JHoss

Yes, I'm out here legally ripping as many off beds as I can then hauling them around in my livewell for up to 8 hours. I've also done a tremendous amount of research on the topic, have a degree in environmental science, and know that pulling fish off the beds in my fisheries have no negative effect on the overall population in said fisheries. And yet, some keyboard warrior on the internet thinks he knows more about the science and wants to bash people doing nothing wrong. SMH It's interesting that the two guys who live in the same region and have clearly done extensive research, are in agreement on how little effect bed fishing has on our populations. Like @Pat Brown, my opinions are equally based on scientific research and first hand experience. And two guys from up north are bashing it. Maybe things are different up north, I've never fished up there nor done any research specifically on northern fisheries.

Is this real? How would they even enforce that? Can you make repeated casts to a piece of cover if you haven't seen a bedded fish? I too would love to see a study or two to back that up? Modern fisheries science says that most lakes are overpopulated with bass, so removing fish from that population helps it. Apples and oranges. How many fawns does a doe have? How many eggs/polts does a turkey have? 2 maybe 3 fawns. 6-15 eggs/polts. How many deer inhabit an acre? How many turkey? Most suggest 10ish acres per deer and 30ish for turkey. Now how many eggs does one bass lay and how many bass per acre? One bass averages 4000-5000 eggs and most lakes should average 50-100 bass per acre. So you have a fawn or turkey born for every 2-3 acres but you have 200,000-1,000,000 bass eggs per acre. You could destroy 95% of beds at a given time and see no effect on a fishery the following year on most every lake in this country. That's why species with low recruitment rates reproduce in huge numbers, because nature expects the vast majority to not survive to adulthood. This might be true for someone who isn't good at bed fishing. People who are good at it, generally ignore the bucks and focus on the females. Heck, the good bed fisherman (especially in tournaments) skip over more beds than they fish because it's not worth it to target the males and smaller females.

Plot twist: she had a huge life insurance policy and the gator was actually the husband's accomplice. Or I might be mixing too much true crime in with my bass fishing podcasts...

Maybe it's different for me because I'm mostly tournament fishing. I'll gladly dedicate an hour (or 1/8th of my day) on one fish if I believe they'll be the on the team at weigh in. I think it's that old saying, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. A good fish I know is there and believe is catchable is far more valuable than the other fish I MIGHT find and catch blind fishing in that hour. Being able to quickly assess whether a bedded fish is catchable may be harder and more important than knowing how to catch them on beds. Cook and Cox can certainly read a fish better than 99.9% of anglers which makes bed fishing reasonably efficient for them.

Search "Float Tube" on Amazon or Google and you will find many options. I also remember them being much more popular when I was a kid, guess kayaks have replaced these for a lot of folks.

I'm surprised by the number of responses for it just being too difficult. That's what makes it so fun to me. You KNOW there's a fish there, now how do you convince it to eat your bait? Last tournament I found some bed fish. The biggest pair did not want to eat anything we had tied on. We threw T-Rigged craws, T-Rigged senkos, wacky senkos, dice baits, glide baits, drop shots, and jerk baits at them. Nothing. Finally pulled a rod with a T-Rigged Bronco Bug out of the locker. First couple casts just dragging or shaking had no reaction. The first flip where I hopped it in her face, she ate and I missed the bite. Repeated that hop on the next cast and caught her. Figuring that out was so rewarding to me. I never would've gone through that many baits on a blind fish to figure it out. A couple hours later I had a similar face off with a fry guarder. After 5 or 6 baits, I pulled out the jerkbait and told my co I would have that fish in 2 casts. It took 3 because I put the second in a limb, but I caught him on the 3rd. We both thought it was so cool to find the bait and be able to watch the eat. @Pat Brown I'm with you on most of that, especially about fish spawning deeper and for longer than most give them credit for. Just talk to some of the OH Ivie guides who are catching bed fish in 18-20 feet. But I don't agree that most of the fish we catch shallow in the summer are on beds- I think there's a sizable portion of the population that just lives shallow year round. I can remember plenty of examples where I caught fish from a wolfpack chasing bluegill in 2 feet of water or pulling 10 fish of one small piece of cover that absolutely could not hold that many beds or balls of fry. Is that a TN River deal? I've never fished a TN River fishery, but always assumed you'd find plenty of bed fish at the right time of year. I think what "gets me" the most is people who think that taking some fish off their beds is going to mess up the bass population. There's enough science out there now to show that a handful of bass can repopulate an entire lake. If anything, most lakes are overcrowded and stunted so having some decreased recruitment in a portion of the population should help combat that without actually harvesting any fish.

