Pat Brown

30 lb braid direct to a heavier EWG direct to a full size caffeine shad. 🤣😎👍🏼

Totally understand and it just goes to reinforce what most of us are saying - the YouTubes lie to sell us the tackle 😔 But it's okay 😁. Tackle is fun. 😉😎 YouTube's is fun. But catching bass on YOUR body of water is something you are very very good at from dirt time. You earned it. Enjoy them fishes! 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼🎣🎣🎣😎😎😎 I mean really though, 20k acres!?!? Can you imagine!?!? @A-Jay has his own very unique challenges to contend with for sure! As do we all! 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Stupid as in willing to indulge me with a bite on my overpriced chew toy. Not stupid as in I don't like em. 😉😌 I'm ALWAYS after the stupid ones - heck I'm halfway convinced they're the only ones I *ever* catch! 🤣🤣🤣🤣

When I first got into bass fishing more seriously back in 2020, the 60 acre Lake near my house was so choked out with hydrilla. You're trolling motor wouldn't work near the marina you had to get out to the middle of the lake. I don't know what they did, but there's no more hydrilla like that in the lake that I can detect. There are definitely huge carp in the lake and huge bass in the lake, but the bass fishing hasn't been as good since they killed the grass. What I want to know is why lake management gets involved to begin with? It seems to me that on some lakes without deep enough water to sustain months where vegetation grows a ton , it could be bad maybe? But if you have deep enough water to chorale the vegetation pockets, should be fine right? I guess I'm just not educated on the finer points of naturally growing submerged vegetation.

@Team9nine those photos are awesome! I have actually seen a bald eagle and an osprey fighting over a 5 lb bass maybe a thousand feet above where I was fishing and it was pretty spectacular - last fall during the big shad die off! I saw more big birds last fall killing big fish than I've ever seen in my entire life and it's probably just because of how much I was on the water but boy was it amazing!

@ol'crickety Well good. The really big ones are probably mostly back out deep anyway 🤣🤣🤣🤣😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫 Bass fishing sure is confusing and contradictory ain't it!?!? I am just impressed with myself when I get my shoes tied in the morning. If I get to the water and find fish, well Hallelujah! All sillyness aside, after March 31st, I'm mostly just messing around when I go fishing. My ship has *probably* sailed for a PB this year but I ain't losing sleep or getting bummed about it. It actually gets more fun once I know I'm just looking for beat up stupid 4 lbers and happen to luck into an 8. December - March is way more serious stuff for me - I do really enjoy it when the pressure is off and spring breaks. That's when I bring friends fishing and care much less.

Seems to me like the St Johns River is a great place to go every year to shake up the tournaments a bit and challenge to offshore electronics experts. I really enjoyed that tournament a lot. I also enjoyed watching Fujita wreck em on livescope earlier this year. I think it's more important now to be good at everything than it ever has been.

I don't know what YouTube's are telling people to do right now and I don't care because most of that stuff is designed to sell tackle not catch me more fish.... What the fish are doing on my ponds and lakes is the same thing they've been doing since February which is very very aggressively trying to be as shallow as they can so they can make babies and very very persistently being knocked back by cold fronts but usually only a few feet back...like maybe pull back 10 feet til it's warmer again kinda thing. I wouldn't trust a single YouTube that says that fish are going to be anywhere but trying to spawn in dirt shallow water in the springtime - crazy apocalyptic weather deviations notwithstanding. Remember, we like to tell beginners that the best time to start fishing is in the springtime and to cast tight to the bank and work your bait very very slow. Because well......yeaaaaaah......that's gonna work 9/10 times. Edit: @ol'crickety bass like warmth but most shallow water is warm enough by now. They like protection and places to hide even more when they're that vulnerable to attack!

I think he's a good angler over all and earned his spot on the pro circuit. Probably should have a win or two under his belt that slipped away. Not dogging the guy. I'm actually trying to be empathetic to his current moment in his career and saying I can see why he's more personality and less performance at this current stage. Slackline hooksets are just generally not the best way to go (honestly, a lot of the hook sets I've seen him do live, despite what he says in instructional tutorials, are not snap setting on slackline) unless you're into the hook falling out in the net or halfway to the boat...but it's good branding for a t shirt or hat.

My biggest issue with G Man is that he teaches poor hookset technique and makes new anglers feel like idiots for not doing it badly the way he does it 🤣🤣🤣. 'Slackliner' my @$$. Enjoy not catching the fish you got to bite. Beyond that, the dude probably knows his time has come and gone and is just trying to show everyone how much he can talk so he still has a job in 10 years. Cory Johnston wrecked em. As far as information sharing and little cliques of anglers..... Been that way since the beginning. Don't kid yourselves. I'm not saying it's the finest aspect of pro bass fishing....but it's an aspect and always has been.

My best luck has been to cast it where i see bluegill and bass eating on the surface and gently blooping it in place and then letting it sit a long time. It's a slow topwater but it works really well in open shallow clear water.

