Pat Brown

I just got a GoPro and I might try to videotape some buzz bait catches tonight because I'm going to that pond that was on fire a couple days ago that's next to my son's basketball practice tonight. It will help to be able to show people my retrieve because I think it's a big part of getting bit. It's about the most fun way to catch a bass there is I do believe and for some reason it works on fish that have been caught a lot and during all seasons where water is wet. The crazy part is, in my opinion, the perfect water temperature for a buzz bait is basically about to hit for the next 2 months and I predict that when we get to that 55 to 60° range it's going to be nuts. They're already starting to hit it like crazy. This morning I got a couple dinks before work on the lipless and that was only a 45 minutes session and I missed two bites. So I'm thinking that all the little guys are moving up. Looking to make beds in the next couple week with the full moon approaching. Thankfully Jake got a toad on the lipless after work yesterday!

@Catt tournament fishing sure is worse now than ever as far as I can tell. I've been indulging in archived tournament coverage from 80s and 90s and 00s BASS and FLW tournaments and it just isn't what it was. It used to be people trying to use their skills to figure out fish with wisdom and experience. Seems like now it's just watching people do their taxes on a boat.

That looks right!

I reckon that's a green sunfish but fairly pale on account of winter time. It could be a green sunfish bluegill hybrid or a green sunfish red ear hybrid. Definitely got green sunfish in it. It has the tropical facial stuff going on.

Jerkin and spinnin' em up outta the pond this morning before work. Decent one on the Jerkbait and a big crappie and a big sunfish. Multi species Jerkbait bonanza!

Yeah I just wish it worked a little slower and faster. I appreciate that Chris wouldn't take no for an answer and made it happen elsewhere. I am just not much of a brand loyalist and megabass didn't invent soft swimbaits and the inventors (whoever they are) were just copying big baitfish so it's not that original of an idea! 😂😂😂 Megabass may have made a soft swimbait before some of their competitors but currently they need to update the mag draft to get with the trends and stay competitive. Fish have seen a lot of that 'magdraft sweet spot speed' and it really opens things up a lot to be able to go slower and faster because depth and speed of retrieve are pretty much everything when it comes to getting bit around here. I'm definitely not interested in the cullshad or the Hangover. Those sound pretty not fun to fish.

And I do it using monofilament line! 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫🤷🏼‍♂️🤷🏼‍♂️🤷🏼‍♂️ Lucky I guess. 🥹😂🎣 Thanks for the kind words @ol'crickety

You can throw big glide baits around staging areas and catch big females looking to move up or who have recently spawned. All the glide baits worked that I tried. I like the shine glide by savage gear.

Big wakebaits/glide baits are on the menu for the spawn/post spawn cycle this year 100% I did really well on them last year and I think they have a lot of potential at the places I fish when the truly giant females move up.

45 minute session at a pond at the community college next to where my son has basketball practice yielded a limit on the buzzbait this evening.

Seems like it is more restricted in terms of retrieve speed. I appreciate that they make a free style model though! Maybe this year megabass will update their formula and try to come up with some innovation!

Looks like I'll be trying the dangerous swimbait this spring! Thanks for that super helpful comparison! I like that I can get two unrigged and put them on a beast hook and fish them weedless at lots of speeds. I almost bought the mag draft many times but the belly treble kept me away. Not a fan of that design. I fish very shallow and snaggy.

Show me the parents of grown kids who felt that they spent as much time with their kids doing quality activities as they wanted to. I'll wait.

If and when I ever get my hands on a small fortune and build myself a private lake. You better bet this is going down! 😂😂😂

Life is short and supposed to be something special and enjoyable and personal to you. So if you're not finding the spark on the water anymore, go seek it elsewhere! My personal $0.02 on this is that most rewarding things in life take a lot of time and energy and work and fishing is very much one of those things. It's very very rewarding but the amount you have to learn and the skills you have to accumulate to succeed are pretty big unless you get lucky. Why else would professional guides and lake map breakdowns and electronics that show you fish underwater and crazy new lures sell so well? Because they're trying to make it easier for you to get around the work you know you have to do to be successful with any sort of predictability. The same thing happens with guitar which I taught lessons for years etc. People realize. Oh yeah this is going to take a lot of work. Maybe I don't have enough time or energy or passion for this and they move on. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. In fact, I think it's better when you can recognize that quickly in your life.