I keep hearing people say that they don't like bed fishing or they prefer not to bed fish. Is this purely because they feel guilty about disturbing the reproductive cycle or is there some other reason folks don't like it? Personally, it doesn't matter if its bass on beds or cruising cobia, sight fishing is my favorite way to catch em.

Couldn't say it any better than @Pat Brown did. I've seen it perfectly exemplified with grouper season in Florida. A lot of species are closed to harvest most of the year. When you're spearfishing during those closed seasons, keeper grouper will literally swim over to you to check you out and show no fear. Once that season's been in for a few days, they're running for their holes if you get within 50 feet of them. Just takes a couple days and a handful of negative interactions with divers to change their behavior entirely. There's plenty of studies on deer hunting that show that it takes about 3 days of hunting pressure for the deer to pattern the hunters and begin avoiding them. I have a tournament on a small lake this Saturday. The blast off area is a nice flat near the launch. Try and fish it first thing after 20 boats blast off and you aren't getting bit. But after a couple hours of things being more settled, the fish are back on that flat and eating... until all the boats start coming back to weigh in.

I think it's kinda like the guys who say "color only matters when it does." Your splash or lack of splash only matters when fish are in a certain mood. Maybe on a Wednesday when the lake's pretty empty, a bigger splash attracts fish and you catch more. Maybe, on a tournament Saturday with 100 boats on the lake, no splash catches more. Generally speaking, I think you have the highest odds of catching big bass when they don't know you're there. So I try to be as subtle as possible with my baits entering the water. I 100% think a big splash in shallow water when you're flipping catches fewer fish than a quiet entry. I've noticed the opposite. When I'm fishing with someone else and we're both throwing spinner baits, the guy with the consistently quieter entry always seems to catch more.

In your situation, fishing relatively private small waters from what I understand, I would be curious of relative weight purely from the standpoint of the health of the fishery. Maybe you'd see a trend of fish below relative weight that could benefit from some harvest. Maybe you'd find a perfectly healthy fishery. I'm just down here drooling over the opportunities you have up there and thinking about how I might try to "manage" it. Not just covering but squeezing in most of those. I lost a few fish over the side of the kayak before I could photograph them for a tournament, so I had a bad habit of holding them a bit too firm after that. Please don't adjust the title based on my guesswork. And regardless if it was 18 or 20, that's a great bag either way. I certainly haven't put a bag of that caliber in the boat yet this year.

I carry 5 colors. Pearl, GP, KVD Magic, Pearl Blue, and Bubblegum. I throw pearl 98% of the time. I'll go to GP or KVD Magic if it's around the spawn or lake that doesn't have shad- maybe 1% of the time. Bubblegum gets used in certain colored water after pearl fails- maybe 0.9% of the time. Pearl blue stays in the boat in case I get on a herring bite or something- maybe gets thrown 0.1% of the time.

I agree with others that you really don't need a fancy or expensive reel for frogging. I'm still using the Piscifun Spark Pro I bought 5 years ago for $50. I like the shallow spool with braid and the 8:1 ratio really helps me catch up to a fish or get the frog in quick once I'm out of the strike zone. All that being said, it's probably the next reel to be upgraded in my arsenal.

One thing I've started doing is combining some of these techniques. I'll have one rod with a neko hook tied on, but I'll have a wacky worm and a neko worm on VMC crossover rings in my pocket or on the deck so I can swap them back and forth as the situation changes. I use the EWG style Ned head and keep a Ned style bait and a finesse worm in my pocket so I can swap them back and forth without retying.