The fry look like glitter! It's mesmerizing! They get bigger fast but in that first stage it's like glitter mist just under the surface. You can see wolfpacks of purple bluegill encroach and the 5-6 lb females plow through them like lightning while the males hover in the fry. They position up on the hard high spots in the evening sunlight I presume for the warmth and so that the fry can eat phytoplankton and the water is so clear you can just sit and watch it.

Nothing super crazy to report here but I did catch this beautiful post spawner yesterday morning. Jake caught every male bass that he could find willing to bite expeditiously 🤣👍🏼 Seeing big fry clouds out deep shimmering under the surface being guarded by big wolfpacks of male and female bass out on offshore structure at the pond has been very very neat. It dropped nearly 40° over night and I plan on going fishing later this afternoon from the bank at the pond and I'm very very curious to see what I see. Lost a fish that was 24" long skipping a senko under a dock yesterday evening. She hit it right as I hopped it once after the initial fall and I set the hook. My 30 pound braid starts ticking my drag real fast and I see her shoot out around a support beam 10 feet with my hook and Senko. Gorgeous and super long. I start to pull her back towards the piling and she shook hard and popped right off. Heartbreak hotel but dang if it wasn't cool! Still a 5 lber to start the day on the dropshot was cool and my biggest fish on a dropshot to date! Let's GO!!!! Tight lines friends!

@Catt coming in hot with wisdom that can save you a lot of time and money. 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼 Basically you gotta get bit a lot of times before you start to figure it out and figuring it out happens in your mind. I can feel a drum hit a shrimp on a C rig on 20 lb mono 200 ft from me with a 50 ft sustained bow in my line from an offshore wind. It takes many hours of *productive* time on the water to develop your own frame of reference for bites.

Top 10 is pretty interesting group of guys! Wild that Tyler Williams missed the cut, kinda bums me out but a lot of my guys are struggling out there. Super happy to see Chris Zaldain and Mark Menendez and Jason Christie within spitting distance of the top ten. Tomorrow should be very very interesting!!!!

Heck yeah @PhishLI super good to see your swamp photos with big dark fish showing up again! 🙂🎣

Good time of year to cull those buck spots to get the size up on your lake and for some tasty fish! Sounds fun @Woody B!

I like them on swim jigs in warmer months or in dirtier water. They kick like a mule. Not very durable but fish bite em.

Seems like in NC, the fish relate to whatever they got. I feel like something else maybe at play on the TVA lakes/river system that accounts for the smaller fish. I catch fish in hydrilla, muck weed, snot grass, wood, rock, sand, mud, dead leaves, pads...blue water, green water, orange water, brown water, black water, clear water.....it seems like if they got food, they figure it out.

Ponds are usually pretty small so my approach is very systematic and usually more of a divide and conquer style then a more nuanced approach. I usually start out with a pretty aggressive reaction bait like a buzzbait or a lipless and I walk the pond very quickly casting to every good piece of cover I see along the perimeter and paralleling the banks with a few casts at different speeds. Trying to pick up some aggressive fish that are feeding or haven't seen a lure in a while. While I'm doing this I usually am looking for fish that either are following my bait and not biting it or not interested in my bait but maybe catchable. When I get back to my car I usually grab a jig or a swimbait or a Texas rig and go back for those fish. And if I have any energy left at the end of it all, I will grab my frog and fish that because I find that on small ponds the frog catches Giants! This time of year that's basically my approach!

I have a ton of good fishing stories and even crazy ones - many are already in the latest catch thread - so I'll try to keep with the theme of 'off the beaten path' as I scour my brain for oddities worth recalling. I came up with these: A couple years back we went out in the spring around a full moon and we were seeing all sorts of life on the banks and in the water. One of those days where it feels like you're in a Disney movie on the lake hah! Well - towards the end of the day as we were headed back in to the marina, I spot a family of deer on the southeastern shoreline of the lake. We all enjoy them for a second and then it happened 🤣 One of the deer - as though leaving for college or the military - breaks from the group and enters the lake. I'm thinking he's thirsty. Nope. He starts a-swimmin and I don't mean struggling to survive, I mean Michael Phelps of deer swimming. We watched the deer swim plum across the ENTIRE lake and get out on the steepest bank like it was nothing and scale the bluff wall - all in probably less than 5 minutes. Deer are athletes!

7'6 Dobyns Sierra MHF 'Flip' rod and an 8:3:1 Shimano Curado 200.

The 6" whales are fantastic quality for the price. Really loving the 6" Zaldaingerous swimbait also and got some 3/4 oz beast hooks for burning the bait under the surface more effectively. Excited! Clearwater Rose and Blueback Herring colors pictured here and both look great in person.

@FishTax The males usually grab the bait first around beds and often times wolf packs of females that have laid their eggs are hovering nearby and will become aggressive and commit to a bait that is in a males mouth in my experience.

Hawg Hunting is really just fish hunting kinda. It's a numbers game and if you're catching fish, you'll catch big fish IMHO! You got this @Mobasser !!!!