Pat Brown

Those lake fork chunks have called out to me many times - can you give any info on action/durability look on a jig etc? Thanks @KP Duty Lucky Craft Jerkbaits are my favorite too. 🙂

To me it's a inverted thermocline situation in the winter time - much like the summer. There is warm water beneath the surface that is less affected by fronts and bait lives there mostly. The water on the surface is turbulent and affected by wind current and changes temperatures rapidly with fronts. This pushes baitfish to a few places in the winter time and the presence of bass is usually dictated by a variety of factors. In general - on shallow ponds in the winter time - you'll do best on the sun warmed banks with hard bottom and clearer water, isolated patches of healthy grass in deeper water, steeper banks like the ones around the dam/rip rap and then if there is a main creek ditch that abruptly gets deeper than the flat gradual banks, those can be awesome. The biggest things that seem to affect whether or not bass are gonna be hanging out are 1) avian predators, 2) (on shad fisheries) a shad die off. When the shad die off - the bass can just meander around on the bottom eating chilled sashimi gizzards til it's time to spawn. Good luck finding them or getting bit when that's happening. If you have significant migrations of large avian predators in the winter (cormorants, loons, eagles, osprey, hawks, herons, egrets, seagulls etc) You think boat pressure scares bass during the hot months? Try 5,000 hungry cormorants that can kill a 6 lber like it's nothing and then do it again and again - and cormorants are like bass - they want a big easy meal - a bass - more than they want a little slippery gizzard shad (when they have a choice). It is for this reason - I believe that lately - being around shad has been worthless on my local lakes. Bass hide from birds and they usually like to do it in heavy cover around steeper banks (relative) that are protected from cold fronts and have good sunlight (for at least some of the day) I think that the absence of an abnormal abundance of avian predators in the winter time OR a big enough body of water with enough volume of water to generally 'get away' can help - but 1000 or less acre lakes that average 10 ft or so seem to be owned by the birds in open water - especially in the cold months. They go back up north when it's hot and the bass definitely swim around a lot more when they feel safer. I think in the winter time bass gorge on dead shad at night to avoid predation and hide during the day. Where they hide - structure with lots of cover - NEAR the bait massacre (relative). @Swamp Girl - full pool is when the water level returns to normal on a body of water that has been drained!

The worm is king in Florida, Mike and it sounds like you're already 100% with the program!!! Maybe try downsizing your braid to 15 lb and throwing a weightless trick, worm or even a finesse worm from Zoom and try colors like watermelon seed or pumpkin seed this time of year. I'd skip The dye in the winter. I've heard that Old-Timers that catch big Florida bass when it's cold around here like to cast their worm out and light a cigarette and they don't even move it till they're done smoking the first 100 mm. 😉

In my humble opinion that's just a tough time of year. It's kind of like the mid to late winter. I think that there are no tougher times to fish, but you can have really incredible days at both times of year. Smaller bodies of water getting tough when conditions are extreme probably has more to do with what baitfish is doing when water conditions get poor than what bass are doing because bass are just lazy and they just follow around the fridge. Bass are incredibly resilient and incredibly temperature resistant and good at finding water they can comfortably live in, but bait and smaller fish have much stricter limitations upon what they can tolerate. The places I do the best in the winter and in the late summer are small bodies of water with resilient forage. I personally like crappie and golden shiners for those times of year. Stay far away from gizzard/threadfin shad fisheries if you like getting bites fishing traditional lures in shallow Waters in the late summer and late winter LOL. I'm not saying you won't get bites doing that. I'm just saying it gets really really tough.

Weightless mag speed worm would be an excellent jack of all all trades for this kinda spot IMHO - you can buzz it - pitch and flip it - slowly swim it mid column - and mostly it'll stay clean dragging it with a high rod and occasionally popping the junk off the front of the bait. Sounds like a really good time to bury the hook eye and knot if you aren't already doing that 😎👍🏼 Nail weights for faster fall rates at a spot like that and I'd use a worm hook so I'm picking up as little junk as possible rather than a EWG which would catch way more junk on the retrieve. Sounds like a great spot for 20 lb big game so as to really help hover that worm over the muck rather than quickly plunge into it on pauses. Eel grass is excellent for a frog - sometimes they really want their meal up high and not down low or even mid column and frog is my favorite bait for tons of junk when they want it high and slow/subtle.

Based on @Catt thread about his success in TB in '17 - when spring hits - if you got some time before full pool - I'd fish that low water hard!

Near every one of NC State record bass come out of a 2 acre farm pond. A fish that beat our current state record of 15 was caught a couple years back....on a farm pond and released. She was 16. Do I think reservoirs like Jordan can compete with a small well managed fishery for producing a trophy? No. Why? Stripers. 'catch and release 🥹❤️' The really impressive state record bass were all mostly caught when bass was ON THE MENU. Lake Biwa beat our world record in Japan thanks to govt efforts to *eradicate LMB*. Keep some fish if you like big ones.

