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Bass fishing was fairly lackluster today. After 5 hours in the sun with only a couple 16 inchers and a boatload of dinks, I had enough of it. So over the course of the next hour, I first reranged and then plusoned a bunch of crappies. Just glad that I released almost as many as I kept. I forgot that cleaning fish isn't half as much fun as catching them.

Not to Hi-Jack the thread But - Get a GoPro (or other action video camera) & a Clamp mount - shoot a few second of video of yourself holding your catch. Then you can go back and select pictures out of the video - it's very easy. This allows you to go frame by frame - you can really dial it in - even action shots. Most every pic I post is done this way. I fish too long & hard not to take the few extra steps needed to get a decent pic of what I worked for. Now back to our regularly scheduled program. A-Jay

air temp was 95 degrees water temp was 93 degrees. Still managed to catch my Largest bass of 2018, from a tough Kansas power plant lake, that has skunked me more than once. 21 inches 5lb. 12oz.

A flashlight

Noting like Ajay puts in the boat, but 4 like this on chatterbait and Craws. My buddy was lighting it up on wacky rigged trick worms

These guys must have misplaced their calendars because they aren't supposed to show up like they did until October! I had quite the time playing this guy on my swimbait stick with a Cardiff 400. I had never caught a big one before, I was very impressed by the power this fish had

Isn't that a George Thorogood song? "I fish alone. Yeah, with nobody else. I fish alone. Yeah, with nobody else. Yeah, you know when I fish alone I prefer to be by myself." ?

Bit of a frustrating day. Hooked up on a few, but my hookset game was not strong or my luck was incredibly bad. Time to trade out the value H2O Xpress hooks and go with a new brand. Anyhow, I pulled in this 4lb. He seemed a bit oddly shaped...big shoulders(?).

Hooked up at sunrise ~ A-Jay

Like @Gundog, I use the same things that I use during the day.....with one big exception: all trebles get stowed from 1/2 hour past sunset until first light.

My answer would be the same baits I use during the day. Literally the same baits used the same way. Willow leaf spinner baits with a steady retrieve, twin-tailed grubs on 3/8 ounce heads around rocks and crankbaits in deeper water. For me nothing changes in the bait, color or presentation.

black chatterbait, black Colorado spinner bait and a black buzzbait has worked for me this year at night. the chatterbait caught me the biggest of the three.

Rest will rarely cure back pain unless it’s just a muscle strain. You want to work on mobility & strengthen your core & erectors. Find a physical therapist who is actually fit & they will tell you the same. YouTube has some videos from good physical therapist with mobility videos. Kelly Starret & MobilityWod saved my back after years of Olympic Weightlifting with poor stretching. My dad pretty much dropped a washer on me & I caught it bent over one day and destroyed my lower back. I have lifted weights all my life & I struggled for months no matter how much I rested or stretched. Found MobilityWod on YouTube and in a few weeks my lower back was almost 100%. Couch stretches, flossing the muscle with rollers & balls, & working on my piriformis & psoas fixed me. Then I did the necessary work to strengthen my posterior chain & core. Rarely does my yak give me soreness now.

fished La Cygne today. water temp in north half of lake was over 100 degrees. found some 93 degrees water on the southern end. caught nine bass total. 6 short fish in the shallows. One anorexic 18 incher that weighed 2 lbs. off of the dam, on a swim jig. These 2 on a trick worm in 10ft. of water, off of a rip rap point. one was 21 inches 5lb. 12oz. (my largest of 2018). the other was 19 inches 4lb. 8oz.

My Grandaughter Mackayla holding up the stolen combo I recovered from the pawnshop.

I fish by myself the vast majority of the time and I'm OK with it. Capturing (& then sharing) video makes it 'seem' - like I not really alone. A-Jay

I haven't fished much in the last 2 weeks, but made time for a short river float today. A bunch of little smallies showed up, the best of which was this 15-incher: Hard work and time-on-task pays off -- congrats!

Had a few hours to kill today so we went to one of our favourite lakes. Caught over 40 bass, about a 50/50 mix of smallies/largies and that’s with a couple swim breaks in between?. Today the fish were schooled up big time, almost like in the fall. Almost every fish we hooked had multiples of either species following and attacking the hooked fish, trying to steal their “prize”. We had multiple double headers, all we had to do was drop anything over the side and the other guy would hook up too. It was a pretty neat experience for my son. Fish were caught on KVD size 300 jerkbaits, 1.5 squarebills and wacky rigged Berkley Max Scent generals. The kid won the bet for first fish. Got a few nice ones as well. Same fish, they’re healthy in this lake ? This one followed one of the kids smaller ones to the boat trying to grab the lure, it hammered the stickbait.

