Fished yesterday morning after work, hoping to get in on a bite before the system had passed ended up getting soaked to the bone with only a few dinks to show for it.  

Today I wasn’t expecting much with the post frontal conditions and all.  I came with both spinning rods rigged and ready figuring I’d have to finesse ‘em.  
 

The Ned was up first and I quickly boated 3 and lost a 4th.  I was excited because after weeks of nothing but dinks I caught a few decent sized fish.

 

A cloud deck moved in so I would try something a little more aggressive.  I tied a Choppo on to the only casting rod I brought and added a few more fish to my tally.  

Unfortunately I lost almost as many as I caught with the Choppo including 3 fish that blew up on it on a single cast!   At first I thought it was because I switched line from 12# Big Game to 10# Trilene figuring it may have had more stretch preventing me from getting good hook penetration.  But on second thought I lost fish on the Ned and the under spin (two different rods) so it was probably operator error on my part.  
 

Speaking of the under spin here’s some of those fish.  Finished the day with 13, lost 9, 4 of which were bigger fish.  Guess with all the dinks I’ve been slaying I must have forget how to boat the bigger ones 😂

7 minutes ago, bp_fowler said:

Finished the day with 13, lost 9, 4 of which were bigger fish.

 

^This^ is a pretty common land/lose ratio for me. I lose a lot of fish. There are days when the bass really wallop my lures and I'll land 90% of them, but then there are days like yesterday when they're bumping surface lures and yanking the tails of my soft plastics and I only manage to hook them for a quick sec.

 

Nice bass, BP!

For this trip, I took a double-dip approach.

I took advantage of the early bite, departed, and returned for the action at sunset.

It was fun and here are the best three of the day.

A-Jay

 

Nice work @A-Jay. It was an absolutely beautiful day! I had frost this morning but once that sun got high enough, it was perfect.

Smoke on the water, full moon in the background, and sun shining on fat smallies. Looks like a good day @A-Jay.

I threw glidebaits for hours this morning and caught nothing. Finally wised up and caught 9 on the spoon. 

GP, way to stick with it and crack the code!

My wife is traveling for work, so I had to do the early morning session to get back not too late for the dogs (they just go back to sleep in the morning).  That also coincided with the dry and less windy portion of the day before this nor’easter kicks in.  I wanted to target some fall smallies which means one of two places. Ended up only landing one and missing a couple more on top.  At least it was a pretty good one in a beautiful place and on a topwater.  Also glad I went early because the place turned into a real snit show on my way back in.  DEC stocking trout at the boat ramp taking up one lane.  People who don’t know how to launch or load taking up space elsewhere.  People running 60-90hp motors across the lake at 30+mph on a 9.9 restricted lake.  And coast guard doing safety checks at the top of the ramp.  

 

 

 

Today was much slower than last weekend, and both quantity and quality was down. Nothing over 2 lbs. Caught two on an A-Jay Special, one on a Fat IKA Texas rig and another on a Rage Bug Texas rig, and 2 (lost one) on a Siebert Fogy bladed jig. After the loss, I noticed the hook was bent (gap widened). I think last week’s big gal did that. Ordered some more. 
 

Biggest of 29 today, mix of LMB and striped.

Fall has really started to take off here really suddenly and with it - crankbaits have also seemed to dominate.

 

I caught a fat 4+ on the frog at a pressured pond that I know has giants but I rarely have much success at and then at sunset I cracked the code burning lipless crankbaits through dying grass and landed 3 and lost 10 in 1 hour last night.  Never experienced anything like it on a crankbait.

 

Hybrid Hunter is doing work on the big lakes with a couple really big fish including a 6 lb post spawn bug eyed brute!

 

Buzzbait days are still happening and I predict some wild ones soon.

 

Still getting tons of bites on big worms flipping into cover but speeding up is slowly taking over.

 

 

 

Biggest fish on the Hybrid Hunter that I’ve landed but it’s worth mentioning that I broke off the largest bass I’ve ever hooked on a crankbait fishing that crankbait a couple years ago.

 

 

Wow, Pat! SO. MANY. BIG. BASS.

Fished a new pond today.  Very shallow and clear + blue skies equaled spooky fish.  As such I figured finesse would be the way to go. But other than a few nibbles from blue gills on the Ned, no dice.  Tried the under spin and that did the trick.  Tried some other moving baits, vibrating jigs, spinner baits, rattle trap…nothing.  So I rode the hot hand and caught 10.  

You can see how clear the water is in this photo.

Snagged 17 bouncin' a squarebill and spinnerbait off wood in the shade.

Beautiful time of year to be fishin'!!!!

Underspinning out of a canoe, BP? That's my M.O. too!

 

Al, you're looking good with that beautiful bass and looking great with that PFD. Thanks for the pretty pics!

