Pat Brown

I fish waters where you're gonna be sorry if you don't get good with both so I have them both tied on year round. When they're in heavy brush or vegetables I go t rig. When they're on rock or points or bluffs or humps I go jig. Most of the time I select the bait for the cover and mood of the fish not really for my enjoyment anymore. I like fish biting more than I like throwing the wrong bait for fun (or however we should phrase this). That's just me!

I'm always trophy hunting!!! Hoping to get another DD but I'm always consistently trying to make bigger fish bite. I really committed to big soft plastic swimbaits this spring and have had some spectacular results and hope to keep improving and upping the size i catch with them. I get a lot more bites than I ever thought I'd get fishing them a lot faster than I thought they were fished and it's been very fun.

You're a dang hammer Katy! Well done! Sorry to hear about the phone! 🤣🤣🤣 Also you clearly gotta fish this pond a whole heckuva lot more now! Jeeze Louise! And bring your scale! I hate to be that guy but you miiiiiight have been pushing 8 with her 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫 Only one way to find out. Gotta catch her again 😌😌😌

I'm in the definitely over 7 camp for this one. She is very tall and very thick. What a dang horse.

Dang Katy that thing looks super duper huge. What did it weigh?

I'd get a finesse jig but all of those work great! The full size / bigger profile deal seems to be more situational and for the more nuanced moments in a jig fisherman's life. Siebert's sniper is really good at under 4$, handmade in the US with a wire tied skirt. This paired with a baby rage bug or menace will get your confidence up on jigs real fast. I also love his grass jig for a more 'horizontal fishing' jig. If you have your heart set on an arkie style jig, Siebert dock rocker is hard to beat! Shot caller is a great swim jig.

You NEED polarized glasses 365 days a year IMHO but in the spring you REALLY REALLY need polarized glasses. More than any new lure or technique or location or presentation. That's important to establish here. Spring is basically casting to visible shallow fish and you can't see them without polarized glasses. You can try blind casting areas that should have beds with things like a drop shot and get pretty good results, but it's just a lot more fun when you can actually see what you're fishing for. I remember a story you told in another thread about a fish your son caught that kind of confounded you and it sounded very very much to me like a fish caught off of a bed. So yeah. Probably gonna want to get some polarized lenses somehow. Even ugly solutions will beat no solution.

This isn't really the way that bass fishing works sadly because in general you're going to need a variety of profiles and fall rates. But I would say that if I could only fish one jig forever from now on, it would be a finesse jig of some kind, probably in the half ounce range in some kind of green pumpkin color. For the sake of the thread: Siebert Sniper - 7/16 oz - Bluegill color. I feel fairly confident I can get bites in all 12 months in most depths and water clarity and most types of cover with this jig even if it might not be ideal all the time. Finesse jigs just tend to get a lot more bites than full size jigs IMHO

The Zoom one is really really big. There's a Zara Spook that's made from hollow frog material with the same hook Assembly. Very very eager to try that bait. Looks like I would be great on big vegetable flats where shad are spawning. Edit: there ya go https://www.tacklewarehouse.com/Snag_Proof_Zoo_Dog_3_5oz_Topwater_Walking_Bait/descpage-SPGSK.html

A cheap 120$ Garmin down imaging unit really helped me tremendously when I started to try to figure this stuff out in the post spawn last year. Sometimes fish want a long gradual drop. Sometimes fish want a steep drop. Sometimes fish are sitting just beneath the drop pushing up. Sometimes fish are sitting above the drop pushing down. Sometimes there's brush on the drop and they are only biting when the shad balls randomly swim past the brush on the drop. Etc etc. Etc. You only begin to get a fragment of a sense of how all of this stuff works on your body of water on the day you are out fishing with real time images of what's happening underneath the boat. The reason it's a lot easier to fish shallow is because you can usually see a lot of the elements that they're using above the water still and it's easier to guess where you should cast. But when I caught my first few big fish off humps and random offshore high spots, I started to get with the program pretty quickly. There's times where you really wanna focus on offshore structure and times where shallow cover play more. Only gonna get a sense of this the more time you spend on the water at your fishery with your fish. Etc etc etc

Color basically doesn't matter. I like the same colors for all water clarity but if it helps you with confidence, green pumpkin or watermelon seed are popular for cleaner water. I catch fish in dirty water on watermelon and I catch fish in clear water on junebug. Color doesn't matter as much as presentation and understanding what bass are doing. In clearer water I like to make longer casts and I like faster falls and smaller profiles. I like subtler action in clearer water and 9/10 times I'm going for a reaction strike when water is super clear. Jerkbaits, heavy jigs, swimbait, Texas rigged soft plastics, top waters etc. In clear water you won't get away with bad casts where the bait splashes down right on their faces. You're going to benefit from working on silent entry when you are vertically presenting a bait in clear water but in general I do best with horizontal retrieves in clearer water which means casting past a target most of the time. Color is one of the absolute last things I consider when tying a bait on and I catch a lot of large fish in clear water.

