Pat Brown

That @Siebert Outdoors grass jig is a thing of beauty! Hard to beat that or any of his swim jigs for fishing vegetation - his brush jig does pretty well as an all arounder that does well in grass as well. Can't say enough good things about Mike's jigs and I've caught many giants on his stuff. Don't sleep on that sniper finesse jig - been my best producer during the hottest months and early spring.

Sometimes alerting lake authorities/marina officials will result in them removing it. You did the best you could - I assume everyone out there knows the risks that come with putting yourself in nature. There's always random logs and stuff floating around in the lakes I fish.

It's feeling fallish here too. The fish are doing early fall stuff - starting the migration back into the creeks but still a ways off from properly occupying the creeks. Basically 'staging' as the temps approach shad spawn optimization. I've noticed that when the wind blows hard those meandering fish do start to use shallow hard edges and the shad get balled up real fast. Still plenty of sunfish and bass spawning around moons - usually on secondary point channel swings and saddles with hard bottom and shade. These fish are pretty wise and don't spend much time in a catchable state when boats come around. I think the most catchable fish right now are the ones pushing bait on structure or ambushing on pieces of cover. And the area chosen and type of cover used and the depth it goes down at changes from day to day/hour to hour. It's a tough time on a lot of days for sure.

Got a new one - if I could have my skills and knowledge today back in any point in my life - id want to be back in the jon boat with my dad fishing a jelly worm on the lake he took me on before I could even fully speak correctly. Those were special times that I think about often. The big bass we fished over 😂😂😂😭😭😭

This is the juice straight from a fishing guide IMHO. Pay close attention when he points out with braid you might want even LESS than 1/3 breaking strength. 😉👍🏻 Deep level wisdom here.

Probably just turn the clock back to a few years before COVID so I could catch all the bass before they learned everything ever. 😉😂👍🏻

Yeah I usually have my drag somewhere in the 6-10# range depending on the cover and application. You just never know what's going to happen and drag is a mechanical failsafe people should learn to use rather than neglect. 👍🏻😎 I never lock it down - on treble hook baits with light line I might go down on the drag a hair from that even. When bass surge - bad things can easily happen and once they're hooked past the barb your drag is your buddy most of the time.

Mostly I struggle on the days where I've got my mind made up how I'm going to catch them and I do well on the days where I try to figure out how they're going to get caught. 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

This is a great question and it really encapsulates my appreciation of the places that I fish seasonally and how they change. I would say that during the spring and Summer I share the bodies of water I fish with the greater Triad area and all of its visitors on a regular basis. I find myself having to be cunning and plan my trips around and within the insanity in order to have any sort of success. This requires me to be very adaptable and very precise about everything. During the fall and winter I experience a beautiful solitude on the bodies of water that I fish that rejuvenates me and fills me with a deep love for this sport and for nature every year. The winter is my absolute favorite time of year to fish. I am alone on the water everyday with the fish. It's just me vs. them every day - a lightning fast chess game - often times with very few pieces removed. Every once in awhile you come up a winner and usually it's a BIG WIN when it's cold outside. My favorite part about the winter though is watching everything become still. Not just the solitude away from people but watching nature become still. It reminds me how important it is to become still - to let our minds become still, to let our bodies become still - not asleep - very much awake - just unmoving. It's a part of life that we have a hard time embracing in this day and age that is natural and it is an important part of processing our existence The solitude of winter is a Good Teacher every year and I'm very grateful for that.

A tip for when they're feeding on insects and you're fishing a frog - watch how the rings coming off the little bugs look in the water and ignore 'walking the frog back to you' - cast it out to where you see bass eating the bugs and just let the frog sit and then twitch it as lightly as you can to mimic the exact sort of 'cadence' and general intensity of the rings the bugs around are creating - hold on tight and pay close attention they will slurp a bug so silently.

It's Friday - may fish be fat and bite well friends. Happy ending of week and tight lines to all. 😎🐦🎣

I'll do him one better and claim that every fish ever will die. 😂😂😂

Heck I'm the guy who bends a hook out in some rock and then bends the hook back into shape with pliers and resharpens the hook and keeps fishing the bait for another 3 months - I applaud your resourcefulness! To some guys the bait I fished and caught with for 3 months was trash the minute I bent the hook out. I recently caught a 5 lber on a speed worm - worm ripped and I bit the head off and re rigged it and made another cast and caught a 7 lber on the same worm with a flat ugly head. Guess bass really don't care!

Yeah I pretty much always do short trips unless it's the weekend and then I do a long trip.

