Pumpkin Lizard

Yeah I think anglers develop a level of intuition over time and learn when to anticipate strikes. I think I anticipate strikes all the time and only remember (barely) the ones that actually happened. Gives me chills and an adrenaline rush that I crave. Something I noticed a while ago with all types of fishing is that I have very vague memory of strikes and my reflexes/lizard brain handle the rest. This can be a good and bad thing lol. A while back I was hopper fishing (topwater) for trout and I was setting the hook way early reflexively and my timing was off all day. The fishing was amazing and I wasted it. It was super frustrating for me and the other guy in the boat. There was also an old 60 Minutes segment on Bassmaster and to prove that the anglers knew what they were doing and it wasn't luck they showed Jimmy Houston calling his shots.

Yup. When people ask me if I ate it I usually say "I don't eat a football when I score a touchdown". I personally can't stand the taste of fish. Once food gets placed on a supermarket shelf, all of those harmful impurities are magically removed.

BASS. MLF I would watch, but the format is gimmicky.

I'm the opposite. I think color is more important and I will change colors before switching lures.

Put me in the beavers don’t eat fish camp. Even if a confused or protein deficient beaver partakes in a fish every now and then I have a hard time seeing how they have much of an impact on fish populations as a predator. Any videos out there while interesting are purely anecdotal. if they want to add some protein I guess there are more attainable sources of it such as freshwater mussels and crayfish. What I usually tell people when they ask if it’s a coyote or a wolf is that if you have to ask, then it was a coyote.

If I gas up on the way to fishing I always wash my hands like crazy afterwards.

Easily my best weekend since getting back into bass fishing this August. -Friday Night, No pics. Bright and sunny at first. Caught 6 right next to the ramp; fish were going nuts on the shad. Burned through a brand new package Green Pumpkin Rage Bugs pitching around some lily pads and brush piles, but alternated with some Crush City Ned BLTs which mostly caught smaller bass but still worked. -Saturday. Back to the tackle shop for more Green Pumpkin Rage Bugs. I need to just order a case of these things in the three colors I use. Tackle jokes with me that I have become their best Bass customer LOL. After my son's soccer game I head over to the neighborhood pond before some college football. Fishing is amazing, I even catch a pig of a crappie. I catch some good ones and then get caught in a lightning storm. But the fishing is so good I hunker down in the woods for 30 minutes. After that the fishing is even better. Still alternating between Rage Bugs and a Ned. But I lose what looked like a 5lbr on the Ned. -Sunday. It pours all night. The shop gave me a solid tip. So I follow through on plans to get to a seclude and inconvenient bank. I get soaked navigating through super tall grass and woods. WORTH IT. I arrive on the bank and the scene was just.... epic. There are large bass jumping clear out of the water on shad. I even see some enormous wipers feasting way out. There's also seagulls, some sort of diving bird (maybe cormorants?) who are not pleased to see me and two bald eagles just feasting on small fish. Immediately I start landing fish on black and blue Rage Bugs. Nice three lb bass at first. Then I lose my jig rig and decide to throw a spinnerbait for *** and giggles. And boom the biggest fish of the day. A weighed 4 lb bass with a 5lb body. After that I pick up a few more good ones. The birds then gave up and the bite kind of quit.

Cool story (for me at least) from the weekend. Got a tip from my local tackle shop about a stretch of bank at a nearby Northwest Missouri lake. This lake gets hammered by boat and bank anglers. But one area gets neglected because by late spring nobody wants to beat the brush to get to one spot. Even the boats don't want to get into this spot. It poured early Sunday and I timed my arrival for the rain stopping. I managed to get into that spot on foot and found a couple hundred yards all to myself and the fish and the birds were going nuts on the shad. Within 30 minutes I had five 15 inch plus fish landed and then a solid 4 lb fish a bit later on. A bunch more after that. Making small talk on my out at the parking lot nobody really caught anything worth. Sometimes it's about finding the right place at the right time.