Yeah we usually ended trips with a few catfish and a few crappie and maybe a few sunfish! Crappie seem to be everywhere and bite a lot of the same stuff bass bite on my home lake. I still catch big ones every year on crankbaits in the post spawn. Do I believe that if people had full access to every inch of the Great lakes and they were not covered in ice for 6 months of the fishable year that the smallmouth up north would become much more difficult to catch? Yes.

I was catching other stuff thankfully. Bass fishing really is a different animal from any other type of fishing in my humble opinion. There's really no frame of reference for it except for bass fishing.

Embrace the chocolate milk. Power fish up shallow. It's like one of the only times in 2024 where that bite is viable everywhere all the time. Muddy water equals fish on the bank.

I don't have as much experience as some people but my limited experience is this: I could catch 50 smallmouth in 2 hours bank fishing Huron in July when I was 10 years old and fishing nothing but floating Rapala Jerkbaits and Squarebill cranks on spinning rods. Here in NC as an eager and ambitious adult, it took me over a year of fishing for largemouth bass a LOT at the bigger public lakes before I started to figure out what the heck was going on. I caught my first NC largemouth bass as an adult trolling an orange crankbait into the mouth of a creek. It would be many months before I caught my next. That one would come on a black and blue senko 'texas rigged' and I caught it out of the back of a pocket. My third bass came one month later in March and it was a 6 lber on a 1$ walmart spinnerbait with a purple culprit worm on the back. That fish (about 2 years ago this spring) is the fish that changed my life. I was determined to make these fish bite my bait if it was the last thing I did, knowing after that 6 lber that I had to know what a true giant required me to do to catch it. It took me 3 years before I caught my first fish at the pressured pond local to me that no one catches anything at. Literally 3 years before that started to happen for me. All this to say, it is now abundantly clear that LMB fishing is a chess match played out across many seasons where instinct and anticipation and wisdom and knowledge are the only things you've really got, because those bass are almost always everywhere you're looking, they're just very very good at not biting baits. But I do enjoy the slugfest that smallmouth can be oh boy, yes I do!

I could get my hard bait stuff done with just strike King but I also love 6th Sense, Berkley and Rapala.

With the frequency with which those bass remove themselves from my hooks after I have deliberately driven said hooks into their heads....I am sure that fish is okay.😂😂😂

I had days like this up north with my family as a kid. Smallmouth can definitely get like that sometimes in the summer. I'm a largemouth bass fisherman at heart from North Carolina, but I do love smallmouth and I owe them at least partly for sewing the seeds and lighting the spark all those years ago! I would truly love to get back up to Huron to fish the summer smallmouth insanity someday!

Just some little guys on the lipless. It's raining hard and I'm hoping it gets nice and muddy so those bigger fish get up shallow!

Beast @AlabamaSpothunter! It's so cool that you've hacked the offshore bite! Totally makes sense that you've also found the biggest crappie because they eat the same stuff as the bass! Something I noticed last year's a couple times at the pond I fish: During the sunfish spawn after the bass got done I saw wolfpacks of catfish and bass in the 12-16" range hunting bluegill fry together!!!! Another thing I found interesting, I saw 8-10 lb bass in 3-4 fish wolfpacks roaming after the spawn and I saw 2+ lb red ear swimming with them peacefully. Surely all hunting the same stuff and the redear know they're too big for the bass to want to eat.

I recently started using a hook sharpener and I can tell you for sure it makes a huge difference. I don't care how sharp a hook comes from the factory. It's going to get dull pretty quickly and I'd rather sharpen that hook instead of change it! I do have nice fancy hooks for when I burn out the stock hooks though.