.I found this great up grade for you crazy kayakers like, just James , Daren, francho etc... ?

braved the summer heat to try for deep water SM. Ned rig in 25ft of water did OK. Nothing big but a lot of fun. Here's one of them

I don’t know what kind of fishermen you hang out with, but I think what the person in the story did was far worse than what any fishermen I share water with would ever do. Accidentally losing soft plastics and fishing line and hooks is....... an accident. Sure it kills fish but it’s an accident. Killing fish intentionally and not using them is something you do on purpose and In my opinion should be illegal

1/2 oz jig with a 4 inch chigger craw on 17lb fluoro vs my normal 3/4 oz with a rage craw on 50lb braid

Don't get me wrong, I'm just like everyone else. I got into Abu Garcia because Ike switched over to them and I happened to come across the Black and Pro Max reels and I like using them and they're well within my budget. I have a lot of Strike King lures, if KVD throws them there good for me. I just started throwing the Strike King bladed jig and I for the first time I bough a couple packages of the Rage bugs because @A-Jay was using them in one of his videos. Good enough for me. Do I follow they hype and think these are "game changers"? No but something I get turned on to and give it a shot. The Hydrowave and Livingston lures that make noise who knows if they make a difference. I guess if it gives you confidence then go for it. Confidence has been discussed on here a ton, so if it gives someone confidence in their fishing then I guess you could say in a way it worked.

Go Croatia.

Found these at a small town Walmart for $2.

Spinnerbait Lipless crankbait Chatterbait Jitterbug ...... He'll, scratch the others, Jitterbug and more Jitterbug !

Well you caught me. Sounds like a good way for someone trying to be funny to get shot by someone thinking they're the first to get Bigfoot. I did see Bigfoot once when I was a kid, I even got a picture of him. It has been verified by several Bigfoot "experts" to indeed be a real Bigfoot.

I posted this on another post, but I am psyched to find these, and on sale, no less!

Do not put too much thought into being stealthy when flipping. Put more focus and thought into hitting your targets and being ready to set the hook. Down here we are trolling through slop with the trolling motor on high a lot of times and still get bit. The splash your lure makes could very well be confused for something falling out of the sky.

I like to say "It's hotter than a Kuwaiti porta-john in August." Trust me... it's not. I hope I never experience that combination of heat and stench again. A case of the runs over there in the summertime is practically a death sentence.

It's so hot ...most fishermen are staying off the water just like in the winter!!! Now jet ski's and wake boats is another topic.....at least they don't wake up usually before 10:00

Cracks me up when people say hook sets are free. Many of them have cost me around 4 or 5 bucks.

DSG has had some I've heard but haven't bothered to go get any yet. I bet they'd be great for pitching in dock stalls like a jig.

Forgot to mention..offspring (in the 7+ range) are awesome. Kids are the most optimistic people I know. We’ve gone 11 hours without a bite and he’s ticked we’re headed back to the boat ramp. That’s positive attitude right there.

I almost always fish alone. I spend most every other hour of life interacting with people in some other capacity, and people stress me out. So fishing is the mechanism by which I extract myself from social activity as much as possible (for about 5 months of the year up here, at least.). When I fish, I specifically go where and when I am least likely to be around more than a few other people. This means small, out-of-the-way waters that are difficult to find, or require effort to get to, and usually in the early morning.

Advil is better then Alieve for muscle pain relief. You need to stretch each morning before doing anything else. No lifting, No twisting, just easy streching using a strap, 1 hand over head the other behind your back and lightly pulling the strap up and down for a few minutes. It can take some time to reduce inflammation, don't rush it. Tom

I almost always fish along. It's therapy to me. I wouldn't mind having company, but I come off as an ahole to most people and I dont try too hard to change their minds. My 17 year old daughter comes with me sometimes, but other than that it's just me. I love it, just me and nature.

I fish alone 99.9999999999% percent of the time. Not by choice. Kids really don't fish with me any more as they have their own lives at 18 and 13, lol, and none of my friends care to fish. That won't stop me from fishing and I never feel bad fishing alone. No doubt, company is usually better, but just is not the case for me.

I always fish alone. To me getting away from people is one of my favorite things about fishing. Just me and nature.

The coolest bottle of Dr. Pepper I've seen in a long time. ?

