jaymc

Besides the advice you've been given it is best to ask one specfic question. What problems are you having in setting up your new rod?

You can say the same for any largemouth lake in NYS. One thing. Look for the greenest weeds. THey produce more oxygen and more fish.

Lake Ontario or the Thousand Islands.

Check out the responses here if you want to get down through the stuff to the bottom. If you want to fish the surface I like the Moss Boss, or a Johnson Silver Minnow with a trailer. But there are all kinds o soft plastics now you can rig weedless and fish on top of the mat.

There's a great trout stream in Tyrone and there used to be an Italian restaurant that I loved.

2x I was astounded by everything in there.

I really appreciate the answers I got to my " deep weed" question and the info on spinning reels. I've been chasing bass over 50 years now. When I started there was nothing like the information availabe today not the equipment. The trade off is that there was less pressure on the bass. Fifty years ago you learned from older fisherman or from articles in the "Big 3." Only Sports Afield ahd an editor that focused mainly on bass. You can find everything I know from 50 years of bass fishing on this board and tehn xome. Thanks again and tight lines...

Linder does more stuff with weedy northern lakes which makes him relevant to me. But they don't do enough of it. Martin lost me when he blew off the Make a Wish kid.

First bass TV show I can remember was a local show in Shreveport La in the mid-50's. It was on Friday nights and the guy would do roundup of the local fishing conditions, which was mainly Bistineau. I remember he was the first guy I ever saw using a Creme worm. THey fished them on a three hook harness with a little propeller in the front. The bait was so hot that local sporting gods stores were renting them for $5 a day with a $20 deposit. Creme worms were as tough as bungee cord. When we moved back to NYS I had two or tree that weren't in a harness. I used to hook them through the head with a regular bait hook and throw them with no weight. Most of these guys who think they invented finesse fishing weren't even alive then. I can't remeber when Mann's Jelly worms first became availabkle because it seems like I've fished them forever. But those soft worms sure were an improvement. Of couse bass tv is commercial. What do you think allows those guys to fish for a living when you're sitting in a cubicle waiting for Saturday. The upside is that anything that attracts money will be protected, which means more conservation. You can learn more on these boards than from all the fishing shows ever made.

Got sick of holing up so I went out to a local spot to through a few lures. I didn't have much luck. After awhole a guy came by on a snowmobile and allowe as to how if I wanted to cast, I might want to cut a bigger hole. Go Ravens

Thanks for the info Rhino, as the 'tendrils is mainly what I was talking about. I'll give all thos methods a workout this year. Meantime, did not mean to exclude southern anglers. But when I watch those TV fishing shows you almost never see the pros fishing grass. They fish points and wood, but never grass. The exception are the Lindy shows from Minnesota. They fish the same type glacial lakes I do.

Funny how your the only one to mention that Thats what I do first as well. If that didn't work I would change bait size before color. Most anglers fail to understand the importance of retrieval speed or rate of fall For that very reason, I've always liked baits that I can fish more than one way. Whenyou think about it most of the baits that are the most popular, are those we can fish a variety of ways.

This is really more a question for northern bassers who focus on largemoths. Smallies are a different deal. In natural northern lakes it is quite usual to find huge weed beds that grow up out of water 15' depth right up to the surface. Now there are many ways to fish the edge of the deep weedline but what happens when the bass move back into the thick stuff? The only way I can think of getting at them is to vertically jig something . I've never really tried that and wonder if any of you ever have tried it. I'm thinking you can find a hole and drop a tube or a jig straight down. It would be slow fishing but I've got a feeling you might turn some big fish.

Most people don't much care about finely analyzing why a bass strikes. Most fisherman are empircists. They look a t a lake, on a particular day, with a particular weather situation and say to themselves "I'm going to use whatever because it always works in this situation." Fly fisherman for trout are used to seeing short strikes which they call refusals. Often you see a trout come up to your fy then drift back in the current under as the fly floats down stream, only to slip away into the depths. Usually the failure of the fly is not the fly tself but drag caused by the line moving at a different speed than the fly. So when you get a short strike I'd think presentation first. A lure ripping across the surface might easily attract a bass that then is alarmed by the action at the last instant. Here's the deal with all artificials. All artificials are to an extent an exaggeration of nature. The greater the exaggeration, be it sound, lure speed, size or color the more the lure will attract. By the same token the more that exaggeration is likely to spook a bass at the last instant or more often, without the bass even moving. However, a less exaggerated lure and presentation might not get the bass' attention at all. Everything in bass fishing is a trade off. Finesse techniques work because the lure and presentation is only a little exaggeration of reality. At the same time they put the lure very close to the fish. When fish are mainly agressive a finesse fisherman hampers himself by showing his lure to less fish that a guy ripping a spinnerbait. But if the fish aren't agressive at all, you may have no other choice than to put a slow moving, non-threatening morsel, directly under the fishes nose. In fly fishing it is the difference between using a deeply sunk nymph and a dry fly on the surface.

Roger and I in this are in opposite side when it comes to skirt color, he says black I say white ( no kiddin ', when I say white I mean white ) . That would indicate to me that color isn't as important as we may think In the absence of sufficient light, white does not appear white. Black takes advantage of this phenomenon, by absorbing what little light exists, thereby increasing the lure's contrast against the lighter sky. Roger Sound might be the trigger more than vision. In the streams where I've done most of my trout fishing the big browns are almost entirely nocturnal. In fact even bright moonlight will put them down. THey feed only in the darkest hours of the night and almost exclusively on crayfish. The crayfish in these streams are already impossible to see unless they move, even in the daylight. It has to be either sound or scent that allows the trout to find their prey.