Fishes in trees

Weights - I use lots of smallish boxes sorted by style. 1 box for tungsten, 1 box for drop shots, 1 for internal tube weights and so forth.. Hooks I store in their original packages and sort by style. I use those zippered pencil bags you get at Walmart for a dollar each. Anyway there is one bag for tx rig hooks, another for drop shot hooks, a third for wacky rig hooks you get the idea, I think there are nine or ten bags all told. I carry too much variety to try to make it fit in one box - AND I have the room in my boat to carry a bunch of stuff. I know how to cut back and just carry what I need for one day, it is just that most of the time I don't have to, so I don't.

Back in the day when I was a meat fishing bank guy, I didn't know about lipless cranks. Walking the banks asap after ice out, a 3" curly tail grub was the ticket - not low and slow but keeping it moving and covering the water. For me, this worked right at the start of spring and not so much after spring had sprung, so to speak. At this time in my fishing career, my go to bait was a Brewer Slider with a 4"Brewer worm, low and slow, rubbing it against anything that was there, but not necessarily stopping on anything. These days, a favorite early spring tactic is targeting shallow grass beds that will be to thick to fish in a month. I throw a half ounce Berkley Frenzy lipless crank and just cover the water. Every spring I get 2 or 3 5 lb + fish doing this. 2 to 4 pm seems to be the magic time for this as I've never had much luck pre-noon doing this. Really, you're just planning way ahead, right? Will your ice be melted before April?

I've probably managed to collect a couple of hundred over the years. I don't think more than 50 or 60 make it into the boat bin to start the year. I probably carry another 12 to 20 chatter baits and a dozen or two buzz baits. I went through a period several years ago, when I bought a bunch of spinnerbaits. Not so much the past few years.

That is a nice boat - similar to mine, which is a 2002 LOWE WF 180. A few years down the road you will learn about one of the curses of tin boats, i.e. the console transducer must be mounted outside the hull for it to read and getting it to read while you are on plane is tricky. Also, I fish in pretty stumpy waters and I was averaging breaking 1 or 2 brackets per year and I replaced the transducer twice. Then I found out about a product called the Alumaducer. It is an after market transducer, made by Vexilar, that can be adapted to many different units. It shoots through the hull. It works great while you are putting around looking at stuff. It works OK when you're on plane. Best of all no more shattered brackets or broken transducers caused by smacking into stumps. Something to consider. If you're real handy with tools and stuff I guess you could install it yourself. I am not. I had to look for a while to find a dealer who had experience in installing that product. I live just outside the KC Metro area and the closest dealer I could find was in St. Louis - towed my boat to St. Louis one week and picked it up the next.

I throw jerk baits on spinning gear. Currently I use a 6'3" M or ML - extra fast tip. I'll either use a light braid or 14 lb Fireline Crystal and a short - foot and a half or so leader. I like the spinning gear because it is frequently windy in the spring when I'm throwing jerk baits and I don't want to deal with back lashes. I use a shorter rod because I got tired of smacking the side of the boat with the rod tip. I don't think that I've ever lost a fish due to a faulty hook set. at a distance set on this rig. Due to the nature of the bait, i.e. sometimes the fish are just hitting short or light, you are going to lose fish from time to time, they just pull off because you never did really get a hook into them.

I have two bucco rods. The 7' Trap Caster and a 6'10" model that is very similar to their Eakins Jig Special. I like them and they are in the starting line up, i.e. they are in the 15 or so rods that I start out with in the spring.

Don't limit yourself. Start with your best guess. If that don't work try your second best guess. Consider what seasonal patterns should be available and start there

Believe it or don't, but there are different kinds of wood/brush. Vertical, rooted in the bottom with nearly all the side branches gone? Vertical, rooted in the bottom with large or small side branches intact? Laydowns from the bank? Laydowns that used to be on the bank and now that the lake has gone through several rising and falling cycles it now resides in the middle of the lake? Brush? Thin brush - heavy brush - thorny brush? This stuff occurs in various combinations as well. If you're going to fish wood, I'd recommend carrying one ( or more than one)of each. While you are at it, might as well have a spinnerbait tied on, probably a chatter bait also. A wood/vegetation combo, maybe a swim jig is in order. . . . . and so it goes. This begin given, when I start to fish around wood and I've determined that I'm going to fish a reaction bait as opposed to some plastic/jig bait, I start with a Timber Tiger that is appropriate to the depth. Most of the time that means a DC8. Nearly all the time I also have a DC13 and a DC4 tied on. If you've never fished Timber Tigers, they come through wood and brush better than any other square bill I've encountered.