Yes, if they come in a clam shell, they stay in a clam shell. I've thrown away too many baits that got deformed by just not sitting in the clam shell perfectly. Elaztech is the worst for this in my experience. I've thrown away so many SMH worms because the tail slipped out of the slot and ended up permanently kinked.

Heck of a bag, but I'd really be curious to see official weights on those. I'm not one to usually chime in and give my $.02 on fish weight unless someone asks but since you did, I'd eyeball this bag between 18-19 lbs. My gut says those fish are under relative-weight, but it's impossible to tell without a scale. I'm pretty confident the lengths for relative weight are calculated with a closed mouth, too. So gotta figure that each of those fish is 1/2" or so shorter on the relative weight chart than they appear on your board. It did make me curious enough to scroll back through some pictures from my kayak days with the exact same board to find some similar length fish that I actually weighed. Granted the angle plays a big role, but most of these fish seems to have thicker stomachs and hang over the board more. 18.25 that went 3-9 The fattest 18" I've ever caught that went 3-14 20" from a bed that went 4-7. Much fatter than the pic shows but it was my PB at the time and was worried she was gonna jump off the board.

Now that you mention it, I don't recall many instances of catching a fish off a log that a bunch of turtles just jumped off. When I'm fishing the James River (or any similar system), I skip whole sections if there's a bunch of turtles in it. Logic being that the turtles want the areas without current and the bass tend to want sections with some flow.

In my experience, yes. I tested it a bunch on household objects when I got it and they always came out the same. I've also found my weight is much closer to our tournament trail's scale than the Berkely scale I was using before. I think that's 50% because my scale is better this year and 50% because the trail's scale is better this year.

Yes, it is one of the Carbonlite 2.0 Technique Specific rods. The Shallow Crank model specifically. I was worried the MH would struggle with lighter sqaurebills, but that hasn't been the case. I paired it with one of their Carbonlite 2.0 reels. Before, I was throwing a Tatula with the Defy Black. Durability has been great with the Defy. The only Fate I've owned was a 7'11 MH flipping stick. It seemed like a step up from the Defy Black until it broke. But you can't really compare the sensitivity of a flipping stick to a cranking rod. It broke fighting a fish in super close quarters in a blow down- I personally think many other rods would not have broken in that same scenario, but can't be sure.

I have two Defy Black Cranking Rods. They're ok for the price but their biggest shortcoming is sensitivity. I switched my squarebill rod to a Carbonlite 2.0 a month ago and the difference is incredible. I can finally feel my line interacting with cover before the bait gets there and it also seems to cast much further. I still use one of the Defy Blacks for my spook rod, but the other has been relegated to backup duties.

I use the Bubba Smart Scale. Everything gets weighed as I catch it and assigned to the color of their cull tag. Every fish after 5 gets weighed unless it's obviously not making the team. Occasionally, if I get two fish that are extremely close in weight, I just hold them side by side and eye ball them. I fish from a 1448 Jon Boat so bringing a balance beam and extra tags just takes up unnecessary space and weight.

That would certainly work too. Those hooks just work great for me and don't require a bunch of extra fumbling with pegs or superglue. I tried the Mustad Alpha Grips, but was not a fan of that keeper at all. I'm, also, a bit paranoid about the scent associated with using super glue- it's a last resort type thing for me.

Lots of good info here. One thing I've found to be key with my fluke fishing, is using an EWG with a built in keeper. I prefer the Mustad Ultra Point Grip Pin. My hookup and landing ratio skyrocketed when I switch to that style hook over a traditional EWG with no keeper. I'll also add another vote of confidence to the SK Caffeine Shad. I switched to those a few years ago from the Zoom flukes and never looked back.

At least they're making it right. Those things are too expensive to be duds.

Got a close up of a bait? Is the internal weight stuck? Something aint right

Guessing this is the answer. Most modern jerkbaits have a weight transfer system that allows them to be cast further. The steel ball in the Stunna probably needs to be released from its current position with a cast for it to sit right.