Pat Brown

1/4 oz jigs are good when you want to hover The Jig in the middle of the water column or swim it near the surface slowly. They're really good when the bottom is mucky or muddy or you're less than 2 ft of water. They're excellent in Lily pads or other types of solid emergent vegetation. They are also definitely the easiest to work through heavier cover like laydowns as Tom points out. I also like them when fishing pressure is high. Probably throw a 1/4 oz or 3/4 oz more than any other weight for jigs specifically and it's because most people throw a half or a 3/8 oz jig. I also love throwing the sneaky 7/16 oz weight a lot especially for compact finesse jigs. 1/4 oz jig caught my biggest jig bass and I was swimming it very slowly over submerged wood near a grass line in February with a very large paddle tail trailer in about a foot of water. 9.1 lbs 3/4 oz caught my second biggest jig bass in March of this last year in 2 feet of water off a long laydown with a rage Craw on the back just letting it fall vertically. 8 lbs 15 oz. I love fishing jigs!

I'm gonna try the Phat Frog from Snag Proof and I got their bigger hollow spook. The big hollow spook puppy thing got smoked by the dock the other morning, but she missed it. It was not a small fish. Those King Daddy frogs look killer @Zcoker. Spro makes a shad shaped 65 frog that I'm eager to try also.

Yeah - seems like you need to send a few of those dumb 2 lbers this way please. You'll get the big ones again soon! It ebbs and flows it seems like a little bit almost always! Just keep hunting. But yeah FedEx overnight in a big aerated tank to NC plz. 🤫😂😂🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

I fish as much as the good Lord and my busy life allow and I'm deeply grateful for every moment I'm afforded where I'm in communion with nature.

I have found the opposite to be true. Smaller bait, lighter hooks, fish engulf the bait and get it much better. Regardless of frog, I always bend my hooks up and out. I tend to throw small stuff when they seem conditioned to bigger stuff or vice versa. Maybe on a windy cloudy day I'll throw the bigger one so they can hone in on it better with the turbulent interference. On a slick calm blue bird sky day, I'd definitely opt for a small frog. 'matching the forage' seems to be of little importance - maybe being in the ballpark with the profile but really bass just eat what's around that looks like food - especially when eating off the surface! Bass that haven't seen much of either seem completely willing to bite both with wreckless abandon and I think it matters a lot less. A smaller frog is definitely going to catch you more of the 1 to 2 pounders that grab it and even the occasional big sunfish etc but it will also catch giant bass that have seen far too many Walmart special standard size frogs from everyone's favorite manufacturers.

I have a wide range of sizes and profiles and different actions for different conditions - much like any other presentation I have gotten serious about and understand the nuance of better. I'd throw a more compact bait to gain confidence for most presentations! They tend to get more bites.

@Dan N Swim Jig is one of my all time favorites. Some fun things to try: Shake your rod gently with your rod tip high using some kind of chunk of craw trailer and a lighter Swim Jig like a 1/4 oz or 3/8 oz and try to keep it just in sight through out the retrieve killing the reel for a millisecond here or there at random and hold on tight! BOMB a 1/4 oz swim jig with a lighter wire hook, thin out the weed guard or even remove it if there's mostly open water with a bigger swimbait trailer (4"+ pick your favorite) on lighter monofilament line (12-15 lb test) out on a flat or paralleling some rip rap or into a pocket etc and let the jig get to the depth the fish should be at and point your rod at 11 o clock and just reel sloooow and steady. When you feel the thump, point the rod at the fish and reel as quick as you can and pull. No fanfare with the hookset. It catches giants even in clearer water with pressured fish. Long cast and lighter line and hook and pressure hook set are the key to this technique. @WRB is a big fan of this type of jig hookset and it works.

I have been known to arrive at the lake with a plan only to retie every rod within the first hour due to the lake not being set up the way I predicted. That's always fun. 😂😂😂

No - but I often leave the lake with the fish fully uncaught regardless of what I arrived at the lake rigged with 😂😂😂

One important 'category' of color that I do think can play for any topwater lure, especially on high pressure fisheries, is transparent baitfish/color variations. Really good on sunny days in clearer water/fisheries where they've seen 1000 white and black and chartreuse frogs.

I've definitely experienced entropy and chaos while bass fishing! 😂😂😂😭😭😭

Bass also hit a lure to determine if it is food and learn very very fast to recognize items that are not food and don't need to be hooked and caught to do this. Bass hit a lure out of curiosity a lot and many bass learn to temper their aggressive nature with some hard earned caution. Welcome to fishing pressure (that sometimes WE put on our own fish!) Try a senko when they swat the frog! For what it's worth I HAVE definitely had bass swat it and I keep the bait moving and then they fully commit or engulf it (OR what may be happening is a school is engaged and one fish was more cautious and the next taker was less sheepish)

