Pat Brown

Gonna echo this sentiment. I own and use a little bit of everything and they all seem fine - it’s just branding and little nit picky things that might make you feel cooler or a little more comfortable while holding one vs another. I actually haven’t had a bad experience with any reel brand and I find that the cheapest stuff is excellent as is this super expensive stuff - it’s a great time to be a bass fisherman on any budget. It’s really hard to beat going to a store and holding some of these reels in your hand and seeing how they feel. I would highly recommend doing that. Also FWIW - the curado is where you really start to “experience” Shimano quality - the SLX feels exactly like a budget reel - because that’s what it is. DC casting reels are all awful at any price point IMHO.

There’s this thing called forward facing sonar now. People talk about it sometimes.

I feel like I had a spool that did that and I googled it and I had to loosen the drag all the way and then tighten it all the way down and then it worked normally again - maybe. Haha It was a long time ago - but I feel like that worked.

Interesting - if that’s the only thing bad about them - that’s not too bad - I feel like with bait casters my line is usually heavy enough that drag only really comes into play when I hook a pretty dang big one etc. The BB1 pro has a cool drag clicker and feel pretty nice to me but it’s so picky about the weight of the bait you’re trying to throw. But yeah mostly - drag doesn’t come into play much with a baitcaster for me - so it’s lower on my list of considerations- maybe someone else will see this new development and have something new to offer.

What exactly are you not crazy about? That could certainly help dial in what kinds of things might help you out.

BB1 pro is pretty nice - kinda sucks for lighter baits and line though - I like it for heavier baits and line. I think the one you currently use is sort of the standard for lews and what most people use for the bread and butter day in day out stuff. Lews product line is as varied and complex and difficult to understand as any brands currently and you can get anything they make with a shallow or deeper spool and different speeds and stuff of that nature - different price points are all pretty much the same until you really shell out some loot for bait casters. Like 350$ and up are definitely in a different world from the 100-300$ reels which all feel pretty similar to me +\- I’d look at the Daiwa Tatula 100 and the Fuego both of which are nice and pretty cheap - I like em better than Lews or SLX stuff.

@Bluebasser86 - dude that rules - congratulations! It’s definitely something different IMHO and it can work extremely well on fished over fish.

Been a little while but we have been having a blast - finally got some frog fish! Jake got some really nice ones on the floating worm! And I managed a few good fish here and there on flipping baits etc But what’s really been crazy has been the giant crappie slug fest in the backyard - here’s just a small sample lol But also lots of perch and sunfish Pretty much non stop action every day when I have time to get out and make a few casts - spring is my happy place!!!

Tell your buddy if he learns to sharpen hooks - they can all be the sharpest hook. Every company ships out a hook that can catch a fish and every company ships out dull hooks. Every companies hooks will get dull after you set the hook on a fish or two and then you need to either have deep pockets or a basic skill that every angler should possess. Once you can sharpen a hook to surgical sharpness - doesn’t really matters whos favorite shopping brand wins the contest. The person with basic essential knowledge and skills (sharpening a hook) will win no matter what.

Shallow side sounds way more fishy but my biggest issue bank fishing big reservoirs is you can fish a big lake from a boat and fish 4 creeks that have all the right stuff and no bass and then stumble on one creek that’s going off - from the bank - it can take a long long time to make these determinations especially on really big lakes. It sounds like you have two choices though - most lakes have fish somewhere on good structure that intersects with cover. I’d fish the shallow side and focus on the isolated veins and the brush piles and the flatter banks right up by the shore etc - but if possible - might be worth fishing both - I’ve done really well on steep rocky banks - bass figure out all sorts of ways to do their thing on those little shelves. For what it’s worth, I think prevailing conditions during the days leading up to my fishing adventure would heavily influence which bank I started on also!

Dude that’s a monster! Congratulations on the new PB!

Dobyns Maverick is a great rod right in that price range - I have fished those and they are nice for the money. Spend a little more and you can get an irod gen 3 Fred’s magic stick - excellent rod with top shelf components and on sale you can get them around 120$. I have liked my abu veritas rods - those are great when you can get them on sale. Can’t complain about the shimano SLX rods - very nice rods for the money - with a guide replacement here and there - I’ve been fishing a couple of them for 6 years! I’d go Irod just for the guides and blank but there’s tons of great options - the truth is pretty much any rod can be pretty great these days - it’s just what features do you need and how good of a deal can you find kinda.

