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Thanks guys I decided to buy 5 zebco 404 combos instead. Gotta love the push buttons.

all this talk about not caring whether you ever catch another fish under "x" pounds sounds incredibly arrogant to me. it's easy to talk tough on a message board, but i bet after a few days worth of getting your butt handed to ya by the lunkers, most of us would welcome a dink or two, especially if you got a buddy who is swinging "average" fish aboard left and right. it don't even take days for me - just a few minutes. humble pie tastes a heckuva lot better than goose egg.

Bonus brown while chasing brown fish.....

Hi everryone. Its been a while since i posted,thaught i'd update everyone with pics of some of the fish ive caught. Here goes: These fish were caught a private farm dam this particular fish took me one hour of irritating him with a fluke before he bit.He was gaurding a school of fry. weight 0,33kg(0,72 lb) lure Zoom superflook not weighed lure : Zoom tiny brushog green pumkin texas rigged not weighed lure : Berkley mini earthworms not weighed lure : Zoom tiny brushog watermelon red carolina rigged not weighed lure : 1" Tenki teeny weeny grub yellow

Have 30,000 in stock - I can hook ya up

I would start out with a spinning outfit... Rod 6'6" - 7' MF with a size 2500 reel spooled with some 15# braid.

hahaha that is awesome. I always like to find simple lures or techniques with my kids too. I mean earth worms are great for catching sunnies but for bass I feel like they should learn really how to do it with lures.

We caught them using my go to bait. Watermelon seed french fry worm on 1/32 weight. Works every time.

Try the 68 Hudd at night, the extra thump seems to call them in like a colorado single blade spinnerbait.

We gonna see how that 1/2oz Northstar "New Gill" flip and swim with a Alabama Craw Rage Craw trailer works flipped and swam arouns shallow isolated wood in back of the creeks on Ohkissa Lake next weekend for a change up to the shad pattern. I will also have a 1/4 oz silver shad swim jig paired with a pearl zoom fat albert grub to swim around while the shad bite is on. Northstar jigs are very hard to beat IMO.

A REALLY bad joke. Same problems here, especially in fall and spring when everything seems to intersect the same habitat.

There are many selections of lipless crankbaits, starting with the Rat-L-Trap and moving up the money ladder. Lipless crankbaits can catch fish all year. However, I have found they work best when you need a tighter wobble. This will occur in water temperatures between 45* and 60*. There is a rainbow of colors for you to consider. I boil my colors to: Shad in the area - silver, chrome with blue back for bright skies and black back for cloudy skies. Sunfish and Bluegill in the area - chartreuse with a blue or a black back. Crawfish in the area - brown, orange and red. You may also want to change the manufacturer's hooks for sharper points. Some of the pros change out the front hook to a size larger. Others remove the rear hook to make the bait hang up less in grass and weeds. The secret of throwing any crankbait is to hit your target as many times as you can. With the standard cranks with lips they can deflect off the wood and structure and cause a reaction strike. With a lipless crankbait you always take the chance of getting hung up. So what else can you do if you think you will get hung up with a lipless crankbait? Change your retrieve. Go faster. Stop and go. Add a jerk. Add a pause. Go slower. Rip them out of the grass and weeds. Use the bottom to change directions. All with the understanding that you can get and will get hung up using a lipless crankbait. Getting hung up and losing your lipless cranks is part of the game. To minimize losing them you may want to throw them into open water. May I suggest investing in a few sizes of the Rat-L-Traps or the lowest priced lipless cranks you can find and practice with them to learn all about then and their characteristics. Throw the lighter ones of a spinning rig and the heavier ones on a baitcaster. Let us know how you did and how many you lost!!!!

i myself fish 2-3 on a consistent basis 3-4 times a week. i like fishing the same lakes/ponds so i can figure out a pattern and learn the lake/pond rather then jumping from lake to lake each time out.

one summer i was a waiter at an 'all you can eat' crab house in Maryland beach. claws would break off the blue crabs while steaming and the cooks would dump all the broken ones on a tray for the staff to eat. i thought it was the greatest 'perk' ever getting to chow down on free crabs for dinner. a cook looked at me on my 3rd day and said "by the end of the summer you'll be sick of eating crabs". I said "No way!" with my mouth stuffed full of buttered crabs and old bay seasoning. well he was right...i ate so many crabs by mid-summer that i didn't eat them again for 2 years. its not arrogance, after awhile you get tired of eating dink pie

You ought to fish with me, lol. I don't think I have a lure, spoon or jig that lasts a couple of days, except when there are no fish around, then some just rust. I get cut off, lures bitten rendering them uselss, jigs pulled apart, gill plates cutting leaders......nature of the game, can be pricey but wouldn't want to do anything else.

Wow that's a fat pike! They're fun to catch but at the same time I'm glad they aren't in the lakes I bass fish, I like keeping my baits

My feelings exactly. I fish to relax. Around here anything over 3 lbs is pretty respectable and DD fish are almost unheard of. I'll take dozens of 1-2 pounders with a 3 lb kicker any day over getting skunked. I have a few friends that throw big swimbaits exclusively. They catch 20 or so fish per season in the 4-8 lb range with lots of skunks in between big fish. In the same time period I catch closer to 1,000 fish in the 1-3 lb range with a few 4's thrown in the mix. I like my numbers better.

