Pat Brown

Boogerman, Prototype Lures, Lunker Lure and Nichols have been my favorite 1/4 oz buzzer! Really all of them I have tried seem to work well! I am eager to check out the new Buckeye offerings as well as the Santone and Humdinger buzzers. Buzzbaits are one of my favorite ways to catch bass.

Even blind squirrels find acorns every once in a while. I'd rather be making a stupid choice and be right than make the smart choice and be wrong. Find your own fish when you go fishing. Throw bait at object. Keep moving. Where is that doggone bait at? What's the weather been like the last week? What's the weather like right now?

I think it's a skill that can be learned from watching too many YouTube videos probably but I don't think it's really any easier or harder without at least some frame of reference. Lenses and cameras are weird. I can usually guess pretty well ONCE I have seen a YouTuber weigh one fish of any size as a reference but before that, it's kinda hard to tell unless I know how big persons arms or hands are or how their lens is set up etc etc. Also the single most deceptive and often times most critical measurement of a bass is WIDTH which we never see on pictures or even most videos. Some bass are tall but flatter. Some bass are rotund and shorter. Some are both. Hard to tell without some good thorough reference material.

I hear more of a Midwestern suburban dad voice: Homer Simpson? 😉😂

A few yesterday after work. My first fish of the year on the old drop shot and my first fish on the new Rapala soft plastic swim bait (the judge or something?). I really like the action on it and the plastic seems soft yet durable! Jake got his on a t rigged zoom speed craw in the Kentucky special color.

Nice fish! Edit: I think actually you might have an angled a little bit funny in that last picture and I'm going to change my answer to between 6 and 7. It's honestly impossible to tell from pictures so you're going to have to get a scale for the next one! 😉

I fish really shallow and I need lift. The rat L trap does much better with a straight horizontal retrieve where the goal is deflection (IMHO). I do much better with the bill lewis hammer trap and the strike king red eye shad , which both lift up into the water and almost hover for a second before they shimmy down slowly due to the lift created by their design. I caught nearly every fish this winter on a red eye shad including a 9.3 and multiple 5-6 lbers. I often like using the 3/8 oz to show the fish something a little different from every other guy at the lake or pond.

Need to reach out to Old Navy and see if they're interested in becoming an endemic sponsor of amateur child bass fishing. 🤔🤔🤔

Well that explains the lack of action around here lately. I'll keep this in mind next time we head out! 😎👆🏼

Truth be told mom won't let him out on the boat with his nice britches on. Sorry guys. Too many opportunities for treble hooks to ruin perfectly good pants!

Yeah, you don't really have to look hard to find the fish when it's muddy. Super shallow. Super tight to cover. Bang your lure into stuff and vary retrieve. It's kind of a myth that Bass need your lure to be big or flashy when it's muddy. Caught tons of big fish in muddy water with small plastics on fast falling t rigs just throwing into heavy cover. The biggest obstacle bass fisherman face in muddy water is themselves. Have confidence and cover water and fish targets. In my humble opinion, muddy water makes smart fish dumber and big fish more likely to bite. If you've got a little wind and some muddy water throw a lipless crankbait on shallow flatter banks that normally are gin clear and hang on tight! I really like a brisk pumping yo-yo retrieve up shallow! Have at it!!! 😎🎣

No giants but a respectable pile of decent ones from yesterday: Big fish are all over the beds at the small public ponds and the lakes are just a little behind. Hopefully this cold front this week makes things.... interesting 😎

Nothing is more frustrating than being doubtful of your own intuition early on in fishing. Learn to read the conditions and trust your instincts. Learn to be very quiet in a boat, on land, with your bait entering the water etc etc etc Learn to cast accurately. One accurate cast beats 10 casts that miss the mark by 2 feet. Learn to vary your retrieve with any and all baits. I like to use my imagination and put myself in the baits shoes. I try to make it look like it's doing everything it can to evade detection or being eaten. No movement should be arbitrary or robotic. Learn to move yrself around. Bass aren't the kinds of creatures where you 'wait for them to get active' and have a lot of success. You got to put yourself on fish and that means covering water and saturating areas with casts. Some of the most successful anglers to ever fish tournaments are merely fast. Spend as much time learning about bass learning about what exactly they're eating on your home waters. If you want to understand the owl, study the mouse. Bait selection? That's the easy part. Just pick something that efficiently targets them in their chosen cover at the depth they're ambushing prey and get your presentation in the ballpark of profile/speed and color and you'll get some bites.

You can keep using plastic craws one last time (past where they're threadable on a jig) by cutting them down to the last usable plastic and hanging them on your jig like an old pork chunk. They also get really unique action rigged this way.

I mean it was kinda like the great Smoky Mountains were just buffering that nasty cold weather I guess. I'll take it! Nice weather suits me fine!

