Randall

Nice fish. I like the patterns and colors on that one.

Lathem res. is on the Cherokee/Dawson line

Nice bass! You can dress like that here in Ga and you will fit right in.

Here is a video from this past weekend. My freind Shane wanted to see how I have been catching big bass at Lake Varner for a while so we finally got a day to go after them. He had already caught one good bass on the spot before this one and lost another big one on a High Power Herring swimbait. When he hooked up this one on a trickworm I knew whatever he had was big so I started looking for the camera. Found the camera and got it on about two minutes into the fight. At this point we still had not seen the fish and the fish was still taking drag. For the past few weeks we haven't needed anything but worms and swimbaits. Agressive surface strikes from fish like the one in the photo on the swimbait from a couple weeks ago and big bass on light line when they are not on the swimbait. Most fun I have had fishing in a few years.

you're right, rep called me back and said it's now just the natural shad. but the threadfin in my neck of the woods has a blue back, silver bottom half and a dark colored tail and fins. spros natural shad is almost opposite of that. and the bait John Crews was holding up doesn't look likethe natural shad. tru tungsten put this bait out but is also not available anymore, i don't think. it's the last one under "Tru-Tungsten Swimbait Samples". http://tackletog.com/blog/2009/05/ The TT bait is custom painted. Really if you want to match a shad that close you may want to go the custom painted bait route. A lot of those are out there with custom paint.

Not here! After a couple slow years the big fish are back. There has been a five fish linit weighing almost 40 lbs, lots of 8-10 pound fish being caught and a 13lb fish just a few days back. Maybe your lakes are just having an off year. Many of our lakes had drought and forage issues but have recovered. When lakes have issues like this it always seems to show first in the larger fish with larger fish not being caught or by them having poor body condition.

I will be at Bear Creek this weekend. Got to prefish some for the big tournament there next week.

Swimbait, swimjig and buzzbait are the three I usually have tied on.

[quote Those power lines and the house to the right of the fish look familiar. Maybe see you this fall if/when we visit our daughter in Temple.

Here is a good example of the blazing fast speed. Yesterday the fish didn't react well to slow moving baits. Lots of follows and short strikes early so midday we changed it up. Air temp was 100 and water temp got to 94. We had to go to a ripping darting burn retrieve over the fish to get them to commit to the bait. You see me rip the bait hard to get the fish to react as soon as I see the fish follow. I never slow down but the fish still gets the bait going as fast as I can reel. Here are a few of what we got yesterday. Thanks for the compliments.

Well I finished the original post at 2am in the morning. Went to bed slept till 4am. Got up and went to a different lake. Thermocline on this lake was a little deeper but very well defined. Killed them on the same pattern as above and saw one of the biggest topwater strikes ever on a swimbait. The giant in the photo came all the way out if the water. Two High Power Herring swimbait fish and around ten other fish between two and four pounds on senkos and trickworms fished weightless or with a 1/32 ounce weight at ten feet. Maybe I should post more here and do without sleep more often. ;D

Saw a few posts talking about fishing hot water, deep water and thermoclines. Also saw one about grass and pads vs deepwater. Instead of replying to them all I will just post this since I have had a few people on another site tell me it was a big help to them over the past week on hot shallow lakes. One if the two biggest myths about summer fishing is that you always have to fish deep to catch fish and that small shallow lakes and ponds do not have thermoclines. Put these two together and you may be fishing where fish can't live. I have been fishing a small shallow lake for the past few weeks. Finding the fish is easy for me this time of year since the thermocline is so shallow at 7-8 feet (see photo) it eliminates half of the water. Fish can't live below it so the fish are either down in the grass or pads or suspended near the grass or pads. So the fish might not be the most active fish but they are concentrated where they can live most efficently. Over the past week the larger bass have been suspended more in open water but near grasslines and pads. This is because the fish can suspend over a little deeper water and conserve energy then move to the edge or follow bait to the edge where they can feed most efficiently. As water temps rise over eighty five degrees the fish become more and more energy conservative so you have to put the bait right on the head of the suspended fish at a slow speed and make the bait easy to get and or use speed to trigger a strike. But the big fish will limit there movements and feeding so they are more predictable as far as location and where they will feed. So, as most hate to see hot water on small lakes I look forward to it and the next two months will be some of the best fishing I will have all year. So what bait do I use? Most of the time its soft plastics in the grass and pad edges. They are weighted either as light as possible to move and fall slowly to be easy targets. Or, they are weighted heavy to fall fast and trigger strikes. Anything in between I don't use. For the open water suspended fish I use good high quality swimbaits that will swim well at a super slow crawl and/or as fast as you can ever reel it burn to get the suspended fish. Just like the plastics if the swimbaits don't swim well at super slow speed (easy meal)and super high speed (reaction) then they don't usually catch these fish. So, after the guy I was fishing with last week had to his surprise three good fish and lost a monster one morning I went back out in the middle of the day to try for more and got one on video. I set the camera up where you can't see the exact location but I was throwing at the same small area for 15 minutes till I catch the fish. I also missed one about five minutes after the camera had started. I am throwing at open water where I marked suspended fish and bait near good structure and a grassline earlier. I am casting from sitting shallower and bringing the bait to the grassline where I think/know the suspended fish feed at. I caught the other fish in the photo a few minutes later but the camera had shut off before I caught it. Thought it might help a bunch to see the speed I reel the bait at. I can say slow or fast but seeing it gives a better idea. You can also tell from the video that I fish the area of the cast where I expect the strike at even slower. If you watch when the fish strikes it hits right after a change in speed from fast to slow. The strike was right at the edge of the weedline. Well that's how I fish hot shallow water lakes this time of year. We had five that went well over twenty pounds that day and that's just a normal good day there. The two I caught ,one in the video and the one in the photo were probably the smaller two of the best five. Hope it helps.