Win? Yo!

Maybe they happened to read this thread!

Yes, I agree with what your saying but i love to explore new places.. Sometimes doing that you get skunked but sometimes you come out with some monsters, but I always go back to spots I've fished before annd make adjustments/continue doing what needs to be done to catch fish.

If it's not frozen, I'm trying!!

Here's what I propose as triton and my team name: PoleTheHoneyHole

Bad game for my Pat-riots. Embarrassed really.

If you EVER move to gardner...........

I'm a big Shimano fan. Nobody makes a better derailleur.

I would also suggest slinging a 6" huddleston in your favorite pattern. I've gotten some big bites swimming a rof 5 hud along shorelines at night. No hook ups though a wakebait if you know the fish are active.

I'm going to try and be tactful. Firstly all of my fishing is for fun, not that I'm not serious about it. My prime targets are way bigger and stronger than bass, I get plenty of that kind of action almost everyday. When I do go bass fishing, which is most afternoons, I'm happy to catch any size. This is my relaxing time to fish, it can be as much fun as a 15# snook which is as common as a 3# bass, I really enjoy bass fishing. When I see PB of 4-5-6 or even 10# that means 1 fish and most are way smaller, hard for me to understand scoffing at a 3 pounder. If I'm looking to have fun, 3 pounds is great I'd just be downsizing my gear, which is how I fish for them. If 3 pounds is a dink, maybe some should forget bass fishing and only target larger more powerful species, I'll stick with my dinks and have a ton of fun.

Without putting a pound / size on what qualifies a bass as a dink in any particular body of water / area of the country, I prefer to fish for what ever is the better than average or trophy size fish in that impoundment. I am not interested in sore lipping several Juvenal bass in the process. A skunking is a bit humbling when trying to catch smaller fish but is just part of the process when targeting larger fish. A day or a couple of completely skunked trips, indicates that I am definitely doing something wrong - so I'm learning. It doesn't mean however, that I have to actually like it. A-Jay

Really? Man, 3 lbers here are decent fish. I need to move South. I would like to be able to say, I'll pass on 3 lb bass. As for the topic, I'd like to catch dinks over being skunked. I don't mind being skunked but I go giant hunting when I musky fish. I don't expect to catch musky every time out. When I fish bass, I better at least catch one! lol

I like to catch fish every time I am out obviously so some dinks do not bother me. However, if I become plagued with little dinksters after about an hour I will get tired of it and do things more suited to catch a big fish. Also for some reason it seems more times than not the days when I catch bigger fish I seem to catch less fish.

...

Catching dinks gives me hope that there is something bigger around vs fishing for hours at at a time with no signs of life. When top water fishing those 2lbs still get my juices flowing because sometimes you would have sworn that something bigger hit.

This was a real bonus for me, not only a great fish but a financial success as well. 1975 in Key West, Florida fishing on a drift boat that was targeting margate snapper I hook into this cobia, I actually landed it on 7' mh freshwater spinning rod, I didn't know any better at the time, lol. Won the pool of about $125.00 and sold the fish to chef waiting at the docks for $2.00lb.......yeh I remember I much I got.

We are very fortunate to have the records we've accumulated over the years, here in MA. For instance: Northern Pike - 35 lbs. even LM Bass - 15 lbs. 8 oz. SM Bass - 8 lbs. 2 oz. Tiger Musky - 27 lbs. even And here's what my PB looked like. Unfortunately, back then, they didn't have replica mounts like we have today, so this was made into a skin mount and ended up on my den wall for many years. This is the only pike I've not released. We were slow trolling for pike with Wendel's Musky Harrassers, in 20 FOW. Caught in Onota Lake in 1984 - in open water (not thru the ice!). We've nailed many large pike there and in Pontussic, Buel and the Ct. River itself. We've caught & released many in the 12 - 15 lb. class here, but few people, besides us, actually fish for this incredible species. Gave me a chuckle looking at this old pic once again. On the front page of a Berkshire Newspaper that year. The reporter only had a black & white camera! And boy, did I have a not-so gray beard back then!

Everything would be fine unless Streetview showed up during the annual N.O.W. (Neighborhood Orgy Week.) The image of twenty or thirty old farts and fartesses running up and down the block naked would probably ruin the camera.

My bass boat in the driveway. (null)

These fish were all caught at Emmerentia dam weight : 0,84 kg(1,85 lb) lure : Rebel top minnow floating jerkbait weight : 0,46kg(1,01lb) lure : Mcarthy jerkminnow olive/pearl weight : 0,58kg(1,27lb) lure : Booyah spinnerbait 1/8oz chart/white weight : 0,66kg(1,45lb) lure : Booyah spinnerbait 1/8oz chart/white weight : 0,89kg(1,96lb) lure : Booyah spinnerbait 1/8oz chart/white My new pb!Caught in shallow water near a weed patch,on my first cast to that area! weight : 1,45kg(3,19lb) lure : Zoom tiny brushog green pumkin texas rigged All fish caught were released,no fatalities and all spawning fish were returned back to their nests. Regards Ebrahim Ali

Try the Hudd Bug or the Rage Tail Baby Craw. They work very well in the clear water.