Next time you post a topic to your post, spell it out - please. Let me explain. The title to your post was MLF on Dale Hollow. I read it as MILF on Dale Hollow. Not the same thing. I was all at once disappointed about the content of the posts and deeply shamed when I realized what I expected the content to be about. My mind is in a gutter. I just got home from work. I'm going to get another beer now.

Most springs, a translucent olive/brown wiggle wart is the ticket. Some of them have a little tinge of orange on the lip. The few times that I fished Table Rock as a co-angler, that was the co-angler ticket. I haven't fished BFL's lately, but I do have a box of appropriate colored wiggle warts, for the next time I do visit Table Rock in the spring. Edit - just went to the Storm Website and looked. Phantom Brown & Phantom Green Crawfish were the closest colors, as I recall. Those colors on the web site didn't look like the same colors as I bought early 2000's at BPS. I'll have to go out to my fishing shed and look some time. At the time, I remember being beaten by a bait that I wasn't familiar with at the time, so on the drive home I stopped at BPS and bought several of each color I saw different guys using. I'm pretty sure there are a couple dozen baits in a box labeled "Springtime Wiggle Warts" The guys who won with that bait were throwing them on a 7' or so medium rod with 10 lb line (bait caster) One guy was throwing a 7.5' Med spinning rod - 10 lb braid and a short fluorocarbon leader. He was doing an incredible job of covering water. Sometimes, fishing out of the back of the boat that is the game.

I go with shorter leaders - 2 feet or less and I reel up to the knot and I try not to go past it. I've gone with longer leaders in the past. No real issues with reeling the knot through the guides other than it seemed to cost me a little bit of distance casting wise. After a while it seemed pointless to beat up the knot unnecessarily.

I always thought that those Berkley shad baits were more of a trolling crank than a casting crank. I don't troll - so I have no personal experience with those baits. The current line of Berkley hard baits is just another attempt to crack the hard bait market. Does anyone remember the "Frenzy" line of crank baits? A long the ago I got a bunch of them on close out - right around 20 cents on the dollar or something near to that. They had jerk baits, medium divers, deep divers and lipless cranks. Paint jobs on the divers and jerk baits were " unique" I had NO luck with the jerk baits, and different levels of divers. After a few attempts, I just put them away. Give them 30 years and they will be collectors items. The Frenzy lipless crank was a different story. My experience with that bait is that it gets bit more often than any other brand of that style I own. The last couple of years that is the only one I've thrown. I have 4 left. It is easy to ding up the paint on those baits, but I think that they fish better with the paint a little dinged up - or in my case a LOT dinged up. Anyway, I suspect that in 2 or 3 seasons, the marketers at Berkley will have had enough and all the hard baits will be closed out again - the idea put on the shelf for a few years and then they will try again. Their Flicker Shad, it seems right now, is a solid seller for them - they probably sell more to walleye guys as trolling baits than they do to bass guys.

The past 10 years or so I've mostly used half ounce lipless cranks - various brands, but very similar weight wise. I have a box of quarter ounce ones, that I haven't gotten wet in 5 years or so. In December, a tackle store I frequent had some serious close outs and I got a dozen 3/4 oz Excalibur lipless cranks at $3.50 each. They are only slightly bigger than the half ounce size I generally throw. Since a large part of my lipless crank game is covering water, I think I'll be able to throw farther and cover more water - that is the plan, anyway.

I'd go MH and are there space or other reasons why you need 6'6"? I've got the HMG 7' MH and I like the additional sensitivity that the MH has - compared to the Med.

Seriously, if you have the room for the extra batteries, go with a 36 volt system. Over the life of the system the extra cost will be negligible. Can't have too much battery power. I have a 2002 Lowe WF 180 and if I could fit an extra battery in my boat, I'd have the 36 volt system.

The short answer is yes. I have a few different rig set up to throw cranks in different circumstances.

