Hey, what baits you throw and tactics do you use during the summer? I find the fish are still in the "summer period", they definetly don't seem to be in the fall period around here.

They seem to be extremely sluggish, and I can't get them to hit a thing. Let me fullfill you on the "terrain" im fishing. Alot of duckweed, some muck, alot of pad patches, some thick, some small and less compact, some stick piles engulfed in weeds, and a little bit of open water.

I have tryed throwing spinnerbaits around the sides of pads in the open water spots, I have tryed flipping/pitching tubes through the muck/duckweed, pitching/flipping them to the lillypads, and the sticks. I have tryed fishing fat ikas pretty much everywhere, and I have tryed flipping jigs into "feeder creeks" thinking the bass might be in the water which is a little deeper (5-7 feet). I have also tryed bring a soft plastic frog over the weeds and around/over the pads.

As to how this all went out, I caught a few small ones working a jig in a cove, and I had a few small ones on the fat ika. But the big ones are no where to be found it seems, and the fishin all in all is slow, like 2-3 a day.. not even 1lbers. I want to hook into some better fish, any tactics for fishing the summer months you can share with me? Oh, and I'm fishing small local ponds in NJ, so the biggest bass you see are 5lbs, maybe a 6 if your extremely lucky, most "quality" fish to me are 1 1/2 - 6lbs.

ps. the water lvls at the lakes are extremely low, and there barely seems to be much movement hapenning in general.

if you have a boat go deep and find offshore structure.  for that try a football jig or deep diving crankbait.

On the lake I fish there are too many jet-skis and pleasure boaters to catch anything with size during the day. As my avatar shows, I wait until the sun goes down to catch the bigger ones. I usually find them holding on deep weed edges. They are much more inclined to bite at night - think it also hides a lot of the mistakes we make in presentation.