Randall

Nice fish! Great video!

Nice fish! Congrats on the new PB!

Thats a great looking fish! Thanks for the story.

I use a fly just made for dropshotting. It's deadly sometimes when fish turn off of normal dropshot and spoon presentations and are tougher to catch or when they are feeding on small shad. I even cast it out to schoolers or fish feeding on fry in early summer when the size of baitfish can be small. This is a local guy who makes the ones I use. http://www.redroostercustombaits.com/flies.html The dropshot flies are at the bottom of the page.

My story was posted here a little over a year ago. I tell the details of the story later in the thread on the third page.

I personally only believe very few of them trying to sell me on something or even giving fishing advice. KVD and Arron Martens are two of the few I even listen to. Neither of them seem to exaggerate claims from my experience and will even mention other brands/baits for specific situations when the sponsored brands/baits may not be the best and give you the reason for using the other bait.

The 3:16 minnow is weedless and has a bluegill color. I like the color because it has an orange throat but a greyish bluish color body that matches bluegill better when they aren't spawning. Don't know if it's more defined but I catch fish feeding on bluegill in weedbeds with it. Roboworm e-z shad has a perch type color without the black bars. I also know some guys who say the Big Bite Baits Super Shad is a great swimbait. I haven't tried it yet but the colors are more defined on them and I have seen video of guys fishing them deep on jigheads catching fish on them.

I voted jigs but it is a toss up for me between jigs and swimbaits in winter.

I have always wanted to make one of these. This looks like my chance since it is close. I can't be there the whole time but think I will try to get over there for one day or something. Would be nice to meet many of you in person.

One of the big advantages of tungsten not mentioned very often is that it helps with hooksets. A bass can latch onto lead with it's teeth making hooksets more difficult. Tungsten is so hard the teeth don't dig into the weight so less force is required to set the hook. Not even to mention the Tungsten weight is smaller which helps as well.

Biggest difference between the two strains is how active and agressive they are. Florida Strain fish tend to be a lazy energy conserving fish while Northern Strain Fish tend to be more aggressive and active. Bass aren't smart but conditioned to do certain things because of thier enviroment and genitic makeup. This includes being conditioned to eat certain size forage based on the enviroment and genetic makeup. Northern strain fish do not tend to be as efficient from my observation and that may have something to do with prefered forage size from fish that survive to be a larger fish. Try to eat too many large meals with failure means a short life and low survival rates for those fish. Florida Strain fish conserve more energy and feed more at optimum times so they could be more efficent so they could survive better on larger forage. I get to fish different lakes with many different types of forage and strains of bass and have developed my own theorys as to bait selection for each lake. For example I fish a lake that has herring, shad and trout and northern strain fish to the best of my knowledge. The fish feed on all three types of forage but the diet of the fish changes season to season. Right now they are stocking trout and the diet of the bigger fish consists of mostly trout in the larger sizes that are being stocked. If I were to go there I would use baits like a huddleston that swim like a trout in a eight inch size. Now if I were to go to the same lake in late spring/early summer during the herring and shad spawn I would use smaller baits in the six inch size because those fish including the big ones will be feeding more on herring and shad. For another example I have noticed in lakes with no shad but stocked trout the prefered forage size is larger and the fish feed on the trout more with the other main option for forage being bluegill. Add shad to the equation and the fish start to prefer shad more often over the larger trout. Something else to think about is survival rates that are related to forage size. I know a lake in NC stocked with trout that has nothing but northern strain bass. Bass there have a very poor survival rate from the spawn in part due to the average forage size and poor fertility of the lake in general. The lake also has a lot of huge bluegills but very few small ones. If I go there I use nothing but 8-10 inch swimbaits and may only catch one fish every few trips but it will be 8-10lbs in most cases. So, I don't think you can choose bait size based just on the size or strtain of fish you want to catch. It takes doing some homework and figuring out which bait size and type of bait the fish are targeting. Sometimes it's just more efficient for a fish to eat more four to six inch fish rather then one eight to ten inch fish. Sometimes one eight to ten inch fish is more efficient.

Given the choice to get a 10lb plus bass I will take the crankbait over the paddletail. The reason is that crankbaits have strong erratic triggering movements when they change direction that cause reaction bites when ripped out of grass, ripped through trees etc. I have caught many over ten on crankbaits but never caught one on a paddletail. I will take the jig over both of them though.

Its all about what I call negative and positive actions on a swimbait. Nobody so far makes a larger paddletail type bait free of movements that turn off the larger fish or have enough trigger action to make them bite on a consistant basis. I can modify and rig some of them to perform better to catch more and bigger fish but I am still not looking at a true high precentage trophy bait with any paddletail style bait on the market I have seen. There are also many true swimbaits that you can buy that don't have "it" eithier and catch no more big fish than a paddletail. On top of that you have fish on certain bodies of water that prefer a certain bait or movement in a bait. All forage doesn't move the same and fish are conditioned to react to different movements. I fish one lake where it feels almost imposible to get a big bite on a Huddleston even though I consider it one of the very best trophy producing swimbaits. I can throw an Osprey or Matt's paddletail type baits instead and they will choke them. It's just a different movement the big fish are keyed in on there. I can switch to another lake and the results are reversed.