If your doctor says it's fine, then hell yeah. The benefits for your mental well being might be immeasurable. I really hope you can.

I knew some really good fly guides out west who basically used to joke that you could hire them if you passed the interview:) Seriously they were half kidding. They were always booked with repeat business. They could afford to get selective. When I started going out to Montana in the 2000s I was fishing with a guy who was exclusive with a small lodge. For five or six years I could book him but after a while he had no availability because I always plan my trips at the last minute. We became pretty good friends and used to drink beers after fishing. We know each other’s kid’s names and stuff. To make ends meet when he was younger during the winter he would go be a head guide in Chile for a lodge. Later on he would switch to Redfish in Louisiana. Fast forward many years and he still guides but also has an outfitters license and has multiple guides also working for him so he doesn’t need to leave his family all winter. It still can be stressful, sometimes the rivers you are guiding have bad year and you end up losing money burning gas to guide further and further away from home.

It does look good.

You can’t win in that situation. My brother does guide trips for trout, bass and pike in northeast. Those trips with inexperienced fly fishers who don’t listen are his biggest nightmare. It’s one thing when they can’t make a cast and another when your only hope of getting a strike is if you can make a cast and mend. Usually he can get them to toss an indicator rig with some nymphs and use the boat to mend the line.

This is the correct answer.

True but this is really nothing new. I remember in the '90s Zoom would come up with a hot new color and on the lakes I fished in Georgia every fish would see it in a matter of weeks or less and the color wouldn't be hot anymore. It for sure was happening before that too.

I've never hired a guide for bass fishing. But a guide fishing for any reason other that showing the client/sport what right looks like as a demonstration sounds incredibly unprofessional to me. Most of the guides I know are trying to catch fish through their clients. I hired guides for fly fishing for trout. Never once saw the guide fish. When I was a new to fly fishing 20+ years ago I had guides make casts to demonstrate a technique. It was the smartest money I ever spent because it accelerated the learning curve bigtime.

Awesome fishing to watch. The last day was fun. Shallow water and lots of different styles of fishing. I guess some guys didn't like getting into the locks with the big triple barges.

So Smith and Costa have figured out a way to alter the very nature of electro magnetic radiation? If so they should get out of sunglasses and get into defense contracting. A blue mirror reflects blue light. This is incredibly simple. The reflective blue definitely affect the bandwidth of light going through the lense. You can see the result by the reflective mirror. Certainly the lens color beneath the mirror also has an impact, but there is simply no way that the blue mirror is purely cosmetic. It’s basic science.

Bad luck to change.

It's nothing like your grassy lake in Maine, but I'm lucky to have it at least until they figure out that I am in the HOA next door.

Neighborhood pond action.

If you're catching 20 a session with 1-2 four and five pounders each time maybe you should tell us!:) Looks like a great spot. I grew up fishing ponds like that in New England. I fish the way you do, staying mobile, covering water, using searching patterns to locate fish. But when I want to take a closer look I start throwing a texas rig or a jig. I'd probably second the idea fishing later in the day versus early. But you never know unless you try. And that's how you learn.

Evenings lately have been fire. It's been warm/sunny for weeks here and cool at night. Fishing seems to get better as the sun gets lower and lower.

One thing I forgot to mention. Whether I am bass fishing with conventional tackle or fly fishing for bass or trout, in 99% of my experience when you are retrieving a lure or fly with no slack they are not leader shy. Where they are leader shy is when the lure or fly is still or being dead drifted. I've never dead drifted with braided but I would think it would drift great given how supple it is. That being said, I would always use a leader for the reasons I mentioned above.

I use a leader with braid. I like the longevity and casting performance of braided line as well as the the tight line sensitivity. But I also like fluorocarbon so I get the best of both worlds. -If I can't get out of a snag I have a couple break points. Most of the time it breaks at the lure. Breaking off with straight braided can suck, -Fluoro leader sinks faster than braid and on slack line Fluoro is more sensitive than braid. -The leader acts as a shock absorber and it might save you. Braided will weaken when it rubs up against stuff.