Palomar for braid and SDJ or double SDJ for clear line. Never felt the need to add leaders to the equation.

Try a weightless t rig original trick worm no salt on 8 lb big game with a 2/0 offset worm hook twitched at various speeds or dead sticked or slowly pulled and paused or popped like a jerkbait etc

My fellow anglers - Dink was clearly defined by our forefathers and was a term developed in tandem with the necessity to harvest fish for food!!! A dink is a fish of any species that is not worth the effort to clean and filet for a meal. Basically “under slot” if you saltwater fish.

Because bass don’t only spawn once or all at once - I generally don’t change what I’m doing much after surface temps get warm - bass are pre spawn when they finish laying eggs because they are physically incapable of maturing a round of eggs all at once and while they’re laying one round of eggs another is incubating and maturing - this process is actually slowed down even more if temps are below 70 or above 80 regularly - egg incubation slows a lot when it’s hot or cool but they keep spawning every new and full moon. Fry guarders are among the easiest fish to catch all year and I truly believe the main reason the bite seems to get so hot in the summer is that fish are spawning and guarding fry literally everywhere perpetually and they have a very hard time resisting anything that’s in the water with the fry. Also important to remember that once a bass is locked into spawning - he will be busy for well over a month and often times be protecting fry for multiple females and dealing with fresh egg drops all at once! Very busy boys! Males look beat up not necessarily because they’ve been caught a million times but because they’re probably on their 6th round of spawning and you think he just got done with his one round of babies etc. My experience is more so that when a ton of fish are spawning at once it can seem tough/slow because when they’re on their beds they get pressured and aren’t really eating anything at all - just chasing things off - so basically a couple weeks where the only way to get bit is to drop a bait right on their bed and let it sit. Not very fun or easy fishing - but it can be cool to sight fish - I enjoy just seeing them everywhere - it’s kinda like going shopping a few weeks before Christmas - you get a sense of how big the bass are and where they hang out from just studying them without even making a cast. The “post spawn” is sort of confusing terminology because it feels like we are talking about deer or trout and bass simply dont reproduce the same way at all - a healthier way of viewing the seasons of LMB fishing (to me at least) is “late spring” - I don’t really sit around and try to generalize an entire population of bass - I try to think more so about the weather / the water temperature and continue to fish for them where they are. The spawn is happening long before and long after people are fishing for spawning bass and it happens in direct response to the people pressuring it every year - bass absolutely will move around based on how much they’re fished for etc. When it really starts to warm up - there’s tons of food everywhere and fish are more aggressive and worried about competition and typically you have sunfish and crappie and minnows trying to use the same areas as the bass to spawn and guard fry - this period when fish are in all 3 stages of the spawn perpetually and in competition with other species on the lake really lasts until it’s too cool for those other species to be up shallow anymore which is a different time every year - just depends on the weather. A lot of times sections of the lake become little breeding factories and you can always go look for hungry or defensive or competitive or territorial fish around sunfish or crappie beds or grass fields where fry will perpetually be protected until the grass dies etc. I think that when fish are super active and looking for things to chase off or kill like sentinels - it becomes more important to target the right part of the water column - bass become way less worried about things on the bottom sitting still and way more keyed in on things that are darting around their faces and above their heads perpetually. I find things just under the surface or on the surface tend to be really really good during the early stages of the transition into the summer when bass are mostly concerned with protecting fry and chasing invaders out of big areas they have staked out.

IMO the best part about a white bait is how easy it is to track the bait visually - I fish a white swim jig right where it gets hard to see it but it’s still visible and often times I will literally watch my bait disappear - on super shallow banks hold your rod tip high and shake it to make the lure rise and dance as it swims back and be prepared for bull shark style wakes behind it followed by the bright white jig disappearing!

Harvesting is work but it’s good for the soul! A filet knife would do you wonders!

To me it sounds like you already solved your problem. Worry less about what bait you want to be throwing and more about what bait the bass like. Sounds like they like the Texas rig. That’s life!