20 minutes ago, Swamp Girl said:

Underspinning out of a canoe, BP? That's my M.O. too!

I copied your homework.  
 

Seriously though I always thought of the underspin as a summertime thing but it’s been my most productive lure this fall.

57 minutes ago, bp_fowler said:

I copied your homework.  

 

I'm cool with that...as long as you give me the chocolate milk and A BAG OF CHIPS that you promised.

 

1 hour ago, bp_fowler said:

it’s been my most productive lure this fall.

 

Do you have any zombie reed fields where you fish, the rotted stumps of last years reeds that exist for a couple weeks each spring? It's a great lure for that situation, cast into the zombie field and quickly retrieved. It's also great for casting under bushes. 

Got on the home lake Saturday and Sunday. Water temps finally dropping...64-66 degrees. 

 

19" (3lb-11oz), 18.5, 17, 16.5, 16 (x2) 15 (x2), some small ones, and some Crappie and Bluegills.

 

Finally caught fish on a swim-jig(!). The 7" blue-fleck power worm produced all weekend long. Largest bass was caught on the tried and true, bluegill colored spinner-bait.

 

Solved the problem with Ulterra randomly losing spot-lock, and disconnecting with remote. Needed some dialectic grease on the power plug.  

 

Cleaned up the boat and garage, and did some minor reel maintenance. 

 

Great weekend!

 

 

I stumbled upon this nice largemouth on a deep laydown in about 30 FOW. 5” black senko was the ticket. I thought I had a catfish hooked at first because of how long it took to come up and jump. Glad it stayed pinned. 
 

The bottom picture is a picture of my computer screen since my old GoPro got a better shot of the fish. 

Big bass, Daubs and Mr. 44. I like the garage shot, Daubs. Please come make mine look like yours. 

 

Fished all weekend with my college buddy from Memphis. It wasn’t the great catching results we have experienced in some past years but lots of fish and laughs still occurred. Friday afternoon/evening we hit some falling generation water and caught some nice fish. My recoil spring for the rip cord was acting iffy on my motor, somewhat nerve racking as we began by drift fishing about 4 miles downstream of the truck 😂. I figured out how to recoil it manually by sticking a pocket knife thru the grates and spinning it counterclockwise 2 inches at a time…….. The generation water then came back earlier than expected and rose the river level/speed. The amount of floating grass in the water drove us completely crazy so we quit a tad early and went to eat pizza

 

Saturday morning we wasted a good bit of time trying to hook up electric start to avoid the recoil spring issue, that only resulted in my shooting sparks into my face in the auto zone parking lot with needle nose pliers and the starter 😂. We punted and decided to just deal with the workaround of manually re winding the spring. We still made it to the water by maybe 9:30-10 and fished til 8 pm so it’s not like we didn’t have time. We tried to keep good count and believe we caught 37-39 SMB and a nice channel catfish. The motor was running crazy shallow even with 3 of us big fellas weighing it down, the video demonstrates just how shallow

Sunday we only had the morning to fish and tried a different river. We had pretty bad luck for the first 2-3 hours, saw a lot of debris in the water from hurricane Helene last year, including a sedan. 

With about 1.5 hours left to fish, my buddy decided he was going to throw a Zara spook for the rest of the trip. He caught 1-2 decent ones, then had a brute of a SMB clobber the plug and somehow come off. Looked to be pushing 4 lbs and football shaped. Then I got a decent one on a small water melon fluke. He hooked up another decent fish on the spook and a school of big SMB chased it to the boat including one trophy. Unfortunately I was unhooking a drum (of course) and couldn’t drop my lure in or hand him a second rod to drop something in.

 

Long time no post. @Swamp Girl was asking me the other day if I still fish? Yes I do just wasn't much up for posting for whatever reasons. Told her if I got into any good ones I'd post em. So this morning I bank fished before work for about 40 minutes in the rain and wind and got 2, a dinker and this one that weighed  5 even both on a jerkbait 

Thanks, @keagbassr: I can sleep easier now having seen you hoist a recent beast! And bank fishing too!!!

Had a good buzzbait bite today.Caught between 20 and 30 on a Cavitron. Finally caught a bass worthy of a photo This was the largest , just a hair under 5 lbs. 

Went looking for bronze and it was indeed found. Aside from a few come and go salmon casters…it was just me, the waves and the smallies. I tried a few other things, but casting a 5.3 tungsten ball with a Crush city Mayor on 8lb big game with my MM caster and jigging a Mooch Minnow on 10lb big game with my MF caster worked best. I also had my ML spinning rod with a drop shot rig, but that only got a few dinks mostly. Most of the fish were 12-16” with a 17”, 19” and 20” as big fish. Albino shad, one of my favorites, was hot to trot