Just because you have found fish doesn't mean they will be easy to get to bite. I catch most of my tough to catch fish on soft plastics fished very slow.

I was having a conversation like this with someone involved in the fishing industry a few days ago. We were talking about a guy who had, according to someone who witnessed the electroshocking, took fish shocked up from a shock boat and was using same fish photos with the bait hanging from the mouth of the same electroshocked fish just days later to promote his baits and guide service. Photos exist of the same fish in the hands of the DNR and in his hands with the bait. Story was the photo was to be used for a magazine article later as well. Now to me that is just wrong but I was told by this guy that at least by the fishing industry (Magazines, writers, lure companies, TV shows etc.) that it would be considered by many to be a "normal practice". Now to tell on myself. I have done several magazine shoots where I caught the fish put them in the livewell and we took photos later. Even some of the action shots were all done later. I did catch the fish and caught them how the articles said I did. I have been asked if there was a bait I wanted to put in the photo. I declined but this told me it is done by others. I once put another bait in the fishes mouth for an action shot. I didn't want to harm the fish so I put a finesse jig in the mouth if the fish since it would do less harm to the fish to get the photo. Nothing in the article advertised the jig and I had nothing to gain from it but it made a good photo for what was a general lake info kind of article. But if you saw the photo you might think it was caught on the jig. My point is that magazine articles photos are often staged and fishing shows often are too. There is also a lot of what is considered "normal" dishonesty that the fishing industry accepts and even encourages. Bottom line is they are trying to sell you something.

I had never read the book until someone gave it to me as a gift and told me I had to read it since he said the methods and systems I use were so much like Bill Murphy's. Now I don't exactly stitch but I catch alot of big fish by reeling real slow taking 5-15 minutes before reeling the worm in with the same splitshot rig, dropshot or a senko. Once you catch a big one or two doing it your confidence will go up since you then know the fish are there. Makes it much easier to fish that slow.

Any bait that breaks and causes fish to be lost because of bad design or workmanship. I have probably caught fish on everything mentioned here and even think some are good baits. If the bait breaks or hooks pull out of the bait that fish is gone. Lots of companies now are selling baits with lots of hype and promotion but no quality. So for me not any one bait but any bait with breakage problems that causes lost fish.

Here in GA most ponds have a very shallow thermocline right now. This puts the bass shallow since they can't live deep. Most of the larger fish are suspended shallow just off areas where they can trap baitfish on the shoreline. So my advice is to just put the bait right up against the shore and keep it there. When you get to any points throw over the point to the deeper side and bring the bait up hill.

For all the banana haters I caught this last week with eight bananas in the boat. It came from a lake known for small fish. I had one more that was almost as big. I also have caught three teen size fish with bananas in the boat. I am thinking about getting a banana sponsor. ;D

I know lots of them. What area are you interested in? Metro Atlanta in general covers 100s of fishing areas.

I had read an article from a Rodger Lee Brown ie...The Bass Coach. This article comes from his years of experience with bass fishing and I believe it to be a true statement about the fish going blind. I am in no means trying to start an argument here I am just simply looking for an answer and since you have been posting a long time I am curious as to how you know they don't go blind. I have hauled in some blinded bass before, Is this due a birth defect? Some have been blind only in one eye and others have been blind in both eyes although the ones with both eyes have been few and far between I am confused to say the least as to what the correct answer is here. Bass stay shallow all the time with bright sun in ponds where I used to observe and study bass. I had a pond with an overhead walkway which allowed me to constantly watch bass movement. My observations just don't support the bass moving up and down with bright sun. Also I have studied all I could find about bass eyesight. Bass can adjust their rods and cones and use pigments in their eyes to adapt to different light levels. I have also studied how light penetrates water, transfers heat, etc. Water acts as a pair if sunglasses. It reflects a lot if light at the surface and scatters most of the rest. Bass can go blind from lots of things but just not from living shallow.

