mattm

I hope everyone can learn a little from this. I know I did. Just got permission from a guy to fish a couple of his ponds ;D. I know this guy pretty well b/c he is my parents neighbor. Anyways I always hear my younger brother talking about feeding the catfish. I thought mistakinly for years that he had only catfish in his ponds so I never hit him up about fishing. Anyways, last week he needed some help with his show animals, so I helped him out for a week during our county livestock show. At one point he needed to borrow my cell phone and noticed the 6-12 I have as my wallpaper. He said he had stocked his tanks with bass 6 or 7 years ago and would like it if I would come see if their was any in his ponds. Needless to say i'm pumped. Place has never been fished for bass 8-). I arrive on Tuesday much later than intended. Its getting hot fast and the cloud cover has burned off about a half an hour ago, but hey i'm fishing. I'm already let down b/c of the weather when I see the biggest pond has absolutely no grass and the water is fairly murky:-[, but hey i'm still fishing. Set my tackle bag down and rig up a black and blue trick stick. Put my scales in the cargo pocket of my shorts and right as i'm about to start fishing get a call on my cell phone. Hang up and throw the phone in my bag. The pond is only about 3-5 acres so I put a bag of trick sticks in my pocket thinking I would make it around the pond in an hour at the most. So I left my tackle bag and t-rig setup. I make it half way around the pond with not even I bite. Then next largest pond is now directly behind me no more than 30 yards away. It is about half the size. Since I hadn't had a bite I walk down the dam and over to it. This is where it gets bad. I make my third cast to the bank and bam my line starts hauling a@# out to the middle. Set the hook and the fish is now in the middle swimming in my direction. I get him in VERY fast b/c of this. Grab the fish put him on the scale and he goes 6-2. Only my third fish over 6lbs ;D. All this including the fight might of took 30 seconds. Then it hits me. My d^$# camera is back in my bag. However the first tank is only 30 yards away. So I take off jogging/walking very fast up the dam. Maybe a minute and a few seconds have passed now, but I decide better safe than sorry and put the fish in the water for some breathing. Right of the bat the fish starts moving around and is obviously not that tired. I make one full circle in the water and she starts thrashing like crazy and gets away. So now I don't have a picture of the 3rd largest fish i've ever caught and worried like h%#$ that the owner is going to be very upset that I didn't release the fish in the same pond. Luckily, the owner was just pumped to hear of the big fish and would rather had it in the big pond anyways. Moral of the story is never, ever not have everything you need just in case, b/c you never know.Just b/c I hadn't had a bite I wasn't worried about going to that other pond without a camera. Thank goodness it wasn't a new PB. The fishing gods let me of easy with a lesson learned .

Amen, LBH.

I don't know if you've messed yourself up, but I would love to have that problem.

I think that slug-gos advertise on their package that they are the first horizontal falling worm(essentially a stick bait). Not sure if this is true though.

Beaver, watermelon any color flake

Confidence ...i'm sure your throwing it and thinking the whole time I need to get to red shad they always bite that. Probablly the first couple of times you threw watermelon you did it with a lot of confidence, but the fish weren't biting so it has a bad rep with you. Maybe i'm wrong and its not a good color for your lakes, but it catches fish in mine under almost the same conditions. You never know.

IMO, watermelons don't work for you b/c you think they never produce. I throw almost exclusively watermelons and they produce better than any other color for me. I fish a lot of ponds that have tons of grass and the watermelon blends in and it is still my go to color. In fact in one pond when I hang some moss it come backs looking just like my watermelon black flake zero. The moss has some kind of black seed in it that looks identical. I have no doubt that if you felt the same way about watermelon as you do about red shad you would catch fish on it, and that if I felt the same way as you do about red shad I would catch fish on it .

I think it is all confidence. For instance I should just throw every soft plastic I have away if it isn't watermelon something. Its all I end up throwing 99% of the time.

Awesome fish

It should be fun to try, but I can't see those plastic wheels holding up.

I've been using 3/0 and 4/0 fishing senko's and beavers. Would you say I need to go smaller than that. I'm about to leave work and i'm off the next 2 days so I may just try it. However, it seems like its pretty evenly split up between the smalls and avg. ones. Haven't caught a lunker lately, but the last one I remember doing it to went 3lbs 14oz. At least its something to try. Thanks for the suggestion.

About a month ago I had a catfish hit a spook at our neighborhood pond in about 6ft of water. I thought I had a real nice fish for about 3 seconds, but then I felt it starting to roll. Dang thing got a treble hook in its eye rolling over and over. Oh well, I guess it had it coming hitting a bass lure and all.

Tough one. I probably would of gone, but i've sprained my ankle that bad or worse twice playing basketball, so I know it hurts. If you said no you probally realize it wasn't in good enough condition to be messing around a boat on. Sorry for the bad luck :-/.

It seems like lately I have had a bunch of hooksets near the eyesocket. Luckily only 3 or 4 have actually been in the eye :'(. Any ideas what i'm doing. I don't think i'm doing anything different then when I firts to into fishing, but it seems like about 25% of my hooksets are near the eye. I fish soft plastics a lot more than when I first started fishing. In fact almost exclusively soft plastics this year. I know that i'm setting the hook MUCH harder than I used to, but I wouldn't think that would be the cause. I set side arm a lot of time, but always have.

If you honestly believe that then go fish the other end of the lake. Seems pretty simple. If you shoot that gator you will get in troulbe for sure. By the way since you have now mentioned it on a public forum I would leave it up to someone else.

Thats pretty funny. I thought you were crazy for a second. 3.5 seems about right, but I don't think it is going to matter. You seem pretty hooked on fishing right know. I'm betting it doesn't stand long. Were these caught on Senko's. Seems like you've definitly have a handle on them now. Oh yeah, congratulations on the PB.

Very impressive

That is to cool that you can see that from your backyard. I also didn't know that about the fighter jets. Did you live there when the one blew up?

Resize it to no bigger than 450X450

Great story. Nice fish. Congratulations

Congratulations, i'm glad you and avid enjoyed your visit.

Ummmm........that was funny. ;D ;D

Ceph, shut up you giant A hole. J/k, that was a complete joke. I'm obviously a newbie and am so pumped up about this site I love posting my opinions. They are just that opinions I hope nobody has taken them the wrong way. I've tried to be very careful with my posts and make sure there was not a chance of offending anyone. I would like to take this opportunity to apologize if my over eagerness in this site has come across disrespectful or as a know it all. I'm doing this b/c I have noticed a couple of cases that I would consider blatantly disrespectful to both very senior members and newbies, and don't want to be responsble for doing either one.

The Hardline, 1310 The Ticket

I wasn't trying to say that a law wasn't broken. What you posted is to fancy for me to understand, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you are right. I'm sure you understand it better than me. My point was more that I don't agree with the law. INMO, the land owner paid a lot for the land and probably paid to stock the fish so he can do as he chooses without being any less in my book, but better be prepared to suffer the consequences. I also don't believe that child molesters should be able to get out of jail, but the law says they can. Still not right in my book.