I have found big fish on all types of bottom composition and it really depends on what debate fish are doing in my experience. Muddy bottom requires adjustments just like heavy vegetation or anything. It's not my favorite way to fish either but if that's where they are I'm going to try to get bit in that water. When I'm fishing a muddy bottom, I like lighter weights or weightless plastics lighter jigs very shallow diving crankbaits (like pretty much wake baits), top waters and suspending hard baits. This is also one scenario where I would lean heavily on the drop shot.

Ain't been my experience at all. I have caught my biggest fish this winter in muddy water. I think all things being equal, bass prefer stained water but bass won't turn down warm muddy water in the winter if it's brought on by a warm rain and activates the food chain. Baitfish is more important than water clarity. I catch fish on frogs in 3 feet of water with 2" of visibility.

Dang @AlabamaSpothunter ! That's a gorgeous fish and a cool story to go with her! I think this is gonna be one of the best 'growth years' for big bass NC has ever experienced. We basically didn't have a winter and I'm fairly certain sunfish and baitfish have been spawning like mad. I've never seen bass seem so content to just eat eat eat in NC when there's such good spawning weather happening and you gotta figure it's just the bass capitalizing on opportunity and abundance? @ol'crickety if you wanna learn what I know, watch old tournaments and fishing shows. I learn a lot from guys like David Fritts, Denny Brauer, Paul Elias, Hank Parker, Rick Clunn and many others. They have been educating through tournaments and fishing shows for decades!

We went out today on the boat at around 1:30 pm and wanted to catch a couple to test out my new home made live well and to see if we could get one that would beat my leading 8-15 from last week to secure my win for March's Big Bass Battle for my local lakes. We worked our way up to a main lake point not 10 minutes after leaving the marina and I'm pitching a Strike King Scounbug in Bama craw on a pegged 7/16 oz t rig into the heaviest cover on the point I can find. I feel a nice supple thump way down in the junk and set the hook hard and feel my line take off into the tree! I play see saw with 20 lb big game in an underwater bramble forest and some how she works her way out into open water and peels some more drag and then I get her up...for a second I thought I HAD beat last weeks big fish! Landed this gorgeous 8 lb 4 oz behemoth! We released her since she didn't beat my leading fish but holy COW I love spring time y'all! Just epic epic stuff. One of the prettiest fattest fish I ever caught. We tooled around and caught a couple dinks and some sunfish and then as the sun was getting low Jake stuck a nice 2.5 lber and I boated a nice 4.5 lber on a swim jig out of some lily pads! All in all a completely sublime day of bass fishing for the books and my 3rd 8+ lber of 2024 on the books! 🎣🎣🎣⚡⚡⚡🌊🌊🌊

I have a buddy who is a single dad and he fishes when he can and he smokes giants on the nessie. He loves em. I haven't bought any yet but they are intriguing. I like that Berkley makes cool expensive stuff available for less money and I feel for the small businesses that can't scale their models to provide consumers with competitive prices. It's really not easy to pick sides for me.

A dink on the red eye shad and Jake got a real nice one that was blind in one eye from the same exact spot I caught my small one but on a small underspin with a fluke jr on the back! Gonna definitely be trying more fluke + underspin! I bet we see a few giants this weekend. The bigs are stacked on points and staging areas. It's go time!

The lack of topwater in this thread is shocking. Unpressured pond!?!?! Come on y'all. Jitterbug/hula popper/spook/frog/pop'r/floating worm/buzztoad/whopper plopper 😮. I mean if they are just gonna eat lures, you better bring some topwater 😂🎣 In all seriousness a couple really large rat wake baits and some big glides/swimbaits would be wise. You might sort out the size on the pond much faster if you bring a few very large baits.

Those orange smallmouth are kinda like that!

I just literally got goosebumps reading this. Can ya take me with you? 😂😂😂🥹🥹🥹 Well shoot where would I start? I reckon I'd hit the inflow and outflow with jigs and sort out who the head honcho on the pond is and then I'd get to know all the stragglers out in the middle and along the banks with jerkbaits and lipless crankbaits and buzzbaits. I think I'd be fishing the heavy cover and points around the NW corner pretty doggone hard.

FWIW, I don't catch a bass that is dark green in color *most years* til after the spawn and I've caught the same fish in February pale as all get out and then in July dark dark green and spawned out. It's not a sign of poor health or poor quality for the fishery, it's merely an adaptation that allows them to blend into the water/bottom seasonally to evade avian threats. This year I fished a blue green ultra clear grass pond near a local college a lot and caught lots of dark green 'defined' looking bass and I believe in water like this they never go pale. Texas share lunkers come out white as snow plenty of times in 5 feet of water. The clay bottom ponds I fish definitely have the palest bass and they're the palest during the winter. I'm learning to appreciate the glowing mass of a stained water gargantuan bass. 😎😎😎