Fishes in trees

There are lots of other centipede style soft plastics out there. Some ar more rounded, like the Lug worm others have more of a rectangular shape to the body. . I know Bass Pro has several different variations of this bait and so does Zoom. Years ago, I bought some bags of centipedes from Walmart that had some manufacturer I hadn't heard of then or since. They worked ok. Looks like you could take any stick worm, snip 3/4" off of each end and then yo'd have a lug worm. Don't forget the original Charlie Brewer 4" Slider worm - they are a little skinnier but even those aren't the original "Do Nothing" worm. I'm pretty certain that over the past few decades other different companies have made similar style worm, but I can't remember then all right now. Now is the time for a real soft plastic historian to chime in.

Those are some old Denny Brauer chunk trailers made by Strike King. I've got 20 or 30 baits like that , stated in a plastic shoe box somewhere in my fishing shed. I got them when they were closed out at Walmart - late 90's maybe, somewhere around then. I wasn't fishing jigs then, so I never gave them an honest try. They might make better spinner bait or chatter bait trailers.

When it comes to throwing poppers & walking baits I'm a mono guy. I'm not real comfortable with braid on bait casters in general - most likely that is just me. I'll generally use 17 or 20 lb mono. I'm not a fan of tying direct to a top water walker or popper, unless I'm tying to a split ring. I like a loop knot in this situation, just because I think it helps the bait move better.

The popper with the diving bill makes me say, "huh?" Don't know what to say about the LIVETARGET bait. IMO the Biffle Bug ain't a bad bait, I've caught a few fish on it.

In my opinion, when wacky rigging a senko, you don't work it. It see it as more or less like throwing a knuckleball, in that you throw it at where you want, let it drop and don't do anything. When it hits bottom, I pick I up and let it drop once, then I retrieve and throw again. I most often throw it on spinning gear. I use 20 lb braid and 15 or 17 lb fluorocarbon leader. I like brightly colored braid, so that the braid works kind of like a strike indicator, i.e. if the line starts doing something funky or different, it is probably a fish.

I use a drop shot, bot finesse style and bubba style, to fish specific spots. I think you can use a ned to do that, but it is better at covering areas, albeit pretty slowly. What the original poster referred to Ned as "keeping the bait 6" off the bottom, four decades ago, Charlie Brewer referred to that technique as "polishing the rocks."

Depends on what you're throwing at.

Sharpies come in many different colors - and they're pretty cheap. If you screw up too much, then a coat of flat white spray paint lets you start over again. option #B - I've got no clue what a cheap to mid-range air brush set up costs. If you plan on doing this more than once, the air brush set up is probably the way to go. It might be worth swinging by some pawn shops to see if anything is available.

I can't complain about the SPRO ball bearing swivels. I have a couple of boxes of in line spinners that I use mostly for white bass and I just put a ball bearing swivel on each one, then I don't have to mess with clips or snaps with my fumbling arthritic hands. This winter I bought some 3/8 oz in line spinners that I'm going to throw in places where I normally throw lipless cranks and I went ahead and put ball bearing swivels on each one of those. As far as the barrel swivels go, I don't see a situation where I might use one. I think all the ones that I have are in the "BIG BOX OF USELESS GEAR" that sets on a shelf in my fishing shed. ( Yeah, that is what it's labeled on the shelf )

I always thought those were good looking baits that should work. For me, in practice, not so much. I believe Riverside got bought out, was absorbed by, whatever, by YUM and YUM is a Pradco brand. Pradco seems to change their line up, with all their different brands, quite a bit. Somewhere you'd think that there is a stash of new old stock of all those air baits. An E-mail to Pradco might vibe worth your time.

Do you mean light in terms of weight or light in terms of line? Because when I throw a T-rig, it is generally into some sort of brush/cover/structure. Mostly a wood/grass or a brush /grass situation and so using light line seems more or less like I'm asking for it, so I don't. That being said, I don't consider 15 lb Abrazx light, and that is what I generally throw, with either a 3/16 or 1/4 or 5/16 tungsten weight. For 10" power worms ( which I use often enough that I have a rig dedicated to that ), I favor 17 Abrazx and either 5/16 or 3/8 oz weight. MY bubba drop shot rig currently has 20 lb Abrazx and I generally start with a half ounce weight. I generally carry a jig rod with 10 lb line but I don't throw a tx rig on it. I'll generally have some sort of quarter ounce jig with a soft plastic on that one. Sometimes the bait will be tx rigged on the jig head and often not.