Try throwing green pumpkin variation trailers on your black and blue jigs and add just a touch of chartreuse to the tails of the trailers. It can be a great way of using a black and blue jig in slightly cleaner water! 👍🏻

Well done everyone! Lots of hawgs in here lately and I'm sure it's only gonna get better as we roll into the fall! Jake caught his second biggest ever last week at the local pond: Gorgeous tank and another one I caught a couple months back on a frog at 7 lbs 8 oz and he recaught later on in the summer a little less than a half pound lighter - typical of bass this time of year. Got one of the fish I saw sharking on little gizzard shad in the grass after Debby passed through and waters receded from the local river system. I caught a few gizzards by hand scooping em up out of the grass where bass were corralling them. Jake found a pretty NC lobster Had a really fun day on the boat with Jake this past weekend with a fat frog fish and Jake filling out the limit with lots of fish in this size range on a weightless trick worm! Got a pile of smaller but nice fish on jigs yesterday afternoon - the first jig bite I've been on for months! Very excited to toss the big more in the muddy water around those dying grass edges. And as you can see I'm doing my best to be diligent and document things on the GoPro. Hoping for a decent little bit of footage soon! 🤫🤫🤫😉😉😉

Best I got is upgrade your hooks to something lighter wire - maybe round bends which tend to have better hook up ratios - and use line with more stretch and lighten the drag a touch. This all works in harmony and makes it very hard to throw a hook that has gone past the barb. This time of year - many people go lighter on hooks and lines and smaller on baits.

For clear lines - San Diego Jam is really good - double San Diego Jam is really really gooderer. For braid - Palomar. Just practice til you use the least amount of line possible. Might consider dropping the braid to leader and going straight braid /fluorocarbon /monofilament etc. I haven't found a circumstance where I'd prefer it over a spool with one type of line yet.

I figured @LrgmouthShadlent you some Dior to slather your beard and lures in.

I feel downright spendy when I throw a 1$ piece of plastic on a 5$ jig knowing it will spend eternity stuck in a laydown on a point. 🤭🤭🤭

Hey Scott from NC - when you're here - it's hard to stay lonely. We all love to ask questions and answer questions and learn from each other. And boy do we love to share bass pictures!!! Excited to hear about your adventures In the apartment complex pond!

I find that your way is better overall for me. I like a little ability for fish to pull some drag - less likely to tear a hole or turn a hook around in their mouth on a run. I have caught some BIG fish that I hooked in open water on super long casts and I know the only reason I caught them is they could pull some drag throughout the fight. I do not ever thumb my spool on a hookset.

Yeah you would be incorrect unfortunately. You do not ever benefit from snapping a hook. It just weakens the penetration for the most part. The only benefit to snapping is sometimes quickness, but in general it's not going to help you catch fish. In my opinion, if you're forced to snap on the hook set to catch up with the fish, then you didn't react fast enough to begin with - which happens to all of us and sometimes we get lucky and catch the fish but it's not ideal and it's not the most high percentage scenario. The sharp gradual set really drives the hook in past the barb and very rarely do you blow the fish's mouth out on the hook set or break them off.

Protected from the wind = eddy. 😎😎😎😎🎣🎣🎣🎣 I definitely do well on deeper structure in the wind but for shallow water - let me find the place where it's calmer most of the time. 😏😏😏 If you think about it - it makes sense kinda. Shallower water gets stirred up really quickly in the wind and probably sucks pretty quickly to be in for baitfish and bass with the silt and mud and so forth. Deeper water that has no wind probably doesn't have much food chain activity - not much to bring a bass to the area.

During the recent storm/Tropical Depression Debbie, the spillway flooded 10 feet during the peak of the storm. The water was up in the grass and ivy. The next morning when I got there early as the rain began to settle and the water began to recede - the gizzard shad were schooling in very small tidal pools that were formed by the water level falling. Literally in the divots of the bank grass leading back to the main river channel where one would normally fish. There were HUGE bass gorging on them in these little slack water tidal pools - swimming in off the main channel through the ivy and pushing these shad into inches of grass along the dangerously low receding water line. Dorsal fins and tails sticking out of the water. Just absolutely wreaking havoc on these landlocked shad in inches of grass. The shad were 2". The bass were 27". Elephants like peanuts too. Bass use shallow water because it provides fool proof hard edges for them to pin their bait AND because their food uses it AND being that they're primarily site feeders and energy conservationists (lazy) - they love those ultra shallow eddys during flooding conditions because they can still see food and threats and because they can eat without fighting current. Even when current is minimal and things aren't flooding - big lazy bass do the exact same thing in relation to ANY current at all in shallow water around cover. I think when you're dealing with flooded creeks or river systems, especially - places where water flows in from multiple feeder creeks - there's always big big bass using next to no water near those in flow points. How they relate to the area changes probably hourly even! The depth in these backwaters is often long expanses of 1-2' max with plenty of humps and stumps and very good water clarity. Shad and shiners and crappie spawn in this stuff all summer long and the big females just gorge themselves. There's usually a lot of emergent vegetation in these areas. The problem is - it's a no fly zone more or less if you are at all particular about your boat or prop so these fish remain largely un-messed with. For most of the summer you can't even push yourself back there - it's just too thick. I really like targeting these areas while the vegetation grows and the creeks warm up with spring rains AND as the vegetation dies and the backwaters cool off with fall rains - but the true giants can be found there in the dead of winter and summer just as easily - just harder to trick in the winter when these flats are cold and muddy and the water is like glass and there's little to no cover / harder to access in the summer while vegetation is rampant and thick. Even on lakes that are bowl shaped/natural /have no dam - there's places that naturally form due to erosion and water flows in during rain fall and even sometimes underground. These areas can be big bass magnets at certain times.