My first experience with bass fishing(bait)

(Long but Sentimental Story)
 

I want to share with you what I like to think of as my first real bass fishing experience when it comes to lures and selection there of.
 

At about nine years old, I started having an interest in bass fishing from a perspective of bait specific type fishing outside of bobber and worm on hook.What I mean is, I was learning what types of lures generally attracted certain types of fish the best. This was a huge obstacle for me as I was the type of kid who would pick that one weird lure in my dads tackle box that “wouldn’t work well here” and would end up catching either the most or the biggest fish on. For example, my great grandad made his own buck tail jigs for stripe fishing and those lures were passed on to me eventually, but as a kid I would take a small one and tie it on and fish an old pond in our pasture and catch everything from bass to blue gill to crappie on it repeteadly. No rhyme or reason other than “why not try?”. This made trying to understand lure specifics that much more difficult for me especially at that age. It baffled my dad to no end because he knew and still knows, his way around tackle and bait in general, but he was happy and proud to see me catching fish and with every fish caught I was getting more hooked(no pun intended) into this hobby.

The first soft plastic worm I ever bought with my own money was the “Black and Red Speckled” Zoom curly tail worm. The name has changed to Black and Red Glitter at some point in the last 20 years but it is still the same lure. Dad showed me how to use a bullet weight with it and the rest is history. It was hard as a kid to resist the “pretty and sparkly” colored soft plastic lures, which I now think is a gimmick because I catch more fish on the natural colored plastics. That Zoom colored worm will always have a place in my tackle box.
 

I eventually made a name for myself As a kid at this little pond we had in the pasture next to our house because lots of folks in our small community fished it without very much luck yet I would pull them out left and right. It felt awesome to have grown men ask me as a kid what lures I was using and how was I fishing them when to be honest I didn’t know lol all I knew was that it worked and my dad was so proud to see his beloved past time being taken on by his son.
 

Again, it was and still is hard for me to pick/buy new lures because of this experience. Catching nice size bass using a cheap beetle spin in an area where the most common lure used is some sort of Texas rig always felt odd, but proved to be my point with dad when he would suggest a lure and I would end up with some sort of a contraption I throwed together.