A long time ago I came across many bags of YUM Zellemanders. Then I found out them were discontinued. Then I fished them and came to the conclusion that I knew why they were discontinued. They sat in a plastic shoe box for several years and then when I got into jika rigs I threw a few bags into a gallon zip lock as baits to try. They are now a solid choice #2. When I catch 3 or 4 fish off a point and the action slows using a brush hog, on several occasions I've switched to the Zellemander and caught another fish. And that's my current record, i.e. 5 keepers off the same point within 15 minutes or so.

As someone who also has tackle storage issues all I can offer is " try harder ". Buy more plastic storage totes. Buy more shelves. Hang more stuff on walls. Subdivide your gear into more recognizable piles. I have 30 or 40 totes. Right now I'm not real sure One thing that helps me is trying to be accurate in labeling what is in the tubs and don't fill any one tote more than 1/3 full. This helps when you are going through totes looking for that one thing that you don't remember which tote you put it in. Back when I was a co-angler fishing tournaments, I tried assembling "kits". I had a kit full of jigs, jig heads, soft plastics, hard baits, etc, everything that I could think of that I might need for Table Rock. I had another kit for Lake of the Ozark , another for Truman Lake and for Grand Lake. Basically one for each lake the tournament trail fished. There was quite a bit of overlap, but that is ok. How else are you going to justify buying 15 different Wiggle Warts in 3 different colors. (There was a time when I threw wiggle warts quite a bit and I tended to lose them. I think I've got 6 or 7 left from that organization try. In theory, it worked great - in practice, not all that well, but I tried. When I outgrew my garage, i.e. I had to decide if I wanted to store my car & lawn mowers in the garage or fishing stuff in the garage, I was fortunate in that I had the space to build a 40 x 60 fishing shed. I like that I can pull my truck & boat into the shed and not have to unhook it, I just plug in the on board charger. It didn't take long though before the fishing shed got nearly as full as my garage was. There is space for me to pull the truck & boat into the shed and for me to walk around it - kinda. All the walls have stuff hanging from them, there are lots of shelves, never have enough shelving, and an assortment of stuff is strewn throughout the rest of the space. Organization is an ongoing battle and the best I can hope for is an occasional draw. I hope you can completely now and forever solve your organization woes, but in my case, I can't solve my organization woes for more than a few weeks.

The videos I've watched on how Tommy Biffle fishes the Biffle Bug, it is kinda like a crank bait that always stays on the bottom. He's moving it kinda quick most of the time - so that's how I fish it. For me, strikes were similar to a crank bait strike - something feels off, so set the hook asap and try to set in the opposite direction from where to bite is going and hope for the best. More or less like you set the hook for a Carolina rig or crank bait fishing, in that setting the hook sideways yields better results for me than setting the hook straight up. But every hook set is different. You've got a lot of time to recognize the bite - fractions of seconds - so just decide which way to strike and do it. The more you do it the better you get at determining which way to go.

I bought some heavier inline spinners this winter ( 3/8 oz) and I'm going to try waking them in places where I might throw a buzz bait or a little deeper like a lipless crank and se what happens. Back in the day when I was a rookie, I threw Mepps quite a bit, but that kinda fell by the wayside when I discovered 4" Brewer Slider worms.

Looks to me like just another square bill variant. I'd fish it like a square bill. The pimp the bait paragraphs mention to bounce it along the bottom. OK, as long as the bottom is within 5 feet because that's the alleged diving depth. The paragraphs also mention that it comes through grass better than other baits. I don't know about that. I own many discontinued Timber Tigers and they come through wood and brush great. They don't come through grass/weeds/vegetation great. They gather up a big ball of the stuff, just like every other crank bait I've tried to throw through vegetation. So I guess this bait would gather up a smaller wad of vegetation. I just don't believe that the bait will come through vegetation clean and I don't have a spare $10 to find out right now. Someone ought to buy this bait and fish it for a while and report.

