Pat Brown

I wasn't wrong.

Siebert makes great jigs I like Zoom, Berkley, Z Man, Missile Baits, Strike King, Bizz Baits, Reaction Innovations, Big Bite Baits, Culprit, Storm, Keitech and Netbait soft plastics. I fish Bill Lewis, Googan, 6th Sense, Berkley, Strike King and Rapala hard baits mostly. Spinnerbaits I get from Nichols, Luck E Strike, Booyah, Siebert, Stanley and War Eagle. Hard to beat an original chatterbait for bladed jigs but I also like the Berkley slobberknocker and the Fogy by Siebert. You'll have to play around to find out what you like but I'll say this: no bait is better than any other bait. They all have their times.

Warm and rainy front got them biting good out on the grassy pond. Found what they were eating too.

Water is definitely warming more slowly but I can't complain because it's more fun before they move up anyways! 😎

Could be a sinking model that he wants to sink more slowly. Or a floating model that he wants to float more quickly.

Same stuff I throw all year. Jig/crankbait/swimbait/spinnerbait/frog/buzzbait/Jerkbait/T Rig. I typically let the conditions dictate my lure choice regardless of the season. Bass use structure near spawning banks to stage and feed up before laying their eggs. Probably wanna target stuff like that 😉🎣

He's trying to change the weight of the bait so that it slowly rises or sinks more slowly or suspends perfectly nose down. There's a lot of fun stuff you can do with jerk baits in this realm. None of them actually truly suspend and the ones that float can easily be made to sink and the ones that sink can easily be made to float.

Big glide bait or a Jerkbait. Need a reaction bait that resembles a big baitfish that you can fish erratically around the bed IMHO.

I like a Wakebait better than the HH for grass.

For *real and healthy grass* rat l trap all day especially kinda deeper grass but for mucky - just off the bottom - very shallow weeds where I'm hovering the trap above them, RES gets the call 😎

1/4-3/8 oz lipless retrieved with a high rod and pumped back to me. I like ones with lots of lift for over vegetation personally so I gotta give it to the Red Eye Shad on this one.

I've caught piles of fish and big ones on the $1 Walmart spinner baits and my first big fish of my life was caught on one! They seem fine. I find spinnerbaits are nuanced and fussy and require commitment and learning regardless of what type you select to start. It's a pretty broad category and there's all sorts of ways they can be fished effectively. It doesn't hurt to have some single Colorado, some Tandem willow/Colorado and some Willow/Willow and some heavy ones and some really light ones. IMO, it's more about understanding that they may be on a spinnerbait bite but they are only going to hit a 1/4 oz white chartreuse single gold Colorado right under the surface....you can't figure this out til you commit to the technique and start learning the nuance of the different types and why you might choose to throw one over the others.

If the fish cooperate we may have some footage of some catches someday lol

Just one today under tough conditions but my first fish on a jig this year!!!!

I was half joking but Kyoya WAS fishing the drift fry (and Sakamata shad) Mid strolling with either 1/8 or 3/16 oz jig heads.

Milliken eats pickled eggs on the boat. Gotta say I relate to that. Now I'm really pulling for him 😂

@Catt I always enjoy hearing about some new study where they pit a worm and a crankbait in two different anglers hands against each other and make the claim that bass get conditioned to one lure faster than the other and I think these studies often ignore that angler skill and nuance of presentation is 9/10 of getting bit when a bass is hot on a lure. Who's throwing the worm? Are they a good worm fisherman? Are we dead sticking both baits? So much of bass fishing is thought of through the eyes of the angler and not the bass and it sells a lot of lures!

I completely agree that your goal is to hide your bait and sneak it past big bass back to the bank and sometimes we fail the mission and catch one 😉😉😉in all seriousness, I think bass are hyper aware of their environment and you definitely want to blend in and stand out a little bit. I think the action we impart - perhaps - is the part that makes the bait stand out to the bass - presentation makes your bait seem distressed or weak or maybe even aggressive and that usually gets them to commit if the bait visually 'blends in' enough.

My birthday is next weekend and I'm pretty sure the bait monkey is coming over to take his toll. Those Zaldaingerous 7" swimbaits look fun and unnecessary. I had a tough time yesterday too @FishTax those winds shifting to out of the north makes the bait monkey happy 😂😂😂

Yeah I'm with all the action and profile matter more guys. I think hues and shades of color can also play but here's another interesting anecdote: I have seen very large bass that can resist live bluegill on hooks dangled on their bed but can't resist a swim jig casually swam into the bed and shaken gently in place. I think bass happily coexist with bluegill and crayfish and shad a lot of the time without violently attacking them. What we do as anglers is elicit a reaction strike from inactive fish a LOT of the time. To make matters even wilder, I believe it was @WRB in another thread who pointed out that on small public ponds, fish mortality impacts bass with the 'aggressive and opportunistic gene' first and over time the 'cautious gene' bass replace every aggressive fish in the pond and you get large ghost like populations of big bass sometimes.

I sharpen my treble hooks and it works really well. Swapping hooks every time one gets a little dull gets a little expensive. There is of course a point of no return. But it takes a while for hooks to get filed down that much. I usually lose the bait first. YMMV

All I know is that all this pressure on these fish offshore is going to make the bite really good up shallow for @Catt in the next couple years 😂😂😂

Ben is having one of his days right now and there's a really good chance he's going to run into a 9 or 10 pounder here soon. Knows what he's doing on Toledo for sure.

I catch lots of fish on the Berkley Stunna and the Lucky Craft Pointer line. Caught a pile on the Rapala rip stop and the Husky Jerk. Buy some suspend strips and you can make the floating ones sink or suspend.

Crankbait bites are super weird but you know it's a fish when it starts to move around on ya! 😉 I fish a lipless crankbait 75% of the time when I fish a crankbait and sometimes you feel the bite, most times you don't. In my experience, when I am bumping cover, it will not throw any amount of slack in my line. If I feel even the slightest hint of slack in my line after a bump I'm setting the hook. Hope that helps.