Pat Brown

Okay sorry I didn't realize the mountain dew thing was a big deal. I've never actually done it. I've just heard people say it works and people generally have good intentions but don't always have all the facts right. Carry on.

I'm learning that nothing guarantees that you'll catch them once you find them, regardless of the technology we are using to find them... Especially if they find you first 😉

I'm out of likes for the day but thank you. I am always trying to get into the heads of everybody on here because there's so many smart people offering so many perspectives I haven't thought of on things that we tend to underthink and overthink both. I tend to feel like I'm the kind of person who overthinks what the bass are thinking and underthinks what's happening right now. When I can get my mind off the big beautiful bass that I'm trying to catch and look around me and take a good look at it and take it in as if I'm fishing from the bank and limited to that quarter mile stretch or whatever it is I'm looking at, it really helps me. If I can pay attention to where it gets deep and where it gets shallow and where it gets clear and where it gets dirty and where it gets calm and where it gets ripply and where the vegetation opens up or gets thick. If can SEE a bass with my eyes..... When I keep my eyes on what's happening around me in the moment and interpret it with my whole collected knowledge, that's when I make my winning decisions. The fish are always there. We just gotta find em. Yesterday at the end of the day, cuz the lakes are open until 8:00 p.m. now, we decided to head out for a brief evening fishing trip on the smaller lake we fish. I took the boat all the way up the lake which only takes about 20 minutes because I think it's a 60 acre lake total, and as the sun was setting we were starting to fish the lily pads that kind of emerge everywhere in the river system that feeds the lake on the other side of an overpass bridge at the back end. The sun was setting and the water was clearer than I expected it to be. The sun was beaming down into a very protected pocket adjacent to the bridge and a big overhanging tree stretched its limbs out over that protected corner where the rip wrap from the sides of the bridge transitioned back to soil. It was right there that I saw maybe 15 or 20 Bass ranging from 4 to probably 10 lb suspending in 0-2 FOW. It was as though the minute my eyes trained on them. They became aware of me being aware of them and they all started to move around and disperse and act different. We were probably 100 ft from them. I worked a frog over the school. I worked at buzz bait over the school. I threw wacky rigs at them. Tried underspins and spinner baits. I did everything I knew how to do. These fish were smart. Sometimes you find the fish but they find you first. 😎😉😂

New rule for the tournament: You're only allowed to cast away from the bank to the deep side of the boat and you have to pop your bait every 3 seconds. It's unfair letting your bait sit in water where fish are obviously going to be! 🙄

Honestly, last spring was kind of bypassed in North Carolina. We had winter and then it was summer. It kind of felt like the bass were all scrambling to spawn at once and it was chaotic and short. This year the spring has been happening very gradually and there have been a lot of winter days mixed in with the occasional summery day and a lot of in between. I think this more transitional weather tends to generate more big fish on the whole per year. Years where we have long, cold Winters and long hot summers without much of a spring or a fall, tend to be the toughest ones to catch big fish probably. If you think about it even on a daily basis, when we go out on the water we are looking for some kind of unique change in the weather. Perhaps a pressure change or some clouds rolling in or the breeze picking up or some drizzle starting to kick up the bite and make the big ones easier to catch. A transitional season is nothing more than a prolonged state of perpetual this kinda stuff.

Yeah if you can find a private pond or something where nobody fishes it at all like at a neighborhood or something you can probably get your confidence back real quick. As far as fishing pressured bodies of water during the spawn from the bank: probably going to want to find some shallower stained water in a wind protected cove with good cover and get to work. I also like the rip rap / dam suggestion. There's always fish there and very big ones, but typically dam fish are among the hardest to fool because it is a type of cover everyone knows and it's right next to the marina usually so people don't even have to try to get there. My best days on rip rap are usually heavy wind or super overcast.

Really cool. Some big bags being caught. Interesting to see some traditionally offshore guys beating some traditionally shallow water guys. I'd love to see tournament coverage/highlights for this one because people probably up the river in the mud power fishing!

One of the hardest parts of bass fishing is when you hurt one. There's some good stickied threads on what to do when you gut hook a bass and a lot of that info applies here. You can bring a bottle of mountain dew on the boat and pour it down their throat and something about the carbon and sugar causes it to coagulate much more quickly but releasing her was the best you could do. If you fish with jerkbaits, you'll eventually hurt a fish. Single hooks, it seems to be rarer but it's happened. Fish bite and we can't control how they get the lure but my policy in general is swing fast when you're bit so they don't hurt themselves. Just remember that even if she dies, she feeds a big healthy beautiful bird or turtle and she takes one more mouth out of the running for food in the quest to become a double digit that all your lakes bass are on every day.

In my experience observing females on small ponds where you can actually see them spawn, it's very difficult to spot them and they're usually only there for literally one day and during that day they usually are basically uncatchable. It's easier to catch them feeding up on the way in or feeding up on the way out and the places that they're likely to do that are usually pretty obvious -If you know where the males are guarding the beds! Look for secondary points with wood/vegetation/rock/some kinda cover in shallow water near deep water leading back into spawning coves and you should find fish either feeding up on the way in or recuperating on the way out. Many times they patrol off the bed in deeper water where they camouflage very well. You may have a shot on a day with the right conditions at catching a female near a bed, but the chances are very very slim of getting a female to bite.