This year I've decided that I'm going to concentrate more on spinning gear/finesse stuff. I've upgraded my Ned rig This probably means that the A- Rig gear won't get loaded on to the boat very often. This year I probably won't do 3 different home made jika rigs - all the same except with different soft plastics. Probably just have one spinner bait rigged on the deck instead of 3. I do plan on throwing more of the great big square bills rather than the regular sized ones.

A number of years ago I bought 6 or 8 bags of this bait, but for whatever reasons I never fished them and they ended up in the great pile of unused/forgotten baits. Well, this winter, I found them, 6 bags, various colors, all stored together in a quart zip lock bag. I took that as a sign and so now I put together a kit of a dozen or so similar soft plastics, swim jigs, swim bait heads and so forth and I have a dedicated swim jig rig now, so I'm going to put this style of bait in the regular rotation. When I finally get on the water this year, and who knows when that will be, a skinny dipper will be tied on, ready to go. OIb yeah, the rig - gonna start out with an older 7' olive green Kistler small swim bait rod and a Shimano Calais with 17 lb mono and go from there.

I fish mid range priced spinning reels almost exclusively. I have a couple of Pflueger Presidents - 4 to six years old & no issues with them. I have a Shimano Nasci and it is an ok reels - wish it had an anti-reverse on it. I have a mid range priced Diawa, (80 or so list) that I got at Bass Pro during a Christmas sale. The spinning reel I have that gets used most often is on my shakey head spinning rig and it is an older Shimano Spirex. I like everything about this reel. I liked the double paddle handle, it has an anti-reverse switch - has the Quickfire trigger for one handed bait opening ( most of the time I still close the bail manually). It will handle mono or fluorocarbon up to 10 lbs with no issues. If you can find any of those, that's what I'd get. The only reason I got the Pfluegers, Daiwa & Nasci was that the store that I bought the Spirex reels from was out and they mentioned that they weren't going to get any more. Looking at the Shimano web site, they are still in the line up.

True fact - there are lots of good to excellent rain suits out there - pick the one that fits your budget. I bought a set of Cabelas Guide Wear in 2001 and it still works great. I don't use it all the time, but those times when you need to use it, it works great. On the pants versus bibs debate, I've found that the bibs keep me dryer - A LOT dryer.

To the previous poster who said, "there are no magic combinations . . ." I beg to differ - YES THERE ARE. !! You just got to find them, your magic combinations might be different than mind. Take all the variables into account - time of day - color of bait - color of trailer - color of water - directon of the wind - speed of the wind - what phase is the moon in? - is your bait clean or dirty? - and I'm not going to mention all the rest of the variables that might be involved, because I'd probably go over the max total size of allowed post AND I probably would miss one or two if I did. If I didn't have a bunch of stuff to do today, (like to get my second cover shot this afternoon) I'd pop a top and ponder this issue. Responsibility is a challenge sometimes. Maybe after 6 pm this evening, when a steak is on the grill. . .

My current state of tackle inventory is unsorted and not really ready to go fishing yet.

A fair question - "What do I consider a higher tech ned rig?" Ned has mentioned in I-fisherman articles that he uses late 70's/early 80's graphite composite rods with older Cardinal 4 reels( or something similar) - as part of the "frugality" aspect inherent in ned rig fishing. He used to use 6 lb mono buy I seem to recall that in more recent articles he's mentioned using braid. Me - I use a 5'9" Fenwick HMG graphite spinning rod with a 1000 size Pflueger reel - 15 lb braid or nanofil - generally don't use a fluorocarbon leader. Just a little more recent and higher tech than what Ned has written that he uses.

Either one - I'd use a boot tail trailer with a chartreuse dyed tail though. On second thought, I'd go with the second choice because the sexy shad with with a chartreuse tipped trailer would look a little too matchy/matchy for me.

I've seen that bait - but it has been a while- late90's - sometime around then. I seem to remember a picture of Guido Hibdon on the package, or maybe not. Anyway, I think it was marketed by Lucky Strike or Luck-e-Strike. Also maybe it could be a Renowski bait. They often did "life like" printing on the sides of some of their baits.