Pat Brown

I have some of my best fishing memories on cloudy and sunny days and I think that the trick is learning to kind of target fish in both scenarios. On sunny days I'm looking for shade. On cloudy days, I'm looking for flat expanses of hard bottom areas near deep water where they can be feeding etc.

Honestly - any of the more natural shad imitators would work fine. Darker back lighter belly etc.

I never caught a tagged bass - that's wicked cool!

My two biggest *so far* on the t-rigged speed craw are 7.4 and 8.0 😎👍🏻 I agree that it might be even better t rigged than on a jig! 🤣

I might give a big spinnerbait a toss tomorrow if the wind gets right. 😎😎😎

Spinning rods and either manns worms or crank/Jerkbaits. My dad had other stuff but I just looked - never got to touch. It wasn't til we started making annual trips up to Michigan for small mouth that I really got decent with a crankbait. Jerkbaits I just fished like crankbaits at the time 🤣🤣🤣 They still caught small mouth. Fishing for catfish with my friends was my second love in my teens. It was a welcome respite from the hardships of adolescence and my friends and I would go out into the woods on the banks of Lake Michie in Durham, North Carolina and we would fish for big catfish in the sticky hot summer sun! We used chicken, liver and cheese flavored hot dogs on spinning rods and we caught us a lot and we ate them too! Caught my first and only chain pickerel doing this and it was a really good one. Never caught a large mouth on chicken liver during this but it turns out the lake is great for largemouth bass! In 2018 and 2019 my wife and son and I started trolling crankbaits on John boats at local lakes for fun to get outside and do something besides sit around at our house and we did that maybe three or four times over the course of those two years and had a lot of fun doing it and maybe caught a few crappie and maybe one bass doing that. Mostly just enjoyed being outdoors. Covid hit and I became self-employed and successful and bass fishing was sitting there. Staring me in the face. Living in Greensboro. I'm surrounded by some of the best quiet and unheard of largemouth bass fisheries on the Eastern seaboard and I have been deeply ensconced with these fisheries since about 2020! I've never fished for anything with the intensity and the passion that I've devoted to the largemouth.

Same thing I want every day - peace on earth and health and well being for myself and the people I care about. That being said, I would really love to try one of those castable fish finders. Be neat for locating sneaky stuff at the featureless no boats allowed snaggy weird little public ponds I fish. I want a true heavy flipping stick for braid and pads etc. I want to be able to horse 12 pounders out of lily pads and don't have a rod for that. I'd like to get the DRT klash 9 In a nice green gizzard Shad color. I'd like to get a wooden musky size jitterbug in Black with proper hooks and hardware and such. Might get one of those new Shimano scorpion reels from digitaka. They look super sweet. Kind of want to get a couple sproKing daddies to play with and maybe a couple of the spro rats. Maybe this year I will finally get a few molds for soft plastics and start recycling. Some of my old used up plastics that I've got in Old coffee cans on a shelf.

Super Chunk jr. Baby Chunk Baby Speed Craw Fluke jr. Centipede Mag 2 Uni Toad Ring Worm Mag speed worm Mag trick worm Mag Fluke Mag Speed Craw Creepy Crawlers The two I most consistently could not live without from Zoom are the fluke and the speed craw. Speed craw is my favorite finesse jig trailer and the fluke is my favorite weightless plastic!

I'm not sure I'm ready to accept a world where @TnRiver46 catches bass on a popular lure that even beginners catch bass on. 😭😭😭😭

Got my first glide bait bass of the fall on the BPS swerve! Super fun catch and a nice fish and my first big bait fish on my iRod Quercus Swimbait Jr. Super epic fun Slayin with the flukes for the others! Missed a couple frog giants but it's about all the really big ones will hit right now so I keep tossing and hoping to hook up! New moon coming - feeling hopeful. 😎🌑 🎣

There are SO many possibilities as to why this is happening - hard to say. I catch bass fine with both. Sometimes the faster fall rate of the CS is good sometimes not. The fluke seems tougher to rig right for what it's worth. But when it's rigged well - it's a deadly weapon when they want that slow gliding fall. To put it bluntly - fluke when they're feeding more up in the water column - caffeine shad when they want it closer to the bottom.

This discussion (a very good one!) points back to the wisdom we return to time and time again: (To the Bait Monkey's™ chagrin) There aren't really 'fall baits' and 'summer baits' and 'spring baits' and 'winter baits'...there's bass baits. Pick the ones you like that cover the bottom middle and top of the water column and work in the cover you fish and that can go fast or slow - learn em inside and out and backwards and sideways and maybe even invent some new ways to use em 🤫🤫🤫 And then stick with those. You'll never have a situation that you don't have a tool for.

That's a pretty small body of water so I would just hit everything. Top middle and bottom. Fast, medium speed and slow. And you got to make sure that you hit rock wood and vegetation if all three are available. Water that small – you're just junk fishing and you're trying to get them to bite and then move on to new groups of fish and trying to get them to bite because usually fish on a body of water that small disperse pretty quickly when one fish gets caught off of an area or out of a group and they're perfectly content to just move on to another part of the lake. This time of year I start shallow and kind of zigzag out deep as I bounce around on different types of structure and I usually start on the bank that the wind is blowing into but not always.