From this site - glad when I’m able to get out on the water or walk the bank with @Gutierrez or @FishTax or @IcatchDinks ! I now fish with an older gentleman named Johnathan after he did some work on my outboard - he’s won quite a bite of money fishing local tournaments and specializes in offshore structure so I’ve been learning a lot from him! I fish with a pond hopping big bait guy that I befriended during Covid named Tremaine. We like to walk the banks at the giant factories quite a bit after work. My son Jake and my wife Meagan are my favorite fishing buddies and we go out just about weekly - slowed down a lot since Jake is a teenager and has girl friends and sports and buddies in the neighborhood - but we still try to get out and whack em once a week together and sometimes he has a day off school and we fish the backyard! Watching your son grow up is about as bittersweet a thing as it gets (very very blessed and thankful that he’s my son AND that he gets to grow up) but I’m very grateful he loves to fish and he even ropes his neighborhood buddies into doing it occasionally when the bite is hot!

I’m a DT6 guy but there’s lots of good ones.

So far it’s been beaver baits rigged with free sliding sinkers, straight tail worms in the 5-7” range rigged a variety of ways, buzzbait, frog. That’s about all I’ve been able to get fish to bite on the “real bass fishing tackle”- ultralight with 6 lb mono and a 1/16 oz crappie jig with a Bobby garland minnow has been by far my most productive set up - caught hundreds of fish this spring running that.

@Swamp Girl - shaking a minnow for pond hopping troglodytes volume 1 - by Pat Brown I point my rod up towards the sky for the most part and do some kind of variation on: Holding the rod still Gently vibrating the rod Shaking the rod Popping the rod With my reel hand I try to begin my retrieve the instant my minnow hits the water for the most natural presentation. I will reel very very slowly. I will reel slow and then slowly speed up the retrieve incrementally until the bait returns (works awesome) I will reel slowly and randomly increase my reel cadence for a turn or two (makes the minnow kinda dart) I will burn burn pause burn burn pause like a dying minnow occasionally and last but not least I will every so often just stop my retrieve and let the minnow fall to the bottom - occasionally triggering a nice bite! By FAR my most productive retrieve in nearly all seasons and conditions is a medium/fast speed retrieve while gently vibrating the rod trying to keep the jig just barely visible the entire retrieve occasionally speeding up a little bit or killing it for a millisecond here and there. What’s most important is making lots of casts over high percentage targets like laydowns and grass clumps and paralleling weed edges and around sunfish beds etc - and you’ll catch a fish on every cast sometimes! I like windy sunny banks with lots of cover the best right now for sure. You accused me of being analytical and now I’m going to live up to your accusation! 🙂 Baitfish will never swim below a predator. They cannot do it. It goes against their programming. I never ever want that minnow more than a few inches beneath the surface in clear water - especially shallow water - for this reason - the technique remains viable well into the months where vegetation grows back for me. I like the little 1/32 and 1/16 oz eagle claw micro fish head jig things from Walmart and the monkey milk Bobby garland minnow super glued to the jig. I’ve caught 100+ fish on a single jig head many times ranging the entire gamut of species in the pond from carp to catfish to perch to bass to bluegill and beyond. The technique will show you SO much about your pond and what lives where and who’s eating what etc. Get after it!

Katy - one of these days you gotta at least try a crappie jig - I know you said the weeds are bad and it won’t work - but I betcha it will work enough of the time to be fun! I actually like fishing with light tackle in places where the fish tend to bite on every cast - makes losing them less bad. it’s not something I really ever considered til this past year and now I do it all over the place and you’d be shocked the kinds of places I successfully land fish and keep them hooked on 6 lb mono with those itty bitty hooks.

There isn’t a best - people have brand loyalty - each brand offers competitive cutting edge products that can help you catch fish. Knowing what you plan to do with super expensive investments before making them is probably a good starting point for knowing which one to buy as @Jig Man pointed out. Certain brands are slightly better for certain jobs but really only marginally - they all do the same stuff well at this point for the most part - pick your poison. All you really need is some form of side scan and live sonar to do well in most tournament situations but all gadgets require time to master - they don’t catch the fish for you (back to the whole there’s no best thing). In capable hands - they’re all adequate.