Jeeze probably some of you all more than anyone. I learn bits and pieces of wisdom that lead to more fish in the boat nearly every week and it's hard to say who did what anymore. My dad put a rod and reel in my hands when I was able to walk and showed me how to clean and cook a fish when I was old enough to hold a knife and use the stove. He showed me a lot of things that are still part of the angler I basically am on a philosophical level at least. Since there's tons of guys out there educating the masses on bass fishing nuance - perhaps I'll pull my other two (okay 4! 2 wasn't enough 😂) from the side of bass fishing I find more important - fish behavior. I've learned a ton of very sneaky juice - mostly about fish behavior and seasonal movements etc from: The Nature of Fishing - Paul Roberts (thanks I can only remember so many names correctly! 😂) Bass after Dark Podcast - Ken Duke/BTC and many other anglers. Big Bass Dreams Podcast - Oliver Ngy and crew are always going way deep into the stuff that bait people don't discuss and it's very good. Tyler Berger - his new channel that is more about bass behavior and less about baits and such (although BassFishingHQ is/has been helpful also) These folks seem to really want to get at the meat of how we catch fish and why we catch fish and are more generous with the truth of it all than the usual 'why you should throw a frog in the spring time 😎' videos - which basically teach people nothing about anything for the most part - except that it's cool to have 5-6 frogs instead of one frog (which is what they're expected to teach by their sponsors)

Because fluorocarbon sucks and braid to leader also mostly sucks. Monofilament is cheap and catches the snot out of fish and is less likely to snap when I'm fighting a giant. Maybe @TOXIC has other reasons but these are MY reasons! 😁

I fish at a pond and a lake where the water level is being drawn down for rain all the time and I see bass beds made and then the next day the water level will drop and the bed is exposed to air and the bass simply try another day. This is the kind of thing that can contribute to a bad spawning year sometimes. When water clarity is good - like 2 to 3 ft good or better, then the bass will simply spawn deeper than you think they will and that will prevent any of this stuff from affecting them. They will definitely find current breaks, under water and above water. They will definitely spawn in protected areas but not always as protected as you think. They don't need much breaking the current and will spawn on main points and in areas where water flows in and out. Look for hard surfaces (rocky bottom/sand/gravel/rip rap/pad roots/stumps, laydowns etc. they like hard stuff to rub up on and lay their eggs on but even with a mucky bottom with mud, they'll find places that work. They're fish after all. Basically if you have a large population of bass on a body of water, they pretty much spawn everywhere constantly until weather prevents them from doing it (temps get too hot) and even then they'll still often just keep doing it a little bit deeper. Remember they're basically giant sunfish. Edit to add this clarifier: when I say 'the bass' it should be understood that I'm saying 'some of the bass'. You'll almost always have some bass doing something somewhere when there's lots of bass and chances are good there's bass making beds that are gonna be dry soon, some bass making beds directly in current, some bass making beds in protected areas, some bass making beds in mud, some bass making deep beds etc etc etc Heck if you get a bite up shallow any time of year - a LOT of the time it's merely because you're in a nursery unbeknownst to yourself. Fish aren't actively feeding much and they don't indiscriminately attack plastic because they're stupid. They have instincts to guard these areas that override their caution. They aren't all programmed to do one thing together and they do what conditions allow.

Way to go @ol'crickety! I knew it would happen! I saw a cool video of 'how bass see color' or something like that. Green pumpkin more or less disappears/looks almost invisible to a bass and I think this makes it very very effective in water where they can see the bait well and water where they have learned a profile/lure. I also very much like clearer plastic baits. Watermelon (clear GP) and Smoke (clear grey) variants with different flakes etc. I think they go even further into that realm of 'felt rather than seen' by fish - which can be excellent.

The Launch is really good too. The Trophy is the bomb and my most productive frog that they make. Something about how it's head bobs and spits makes fish go insane. I haven't used a Scum Frog frog I didn't like. The original and the mouse that they make both work extremely well for finicky fish and have light enough hooks you can throw them on spinning gear with light braid.

I bank fish most days so 0 most days. On the boat I have a 120$ Garmin that I use for water temps and finding structure and not bottoming out/breaking my prop. Maybe a 1-2 on the boat? I think that it's like bow hunting vs rifle hunting. You gotta be a good hunter either way.

White works every where. Black works everywhere. Frog works everywhere. They all kinda mimic perch and bugs regardless of the nitty gritty details. The colors are more for different water clarity/light intensity to be honest.

Much easier to rig plastics and you save more plastics in the long run.

Check again 🐸🐸🐸 I'd fish a frog til my arm fell off mainly because I know it'll get the big smart ones to lose it.

I'm in the exact same boat as you with a replacement. They put me in the pipeline too and I can't get a call back now. Not happy. They had it way more together a year ago which is why I purchased a couple more.

I pretty much only throw 3/8 or 7/16 most of the time these days. Ain't got time for all that slow falling and the fish don't seem particularly eager to bite slow falls here so everyone wins. I'd fish a frog. 🐸🐸🐸🎣🎣🎣

Couple lil guys before work and some much needed frog hookset resetting. Delay is the way. 🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸 Wait 🕜🕜🕜🕜 then set 🎣🎣🎣🎣. There really isn't any advantage to swinging fast with a frog. For one thing the fish learn the bait is fake in an area much faster if you swing on every nip. Sometimes that first fish misses and you keep walking that frog and the next one isn't so sheepish. Swinging pretty much shuts all of that down. If they don't get it, they don't get it. That's the cold hard truth of the frog. This morning I hesitated and kept walking and saw SO many tail swats and pecks that would never have happened if I was just swinging. The frog is the best when you lean into the subtlety of the lure.

Dang dude that's a tank! And bank fishing! Way to go!