I think in the end we develop our own repertoire of confusion and we adapt to the fish that we like to fish for in the places we like to fish for them. Fishing is definitely more for fun and soul satisfaction than anything else and I think lure selection should always be in that spirit! I catch em how I like and so should each angler. 😎😎😎

Call me crazy if you want, but I don't think bass can be conditioned to a part of the water column - but I hear what you're saying. A lot of lures (chatterbait and lipless and buzzbaits and frogs included) - unless you learn how to kind of do special stuff with them - kind of only do one thing - and if the fish learn that thing that everyone does with the lure and it's also what you do with the lure - you're not going to get a bite. I think regardless of what part of the water column you select - got to be a little different 😎👍🏻😉

Kind of a cool story for this thread - A couple weeks ago back in mid-september. It was my son Jacob's birthday who is an avid bass fisherman his self. And his birthday. He wanted to do a fishing party at the pond and we did that this year and I was fishing around a creek channel on a really windy day in September for his party and I came across a red ear color popping frog made by spro. I am a huge avid frog fisherman and it is my favorite way to catch bass and up to that point I had never purchased a spro frog and thrown it myself but this frog appeared to be unused and had simply broken off and floated to the bank on this windy day. So I put it in my pocket and vowed to throw it eventually when the time seemed right. Fast forward to this past few weeks and a lot of really big fish have been migrating up shallow and wanting really fast moving small baits. I finally convinced myself to tie on that spro-popping frog and went out to my local shallow pond and fished it on a really good looking day and had some violent bites that did not connect but gave me a lot of confidence in the bait. I then decided to tie it on at a spot that had recently been producing some big fish in the evenings and lo and behold. I caught a 6-pounder on it and she literally swallowed the Frog. I had to cut the line and unfortunately the Frog is no longer in my possession but she swam away okay and she was already digesting it by the time I released her. As a result of all of this excitement, I went ahead and tied on a replacement spro popping frog and went to another spot that's been producing a lot of big fish lately and caught my biggest fish so far of the Fall on that one. An interesting chain of events spawned by one found lure! You can just barely see the last remaining moments of that spro popping frog in red ear's life as it is going down her throat. And here's the giant a couple days later on the one I got to replace my lucky find. It's always interesting when a found bait changes the game for you!

Buzzbait is not even able to go fast enough for this situation. Try burning a fluke or even like a spook or popper over the top of them.

I would start on the West Bank when there's an East wind. Then I'd go try the East bank. Probably bounce back and forth while trying different types of cover and structure. Bass like flats/points/coves/creeks/vegetation/wood/rock. Sometimes it's all about being in the wind. Sometimes they want to be wind protected. Beyond that - when it's windy - I usually speed up my presentations and fish more reaction type lures.

When they're doing that I gotta go FAST. Like I'm talking you gotta make it look like you're burning the bait back in to make another cast ~90% of the time to even get a sniff.

I definitely feel like it's good to kind of change things up a little bit even within a bait category, especially if you're hammering on the same fish all the time. Little tiny changes can make a big difference. At the end of the day it's all about showing fish something different if you really want to get a bite from a special fish. I definitely think that tournament angling is a unique subset of our bass fishing culture because tournament anglers not only often are watching fish react in real time to their baits. They're targeting very specific fish, often in community areas at the same time as each other and I would think it would make it very difficult to figure out what the heck is going on ever with any sort of certainty. In my experience with my fish on my lakes that get the pressure that they get - being a little bit different pays off big time sometimes! Downsizing my bait or line or upsizing my bait or adding some weight or putting a little color on it with a marker, etc. Those are the types of things that keep baits working year after year for me! YMMV The fact of the matter is the bass are eating on the top or in the middle or on the bottom. Bass are going to eat something moving fast or moving medium speed or moving slow. It's up to us to figure out how that's all going to play out and I think that the lure don't really matter that much!

You may not be tipping canoes anymore but I got a feeling the days of slingin' hogs into the boat are far from over for Ol Crick!!! 😉😉😉🎣🎣🎣😎😎😎 It was a VERY good year indeed.

My experience has been that the deep dive is worth it if it's worth it. Meaning - if you find a bait that YOUR fish really like YOU to fish - it CAN be worth a deep dive. I get a lot of bites on lipless crankbaits and frogs and Jigs every year where I fish. As a result - I have quite s few different types of each available - because I'm aware from experience - the types of situations I might encounter and how the variations I have selected benefit me in each of these unique circumstances. That basically comes from experimenting and having success which comes from time on the water catching fish. I hear a LOT of people say ' if they're not biting my black spro 65, they're not on the Frog' This has been fundamentally and totally and completely untrue time and time again. Little changes can make a big difference IF (and it's a big if) you know a bait inside and out and know bass should be biting a category. I usually rotate bait categories first but sometimes my Spidey senses tingle and I know a smaller frog that spits some water will get bit if I work it a little faster etc and then boom 7 lber.

Confidence baits!!!! It really begins and ends with confidence.

Dang - it's been a lil bit hasn't it? 😉😉😉😉 Been busy getting sizable bass to eat hollow frogs and flukes and glide baits and such 🫢🎣😂😎👍🏻 Lil red on the throat is the deal for a lil while??? There's a frog that got completely swallowed for those who doubt that it happens. Literally swung the instant she bit in pitch black and she was digesting it by the time I got her in. A giant! Long 6 lber and my first fish in the Spro Popping 60 in redear! Jake caught his first fish on a glide bait and then we went back for more action and he caught his 2nd fish on a glide bait this morning and it was much bigger! I saw some big swirls WAAAAY out beyond kingdom come and I threw my Spro popping frog probably 200 feet and started reeling slack out of my line and the frog burned for a couple seconds while my line straightened out - and then she hit. It was the kind of bite we live for. I set the hook and she launched her mass into the air and she took my breath away - my heart skipped a beat - time stood still. Jake scaled a ravine and landed her while I fought her and brought her to the bank a good 6 feet below where we stood. It was an incredible experience and a GREAT October frog fishing moment. 7 lbs 8 oz of MEAT.

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