Me and Jake caught a bunch tonight but the majority were tiny. Caught them all around wood on Texas rigs. These were the biggest ones. Every fish is showing signs of spawning activity but there are very few fish visibly on bed right now. Might be that fish are spawning a little deeper this year with slightly clearer water I've been seeing.

Keep walking it til you feel them. Ignore the visual. Set the hook when you feel the tug. Just lift and pull don't go bananas. Loosen up your drag just enough for them to pull some if they're enormous. Most bass spit it when you stop the bait while they are eating it. My biggest bass on a frog I was having a conversation with somebody and didn't even see the bite and sort of set the hook by accident and it was definitely a lightbulb moment for frogs....and my biggest frog fish.

I would try to master a very finesse top water. The floating worm has been known to work magic. A variation of the floating worm that I really like to throw is a z-man goat on an EWG fished weightless on light line. I've never seen a bass that could turn that down early in the morning. The frog will break your heart BUT it will show fish to you, and in the long run I've caught so many big fish on the frog that I can forgive it for missing so many too. It's a VERY effective lure for pressured fish. But yeah. Sneaky topwater early or late in the day is my suggestion. Weightless fluke or wacky rig is hard for fish to turn down. Very small swimbaits/tiny flashy Swimmer.

Night. Fish.

I think I'm guilty of not knowing when to put a bait down/pick a bait up even when the day is screaming an obvious lure at me. I'm guilty of leaving fish to find fish instead of fishing until I figure a tougher group of fish out. I think a lot of days I don't rotate my presentations nearly enough (kinda ties into point 1) ESPECIALLY in areas I know there's a lot of fish. It's hard to be disciplined when you know they've bit X really good before. History can be more of a hindrance than a help *sometimes* Basically the more fluid and open minded and systematic you can be on the water, the more opportunities to catch fish you're gonna get in a day!

I would put a hurting on the catfish and bluegill and then maybe get to work on the 12-16" bass if your goal is bigger bass!

I would say 90% of my lipless eats are what you are describing!

When I get home from the pond I like to take my clothes off and put on different clothes. That way I don't have to do laundry constantly and I have clothes that are designated dirty clothes. But thanks Mom. 😃😃😃

Another 5.5 lber on the 'Pats Gizzard' Grass Jig from @Siebert Outdoors sans trailer (just some plastic for a little bit of weight on the cast. Very happy to catch this gorgeous healthy pre-spawner today after work on a sunny hard bottom area where I could see wolf packs of big females corralling bluegill fry. It was epic! I got a crowd for the release too!

Big swim baits don't always catch the fish, but they always make for a fun trip! Glad you guys did catch some though!

She's back! 😎😎😎🎣🎣🎣

So far in April it's been: Buzzbait Swimbait Spinnerbait Finesse jig T rigged beaver Frog I did pull out the lipless just for kicks and caught a dink and a big sunfish so it's still working. Haven't fished bladed jig yet this year but I am planning on adding it back to the rotation this year after a year off. It caught me a ton of big fish in 22'.

I've been very very happy with the hookset and hook penetration I get fishing swimjigs with the 'Frog' 7'6 MH/MF Abu Veritas PLX paired with the 8:3:1 Daiwa Fuego spooled with Berkley Big Game 15 lb. Caught some dandies on that rig.

I've noticed that on 5 acre ponds that I fish that basically have a bowl shape everything is both structure and cover at different times of year. There are certain parts of the pond where a piece of cover is literally the only hard spot in the area. So it is also treated like structure even though it was placed on the Earth's crust by human beings. There are also places where the original concrete pour rises up out of the silt and these are like pieces of cover for the fish even though they're part of the bottom contour. The point is fish like little changes for some reason. My guess if it had to be boiled down to an objective. Measurable observable reason: it would probably be the fact that it's breaking the current in a way that perhaps we aren't even aware of or can't see that the bass appreciate.