If a new state record got an all expense paid trip to a hatchery where she gets to live out her life making babies and eating trout - I might be more inclined to submit a fish - but that ain't what they do.

And I mean honestly - what is a state record? Is it really worth murdering a spectacular bass over? Probably not. Y'all want to really grease the tracks on the next state record business in your area? Start culling every bass you catch that isn't big and every fish you catch that isn't a bass or a basses food.

I am too - I mean that's basically what I end up catching but I'm definitely not looking for lots of dinks or something. I'm looking for a new PB hopefully every time I fish. I'm not like only throwing big swimbaits or anything super anachronistic like that. I enjoy hoping that I'm fishing for the biggest fish 😂 I DO think that systematically targeting tougher pieces of cover and main lake structure is more what I'm referring to. You basically still end up mostly catching normal sized bass BUT you get less bites per year/per trip on average by a country mile - the trade off is your average size goes waaaaaay up because the other half of the time it's Nadine or one of her cousins. 😁😁😁

Frog/Fluke/Weightless Worms (mag speed worm/mag speed craw/mag trick worm/Senko/etc.)/lipless crankbait/bladed jig/Jerkbait/glide bait/swim jig/drop shot/c rig/punch rig/heavy grass jig/big soft swimbait on beast hook. When I'm fishing over healthy grass a trick I employ is using heavy monofilament line to help keep my baits up in the water column/slow the rate of fall. Pretty invaluable when fishing OVER grass 😉

NC Winter Bass Fishing ain't for the faint of heart. 😎😎😎🎣🎣🎣 But I reckon we gonna find one this weekend. Snowy front hitting Sat-Sun.

@Alex from GA I think you'll get her this year! It's been a warm winter.

I believe it is *yellow* and white that appear the same to a bass - chartreuse is actually yellow mixed with a little bit of green which is something that bass see very well. They have green and red color receptors. Any chartreuse that has green in it is going to stand out to a bass. Even beyond this - I would think that contrast still exists even if bass don't necessarily have the receptors for differentiating between white and yellow.

My PB caught in July of 2023 - 11 lb 5 oz

Don't stop sharing, Tom! I always find your history lessons fascinating and very educational. You are absolutely right about learning from the pioneers.

We gonna get em Monday I guar-on-TEE.

You just gotta work on casting mechanics with big clunky baits and it's a steeper learning curve. It will also make you forget how to cast normal sized lures. There's a reason I throw a spinnerbait and not an A rig 😜👍🏼 But the bait monkey LOVES a rigs. 40$ worth of tackle gone in one cast? Yessir. Bait monkey loves em.

It's fun from the bank. If swim jigs hardly work at a small pond you fish - try shaking a minnow just beneath the surface. The wakes I see on that little minnow are comical - they shoot to kill with those minnow baits for sure.

My only good day ever on a spook was the flitter Shad super spook jr! I did win a tournament on that bait that day however so it bears mentioning. Caught around 20 fish on the only one I have and still toss the very same one occasionally but have never replicated the success I had that particular day with it.

Can you take a picture of what you mean? - kind of hard to picture what you're describing. Sounds like maybe you are getting tangled up in the cast and not the retrieve though....

Big girls play by their own rules for SURE. I ain't fishing for every bass in the lake or pond - I'm generally trophy hunting and you start to think differently when that's all you do. 1 OZ jig is also generally thought of us a hot water reaction speed thing and this one seemed to like the bait moving very fast in the cold! I am just gonna keep learning my own rules and tricks and probably ignore the rules from now on! Been getting loads of action on the frog too - I predict at least one frog fish in January this year if weather keeps going how it is! 😎🎣😉👍🏼 I'm really starting to like cold sunny days a LOT. Seems to be the best days for shallow winter bass for sure.

Yeah had the chance to hold one more really special fish on the day before Christmas Eve that definitely deserves to be added to this thread. 7.35 lbs and all of maybe 20". Just a complete football - and potentially my ticket to the 2025 big bass bash for the tri city lakes! My fourth submission this year but hey - I'll take winning December in NC with a 7.35. That'll make me look scary to the competition - especially catching it out of a Jon boat fishing with my son 😉😉😉👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼 Caught on a 1 oz @Siebert Outdoors grass jig in Patz Gizzard with a watermelon mag speed craw trailer in 1 FOW - 44° surface temps steady NE wind and bluebird skies - 3 pm. Gotta love the ole jig.

I just literally try to keep the minnow in or nearly in sight (think spinnerbait or swim jig + Alabama shake). I use lighter jig heads to achieve this. Yes - the strikes are incredibly violent and often they wake at the bait out of nowhere and smoke it at the surface like a topwater.

I have caught fish in chocolate milk on minnows. Bass don't stop eating little minnows when the water gets muddy. I actually do well shaking them just beneath the surface dirt shallow on small ponds - oddly enough - poorer visibility almost always = more bites on any artificial lure at these particular small bodies of water. These look fun. I shake minnows on weedless ned heads and have a lot more confidence in the bait being able to come through the tops of brush etc - works great.