@sully420Yeah gotta stay away from that nasty stuff. I always spend the first hour or two scanning and looking at the map before I even make my first if I don't fish that lake much. I guess it's my tournament mentality. Find the juice before you squeeze it. I got out last night too from 5 to 8:30ish. I spent an 30 min scanning the whole lake (it's a small lake) picked out a few nice drop offs where I marked some bait fish with healthy coontail on it and got to work. Caught a nice bag again. 16-18lbs of bass (5 fish). I honestly didn't expect it cause I was using a bunch baits/lures/colors I have never used or have no confidence in. Brush hogs, spoons, chatterbaits, etc. The fish were biting like crazy. I think they were just in feeding mode. @sully420 I'm definitely on the same boat as you in terms of trying new techniques. I think most anglers just get used to using the same techniques over and over again because it works in Minnesota. But when you go to a different body of water in a different state things change drastically. Flipping Tonka is way different that flipping the Cali Delta I tell ya. I know I get stubborn when I can't get that jig pattern to work, cause that's my favorite lure/technique. But I've learned to kinda just fish the moment and let the fish tell you what they want instead of trying to force your will onto them. We are all not KVD! LOL!!!

Silver was absolutely on freaking fire tonight. I bet I won't say that a lot this year LOL. I fished 3 hours, from 6pm-9pm, boated 30+ bass. Easily one of the best short after work trips in a long time. Best five 5-3, 4-9, 4-6, 4-4, and 4-3. A 4-0 and several upper 3's didn't make the cut. I flipped docks for an hour and a half and caught the snot out of them, then moved out to the grass as the sun was going down and kept up the pace. At one point on the grass, I had a flurry of 7 fish between 3.5 and 4lbs on 7 consecutive casts, with hordes of bass following the hooked to the boat trying to steal the bait from it. I don't know what's going on here LOL. I have fished this lake for 30 years, had the day of my life back in May, followed by one of the worst 3-4 week spells I can ever remember, to the place being more "on" than "off" lately. Meanwhile, Conesus, which is usually great for me more times than not, is stumping me. I wish my Thursday tournament was on Silver this week instead of Conesus. I am not on Silver (for a tournament) again until the 26th. Which by then might be too late to take advantage of this spell of good fishing.

My wife is my fishing partner and better half, but she has hand, arm strength issues and can only fish for short periods of time, and only with a lite rod and Zebco spin cast reel. However this doesn't keep her from showing me up on a regular basis. Yesterday was a perfect example. We were fishing for bass in shallow weedy water. The bass weren't cooperating but we caught the occasional pickerel. I was doing OK with pickerel when I heard her say " Fish on ". As our usual practice she handed the rod to me to get it in. ( she doesn't have the strength to do it ). Got the fish in and darned if it wasn't the biggest, thickest, pickerel we've seen in years. 3.2 lb. 26+ inches of muscle and slime. No one will ever convince me a Zebco can't do the job. Here's a couple of pic's. the first one is the average I was getting, the second, I'm holding, but it's her fish.

Took the boat out on the lake this past Sunday, it was to nice not too.

We had a front punch through east Texas yesterday afternoon. It left behind about an inch of rain here on Lake Athens. So, with temperatures depressed to really comfortable levels from the earlier part of the day's mind-melting high 90s, I jumped in my Meyers Sportspal canoe and took off with a single rod/reel, some Keitech shad-like plastics and fished for a few hours. Late afternoon fishing in the summer, in Texas (elsewhere, too!) is so very nice. I particularly like conditions when the sun has dropped down very low or the ambient light that remains for a while after sunset. Texas is windy but there is almost always a significant drop in wind right about the time. I ended up with 6 LMBs and 1 nice bluegill, not certain how that gill managed to grab the 4/0 hook I was using, but it did. One bass was in the 4 pound range, another in the 3 lbs. area, the others were the 1.5 to 2 pounders. I used both the Shad Impact (soft jerk bait) and the Shad Easy Shiner (with the paddle tail) and both worked about the same. I just grabbed whatever fell into my hand when I plunged my hand down into my soft tackle bag. Yes, I still GREATLY prefer a traditional worm hook with a straight shaft to either an offset or an EWG hook. I like the way the hook comes flying out of the plastic on a hook-set, the angle. For me? I get most of my strikes on the fall, the others after I jerk the plastic a bit with a lifting motion so that it essentially re-falls over and over. My retrieval and depth is much closer to a T-Rigged worm than it is to the way most people fish swimbaits where they are fished faster and I guess a bit higher in the water column. This has been a very good presentation all the way back to the pre-spawn months. I rarely have gone out and not caught a 5 bag limit with it. Some pics! Cheers! Brad

Its so hot Lance Armstrong tested positive for water.

I know it can be a foreign concept to a niche of anglers obsessed with techniques, patterns, and magic lures, but 90+ % of catching fish, (any fish) is finding fish.

Original Rapala Floating Minnow, a classic that still works.