Around here those are going for three to five dollars each. Tackle Warehouse has them for around seven. You way overpaid. ;D Don't feel bad though. There are some of us including myself who paid way more a few years ago to try one to figure out they are not worth the money. There was even some sponsored guys on here telling everybody how great they were for the money. ;D Much better choices out there for trout swimbaits. If you want a good swimbait get a Mattlures or a Huddleston.

I have caught fish bouncing huds on the bottom in 40-50ft of water and they don't float in the live well. When these fish are hooked they generally shoot to the surface in a matter of seconds like a torpedo. So my question is do smaller fish take more time to adjust than bigger fish? I have found that fish which voluntarily come up in many cases have adjusted. And if they can adjust in a matter of seconds could they comfortably adjust over the course of an hour? What depth change requires major adjustment? Can a fish move from 3' of water to say 15' without major a adjustment? Most fish I have caught in 15' of water do not need to be fizzed when brought up. A lot of the water I fish is pretty deep and clear. When they are up shallow fish are pretty easy to spot. There is very little cover for these fish to relate to. If they stay the same depth suspended as they do up shallow why don't I see more fish roaming over deeper water? Really good observations and questions. I'll offer my understanding at this point: It's not definitively known how rapidly bass can adjust to depth change. The best educated guesses so far (based on studies on other physoclistus -closed bladder- fishes) is that bladder adjustment is about a foot or two per hour -if they decide to make such a change. It may be energetically costly to do so, so it appears most bass do not do this often. From angler observations via sonar, bass may make moves of 15feet quickly, say to smack a bait, but must return to acclimation depth soon. Short term changes of less than 10 feet are known for feeding bouts, but this would not be comfortable or energy efficient for a prolonged period. I've watched shallow buoyant hunters (I can see them finning to maintain position) drop out of sight, making a roughly 4foot depth change into cover, or into the gloom of depth. These were LM. From studies and angler observations, SM and SP appear to have more leeway in depth change than LM. As to why you don't see suspended bass: Bass do not often like to be visible from the surface. When you see them they are either spawning, sunning (at times, but usually close to cover), or briefly exposed while feeding. When they were feeding up in the water column they were likely positively buoyant, afterwards dropping a bit deeper and becoming neutral again. It doesn't take much depth change to allow a bass to "disappear". They appear smaller with each inch of depth gain. And they are very well camouflaged. Amazes me how easily they can disappear when they want to. As to 50ft catches that come shallow that don't float in the live-well. From what I understand at this point, that shouldn't be possible. Maybe large bass are more capable in this regard than is known, and those in your water's regularly make good use of this. I read one study in which yellow perch (physoclists) made nightly changes of 20feet. If the payoff can counter the effort/energy deficit, maybe it's possible. But another explanation might be the way sonar depicts discrete objects like fish. They are recorded on screen in relation to the distance from the transducer not necessarily their depth. A big hook at 50 feet might be 50 feet from the TD, but only 20feet deep, or much less. Just to add to Pauls great answer bass do have a way to compress the bladder to move deeper but it also causes them to sink so they would have to swim to stay off the bottom. All they have to do is swim downward against the bladders floatation until buoyancy is lost. I personally don't fizz fish but send them down with a weight until they sink which is the same thing as the bass swimming down. Also ultra deep fish from my own experience can and will make larger moves than fish in shallow water. The pressure must change much slower in ultra deep water. Also, the balance of a fish is connected to it's swim bladder so "not needing to be fizzed" and having a good balance and equilibrium to live and feed are not always the same thing.

There are lots for sale in the background of this photo. I couldn't get the photo smaller so you may have to click on it. Lake is the best bet for big bass in the Southeast outside Flordia. Those five fish weigh almost 40 lbs and were caught this spring. It's not an easy lake to fish but it has big bass. The lake is Lake Varner near the town of Covington which is just East of Atlanta. You can search this site and find a few posts on it. I fish many more electric only lakes in GA and could tell you a couple more good options as well. Just send me a pm.

Having the right head for grass helps as well. The Spot Stalker or the Davis hbt heads are the best I have found for coming through grass.

Here are three facts about bass to help with understanding the myths about them moving first. 1.Shallow bass don't actually move deeper from shallow water in most cases. They can and do often move out to deeper water but stay shallow suspended over deep water. Making swim bladder adjustments takes a lot of time and energy so for the most part bass stay at the same depth during a day. 2. Daily bass movement in most cases has almost nothing to do with temperature. 3.Fish may not have eyelids but they have no problems with bright sun in shallow water and will not go blind. Here is just one thing that could be happening. Shad do not have a swimbladder so they can and do make daily moves from shallow to deep. When they are shallow the shallow bass are more active. When the shad move deep the deep fish turn on.