I am not impressed with that design. If it is the "special shimmy" on the initial drop that is attracting the fish, I believe that a wacky senko would do a better job. If dragging the bait on the bottom is getting bit, I believe that a jika rig would get bit more often. If you need the smaller size, as mentioned earlier I think that a 3/16 or quarter ounce Brewer Slider head would get the job done better. As mentioned earlier, I think that the bait holder ends too close to the hook point.

I "bubba" drop shot more often than I finesse drop shot. If I'm going to stick with the approach for a while, I've found that the 5" GULP sinking minnow works good. If I'm just trying different stuff here and there, then that bait dries out too fast. I've had decent success with the Berkley crazy legs Chigger Craw.

I have always thought that standing up in a canoe is a bad idea. If you are looking for stability, safety, something you can stand in and something fishable get a pond boat. A BPS pond prowler or something similar. 2 people can fish out of one. The last post about a 55 lb thrust trolling motor and a battery is a great idea. The pond boat can be transported in your truck. That's the way I'd go. Back when I was a mostly bank bound meat fisherman, I occasionally fished out of a canoe because I had no better option. I never liked fishing out of a canoe.

I have one of the bait shown above - the one with the colorado blade. I got it in the late 90's - early 2000's. Can't for the life of me remember the name. I remember I bought it at Walmart I think. Seems to me I bought it because it was one of those rare Walmart baits that was made semi-locally. I'm guessing Luck-E-Strike made that bait. For the record I've fish that bait several times and never caught anything on it at all. That is how most of those old collectible baits became collectable, i.e. there weren't very many of them made and they didn't catch fish, so they didn't get lost. Instead they lingered in the depths of different guys collections until they surfaced. As I think about it, Luck-E-Strike has made and discontinued many baits over the years. I went to their web site and looked and it wasn't there - go figure. Anyway, it occurs to me that it could be a Strke King baits from the same era - late 90's to early 2000's.

Time management on the water can be an issue for me. I spend too much time trying to make the fish bite what I want to fish, instead of figuring out where the fish are. I could improve my deep water game. We're talking/writing fishing and not life, right? There are a whole bunch of life management skills that I could get better at, but that is a subject for a different thread.

In Missouri/Arkansas, the generic term for a hula grub is Chompers. Their version of the hula grub is better than the Yamamoto one, IMO. I've been in a bait store in Kimberling City, MO, just looking around and a guy comes in and says, "I need some Chompers. I need the real ones, and some of those Yamamoto Chompers too." I mostly fish them on 3/8 or half ounce football heads and drag them around chunk rock to gravel transitions. I sometimes fish them tx rigged with a pegged sinker, pitching them into cover and next to objects. They are good baits. Like I say, around where I live, we don't call them hula grubs, we call them Chompers.

Don't limit yourself to just 2. Get as many as you need to cover the situations you might face. They don't weigh that much. Get 5 or 6 or a dozen. What are you going to do if you are on a spinner bait bite and you lose a bait? Also, limiting your baits is just asking for it. Inevitably, you will have bait A and Bait B and you're out on the water and you'll come across some guy who is just nailing them on bait X. You could have had bait X but NO, you felt like you had to limit yourself to A & B. Try to make conscious decisions about what baits you might need without limiting yourself to a given number of baits. That's what I do and I have fewer regrets about missed opportunities than I used to. JMO

Straying from the subject of jointed wake baits for a moment, while I own a few different jointed wake baits, I get bit more on non-jounted ones. Mann's Minus 1 in the med & large sizes and the Timber Tiger DC1 are my first two choices when the subject is wake baits. Most of the time I throw them on the same rod that I throw lipless cranks on, i.e. a Falcon Bucco 7' Trap Caster, with a Shimano 200 TEGT and 17 or 20 lb mono. These baits all weigh in the half ounce range, so distance isn't really an issue with this particular casting rig.

I use several different brands for spinnerbait/chatterbait rods. The ones I like are very similar to my pitching rods except they are a little shorter (6'8" or 6'9" compared to 7' to 7 1/2') , very similar back bones but a little more "tippy". I've went through more than a dozen rods before I found some that I liked. If you can find an old All Star 6'8" Zell Rowland Spinnerbait special, that is my idea of a perfect spinnerbait rod. Mine are currently on the bench, they need new guides and whatnot. If you throw a lot of spinnerbatis, it is worth the time to find a spinnerbait rod that is "right" for you, rather than trying to "make do". Be prepared to spend money in this quest.