I did a new upcoming show that hasn't aired yet this past spring called Country Fried Cletus in less than half a day. I was on good fish but feeling a little under the weather and told them to just show up at noon and we would have enough fish for a show in a few hours. They were a little worried that I told them to sleep in until we fished the first point and started catching good fish. We got a six or seven pounder that made us all dance around the small boat we were using a few hours later and that was all they needed to make a good show. I did a Lunkerville show a few years ago and we fished till we couldn't take the heat anymore. It was over 100 degrees that afternoon. We fished half a day but never got a big one in the boat but they did a great job of making a good show out of it. What I like about both of these shows and the people doing them is they just came to the lake and we did a show. Nobody asked me to save up big fish to hook on the line later etc. They said we were going fishing just like anybody normaly would and it would be on film to make a show out of however it came out in one day. I think these shows may be an exception to the norm though since they are a little different type of fishing show.

Most of the time I don't really pay as much attention to the length of pauses as to how slow I can keep the worm moving. Try very small shakes of the rod tip and just reel up line to take slack out of the line. If I know fish are there this is how I fish worms most of the time. This way I get very subtle action and movement while the bait stays longer in one area. For me pauses with quick movement of the worm in between does less to get strikes most of the time. The worm just lays there and does nothing to trigger a strike then the fish watches the worm dart off just to lay there on the bottom again. That pretty much just leaves the worm falling and taking off again as a good strike trigger. I will take constant slow motion most days over any other way to fish a worm. Not to say other methods will not work either and some days just pulling and deadsticking the worm work better than anything else but just not the way I get bites most consistantly.

Great fish Paul!

Walmart sells waterproof containers in the camping section that lock down air and watertight. Most of them are under $10 where I have seen almost exactly the same containers online for $15-$30.

I looked at the baits that I had caught the most fish over ten pounds in recent years on a couple years back. The baits I caught the most big bass on were swimbaits and straight tail worms like senkos and trickworms. The lake I fished most didn't have a good crawfish population so I looked at other lakes besides it and added a jig to the list. Now that's all I fish 98% of the time. I don't have any specific numbers but have seen the numberof big fish increase for the amount of time fished since going to those three types of baits most of the time. I catch most of my fish in GA.

Get the golden shiner color or the other colors they sell that are close to that. I wouldn't get the weedless hudds or the regular 6 inch baits for trout imitations. The Hudd68 and the eight inch Huddleston swim more like a trout and that is more important than getting an exact match on color from my experience.

Nice to see you back!

I dont fish there often at all so when I do I mostly just fish docks all day and do ok. I would go to the back of the creeks and fish out till you find fish. It's not known for many big fish so don't expect too much and just try to keep culling up.

I didnt post it because some people took it the wrong way before and thought I was wrong in making fun of the guys I was fishing with. I added the bad cast and stuff as a little comedy but the guys have both seen the video and liked it. We are always joking around and poking at each other when we fish. I left the plug out my old boat the last time we fished together and I was the focus of all the jokes since we were taking on water and I couldn't figure out where the water was coming in and we were close to sinking. Theres a couple other jokes thrown around that you have to be in the boat all day and hear out conversations to get. Here is the video and it has some of the other photos I couldn't get to post.

Went out fishing with two guys I have known for a while. Phil Williams (aka Fish) fished BASS tournaments back when they first started he has shared a boat with people like Johnny Morris, the guy who invented the Carolina rig, etc. He is a true old school bass fisherman. His buddy Charles has been fishing a long time too and he and Phil have been fishing together for 30-40 years. They are always fun to fish with because they have so many stories to tell from all the years of fishing and are always just out to have fun. We went out on September 4th and the remains of a tropical storm were passing nearby so most of the day we had clouds and later in the day a good breeze blowing along with it. I told them I was going to start with a swimbait but would change to plastics if the fish didn't want the swimbait. Also told them that no doubt about it we were going to get on some swiumbait fish late in the day when the wind shifted and picked up a little. Well to make a long story short I got on some swimbait fish fast early and then went to soft plasitcs for two fish and then the swimbait bite was on and never let up. They didn't want a swimbait at first but everytime I would catch another big fish I would just ask them if they wanted a swimbait. Charles gave in first and started catching fish, after fish, after fish while Phil netted fish for Charles. He held out as long as he could but after seeing me catch the bigggst fish of the day at over nine pounds Phil tied one on too. It was one of those things where he couldn't believe the fish wouldn't hit his tried and tested baits since they were hitting that much bigger swimbait every few minutes. They didn't have a baitcaster so they used spinning rods with braid which made for some good laughs as all the casts didn't land where they should have (some never made it out of the boat LOL). But we made it work and had a great time. At the end of the day we had a bunch of big fish caught of both hybrids and largemouth. We estimated our best five largemouth at around 40lbs for a best five but only weighed two nine pounders. We caught so many three to six pound fish that we lost count of them. All the fish except two on soft plastics were caught on swimbaits. Most of the others including all the bigger ones were caught on High Power Swimbaits just slow rolling them as slow as we could reel them. Most importantly we had a lot of fun and I got to teach two old dogs some new tricks and show them a new perspective on fishing for big fish they had not seen in years of fishing. I have some more photos of more big fish took on one the cameras Phil and Charles brought but they are bmp files or something like that instead of jpg and I know nothing about how to get those to load on here or if it is even possible.

Great fish! Love those big thick fish with big eyes!

Nice fish. Congrats on the new PB!