Awwww shucks y'all. Thank you very much. We had a lot of fun! It's nice to see others wrecking em too! This spring is gonna be a doozy I believe. That 13 lber that guy got in the other thread and all the chunky fish in here. Shhhheeeeew 🫠🫠🫠🫠🎣🎣🎣🎣

Well it really depends on the conditions on the day that I'm fishing and the body of water and the cover I'm fishing. But usually my 'repertoire of confusion' (thanks @Catt) consists of lipless crankbaits, lipped crankbaits, jerk baits (hard and soft), t rigged plastics, jigs, swimbaits, spinnerbaits, bladed jigs, buzzbaits, toads and frogs. I generally try to mimic a bait fish in North Carolina but sometimes I mimic crawdads.

Big but not super hard to catch? In NC? Excuse me while I belly laugh heartily. 😂😂😂😂😂 Now that we are done with that, there's giant bass in darn near every publicly fishable body of water in this state but they're all big and super hard to catch! Jump into the learning how to catch large bass pool, the water is warm! Maybe someday one of us will figure out how to make em bite down here 😉

If the fish down here hit as hard and as often as they do up North in your bogs, I don't think anyone down South would even know what bed fishing is 😂😂😂 Consider this: You hear a fish blow up in the grass and think 'dang the fish are really chewing today' and you note where the blow up happens and pitch a bait into the hole. Instantly you are bitten and catch a chunky fish with lots of minnows crammed down her throat and think 'wow they're feeding in here!' When in fact: Fish are on bed in the grass field. Bass are constantly blowing up on (and consuming) bed invaders all day long. You see a bass guarding it's fry or it's eggs (via the blow up in the grass) and you visually cast to the fish and catch it. Point being, we are often fishing beds without knowing it. Why else do we tell new anglers 'parallel the bank slowly' You're gonna be putting your bait around an angry fish a lot of months of the year and they're not eating your lure because they're hungry. We see a big female hovering in the sun next to a dock piling and pitch to her and she hits and we catch her. We don't know it but she has just laid eggs next to that piling. Etc etc etc etc

Jake was off one last day today and we had a day alright. 6.3/5.2/4.1 on the bank at the pond this morning on jigs. A few more to round out the pond visit..... And a 5 lber on a gizzard shad @Siebert Outdoors grasss jig and an incredibly fat 2 lber on a Missile Baits D Bomb and a dink on the bizz baits spinnerbait on an afternoon boat ride! Missed a good few too! What a day!

I am merely referring to the Florida strain largemouth present in North Carolina. I have no idea what Northern smallmouth do on their beds @TOXIC and wouldn't be surprised at all if they're a)more aggressive b) not as easy to educate. Here the bass seem real quick to learn but yeah seems like the mere thought of catching a fish on a bed offends some people and I get that but also those people probably catch fish off of beds blindly without knowing all the time. It's kind of a strange topic to wrap ones head around when you really start to consider all the details. Heck tons of the bass around here spawn at odd times and in depths that make no sense etc. I mostly don't change how I fish at all regardless of season but I'm ALWAYS using my eyes to catch fish every single day. I think what I'm trying to say here is that I site fish the banks all the time. How else does one fish a bank?

I don't know. I think it's pretty obnoxiously hard and I usually get bored and just go fishing but to each their own. There are certain fish that will never be caught any other way unless you like to use forward-facing sonar or something like that. Them's the brakes!

A friend of mine selectively harvests every year during the spawn to make sure his bass are big on his pond and it works very well. He also sight fishes the large ones to teach them to fear people. I'm always using my eyes to try to locate bass so to say that I'm not sight fishing would be a lie. I'm using my sight to fish every day during every season. As far as bedding bass: in my humble opinion, if the bass don't move or act startled when I walk up to them, it's better that I catch them and let them go with a sore lip and an education before somebody else catches them and puts them in hot grease. I can almost guarantee after I let them go, they're not caught again during the spawn, at least on the bodies of water I fish. The fact of the matter is people are fishing for these bedding bass whether I do it or not and not everybody is compassionate and releases the big ones. In general, the water clarity and the sky conditions and the wind don't really allow for much sight fishing anyway.

I haven't fished the campgrounds at Jordan for years but bring lots of chicken livers. There's big catfish and striped bass that will eat them. I do my best fishing for bass there this time of year on t rigs but again, been a long long time. Jordan has piles of huge bass that should be pushing shallow, so I'd say just go for it and as others have said, welcome aboard!

5/16-7/16 depending on depth and how heavy the cover. I am a weirdo who generally pegs my t rigs and only un pegs them situationally.

I like spinnerbaits, swimbaits, Squarebills, lipless crankbaits, Jerkbaits, bladed jigs, swim jigs, heavy t rigs and casting jigs!

Bryan New seems to be in the wrong at the very least for being kinda rude and unprofessional. Makes me not respect or like him at all and if he's breaking rules then he should be DQ'd. Andrew Upshaw has always struck me as a straight shooter and he essentially has nothing to lose or gain in this and the story was corroborated by 4 people. Case closed.

I think you do whatever the conditions call for if that makes sense. There are sight fishing days and there are reaction bait days even within the spawn. I agree that you're going to do much better scouting out beds and then blind casting from a distance if you're really trying to catch females in an efficient manner.

@Aaron_H that's a nice fish there! Spinnerbaits rule hard. I'm feeling like they kinda pick up where the lipless leaves off in some ways as the spring gets more pronounced. Something about the way they hover and dance in the windy or muddy water really gets big fish riled up.

Let's GO @Fried Lemons! That's a dang gorgeous fish! @Woody B here in central NC they definitely were close and then pulled back. Water temps have dropped 5 degrees over the past week or so. I think a few already fired before it hit and may have locked in for a little while but mostly I think the lions share is still waiting to do their thing and we got a real spring this year in NC rather than dropping straight into summer like we did last year!

I've never been to Memphis. But it does sound like the beginning of a beautiful song. 😎