's snagged. I'm a little miffed by now because I had just unsnagged and Meagan of course is making me feel dumb for trolling back over the spot I just lost a crankbait....and then Jake says 'IT'S MOVING!??' This is where things got very interesting. I am half convinced he's got a waterlogged stump that he's patiently reeling up to the boat but then his drag starts to slip. The line isn't moving much - compared to what I had seen at that point - just pulling. Well after what seemed like an eternity a bass that was all of 30" long and had a head that looked like a literal cement bucket emerged with Jakes beloved orange crankbait completely gone. We couldn't see it down her throat. We were VERY green and VERY uncommitted new anglers at this time as a family and did NOT yet own a net OR know the first thing about large bass or lipping fish. In the heat of the moment - the fish had come up closer to Meagan than to me and in an effort to keep the fish from getting off, she made a quick decision to grab the line - unfortunately her plan ended there and instead of using that leverage to lip the bass she fearfully tried to hoist this fish on 8 lb mono over the bow and into the boat. Well that did NOT work ☝🏼🥴😂👍🏼 The fish very casually proceeded to snap the line rather instantaneously and then slowly lumber away as the big ones often do. Jake still hasn't forgiven Meagan for that one! 😂😂😂😂😂 Knowing what I know now, she was 13+