Swamp Girl

I like sidetracks. No need to apologize. I'm wondering now if I shouldn't chuck my lures like Doug Flutie and his famous Hail Mary, but make shorter and MORE casts to trigger more reaction bites. T-Billy, come to Maine to catch loads of bass. I'll get a tandem canoe, put you in the bow, and park you on fish. I've scouted 19 new ponds for next year. So much to explore! One is a 450-acre bog. Geez, I could spend a week exploring that and still miss some nooks. I already mentioned the pond I scouted last week. You drive down a dead end road to a stop sign, explaining that the land is private and you must follow the rules, the first one being don't drive down to the pond. The landowner even erected a barrier to stop cars. Well, I bought wheels for my canoe, so I'll roll down to the pond and launch. The pond only has three cabins on it and connects by a mile-long swamp/creek to a bigger pond with another three cabins. Not completely wild, but close, since a lot of cabins are only inhabited for a week or two each summer. It looks great. And on the drive to this pond, I passed two swamps, so the first morning I go there, I'm going to stop and cast into both swamps. Another pond I'm aching to fish is one I already fished this year. It's almost all lily pads, but I caught two 18-inch bass and lost a 19-inch bass on my visit there. 90% of the pond is a mile of lily pads, but I've caught a few fish froggin' now and I think I'm ready for The Show. And I've been watching videos about how big bass can be caught pre-spawn. Spring will be my Christmas and I'll be like a kid whining to open the presents.

Okay, I've changed my mind. I think distance might still be in play, but now I'm going with Dwight, ironbjorn, and the other "it's a reaction strike" guys. The longer the lure's in the water, the more time the bass have to study it and find some fault with it. MassBass, I do vary my retrieve and try pauses, but I haven't found the pauses to be more triggering than a steady retrieve. It's not that I don't catch fish on a pause. It's that I catch the same number, more or less, and the pause means I'm covering less water. AaronH, I like your click counter. However, my boat is so wet that I keep my cell phone in plastic. It still sorta works in the plastic, but it's a pain.

Most of you guys know I fish a lot of surface lures, primarily the Whopper Plopper and wake baits. I also fish with spinning reels because I can cast farther. A big Whopper Plopper with ten lb. mono can be slung a long ways, which means that there's a lot of water to plop before it returns to my canoe. What still surprises me, after decades of catching bass, largemouth and smallmouth, with surface lures, is that I catch 40% or so of my bass in the first two or three feet of where the lure lands. The chances of catching a fish diminish the closer I am to the canoe, unlike muskies, which are slap-happy to take a lure two feet from me. This is my best guess: First two to three feet from where the lure lands: 40% of the largemouth I catch Next five to ten feet after that: another 40% of the fish I catch The rest of the retrieve: the remaining 20% of the fish I catch Does it play this way, percentage-wise, for the rest of you? I think it works this way because even though I'm a quiet fisher, bass are less wary the farther they are from me and thus more willing to strike. It's not like I'm casting at rocks and logs, like I do with smallmouth in Ontario, here in Maine. I'm mostly fishing weed beds and lily pads and one would think that there are bass all along an edge or over submerged weeds...and I think there are, but a little more wary because I inevitably make a little noise in my canoe, which puts them on edge. For Ontario smallmouth, I catch 60%-70% of my fish in the first twitch or two of my Rapala.

I just read the original post. Great advice. In 2023, I will follow it and focus on the vibration. I'll also be ready to sweep set the hooks if there's a change. Heck, yeah! I'm your choir and you're preaching to me, pastor.

Nah, eat the salad. I have a friend who just died at 61 from 99% blockage in his arteries. No more fishing and hunting for him. Gosh, I miss him and I hated to witness his last couple years, when walking to the mailbox would exhaust him. Truthfully, A fellow fisher who eats a burger from time to time On the less serious side, that store sounds great!

Welcome! The guys on this site are great. So savvy and helpful. I'd write more, but I'm busy building a back-in-time communicator. I'll tell my childhood self to pedal to Indiana to fish that gravel pit with you. I'll be the skinny girl on the blue bike with the balloon tires. I'll have my fiberglass fishing rod strapped to the bike. The reel will be a Zebco 606. I will be wearing hand-me-down clothes.

I'm out of likes, but I ^like!^

Here's something beyond the line of what we're discussing:

All I know is that if I ever become a pro, I'm going to fish with a jet pack and use drone submarines to attach transponders to all the big fish.

I like the way you think, lunkerboss, and fish. When it comes to depth, I sometimes use Fish & Wildlife depth maps, but I don't take them fishing, though, because they get wet and worthless in my always wet canoe. However, one can determine depth with different lures, but in the end, depth doesn't matter to me as much as simply where the active bass are that moment. A boat is where we disagree. Yes, bank fishing is pure, but you're leashed to the land. In my little canoe, I can roam and I do roam. I paddle a couple strokes, position the canoe for my casting, and cast three to five times. Then I move, always looking for active bass and changing my lures. Even if one lure is consistently catching fish, I still switch because I'm curious about bass. I don't need much of a boat. My only requirement is that it's light enough for an old woman to lift. I also agree about a 25-pound sack. The best piece of fishing advice was given to me by an accomplished fly fisher who said, when I landed a tiny bass, "They're all good." She's right. We need to be grateful for them all, big and small. ^I really like this.^ I can read a reed line and see the gap and wriggle my canoe through it. That's a skill set that a pro might never develop and certainly not in their big, shiny boats. I'm so quiet in my canoe that there were a couple times this past summer when I worked deep into the lily pads and made a mistake and bumped the boat and I saw four or five swirls less than four feet from my canoe. They didn't know I was there until I blundered or if they did, I was stealthy enough that they felt secure. I'm almost always the only one on a lake, but if someone else arrives and they're half a mile away, I sure hear them again and again and I'm hearing them through the air, which doesn't conduct sound nearly as well as water. If I'm hearing the other fisher with my old ears, the bass sure are hearing them too.

Great analogy. I try to go through my progression of pass options fast too and that happens before I even reach the lake. It happens the evening before, when I'm thinking about the water I'll be fishing and rigging my five rods for it.

I just discovered this thread and only read the first and last page, but I look forward to reading and laughing more in the coming days. Sadly, I resemble a couple of the memes, like catching bass with spinning rods, which I use 90% of the time, and taking photos of pretty skies.

I'm a fellow swamp rat, Mr. Wolf.

Oh, I'm too fraidy to fish again this year. It's winter here and the wind is howling. However, I did scout the pond and it does look gorgeous. It also connects to another pond down a mile of swampy river. C'mon, 2023! I'll share some pics then.

^I know this lake! Well, not this exact like, but lakes that look just like it. And I love them all.

I scouted a new pond two days ago. It's perfect! No boat ramp. A walk through the woods to reach it. Likely full of fat bass. Let's go!* *There is snow on the ground and we'll be paddling through ice.

Alex, I don't know if you feel the weight of us Yankees angler perched on your shoulder, as well as the shoulders of other southern and western anglers. Think of us as ginormous black ravens, crying, "Evermore," as we want to see evermore fish photos and videos. This is us, waiting for the next fish reports, looking to the southeast and then the west:

Alex, when you paused on the retrieve of that BD Shad, is that because you saw the bass or sensed the bass? Again, I love your videos.

I trapped and released 33 red squirrels a few summers back and they'd be the same. They'd be bonkers in the cage, trying to free themselves, but when I got to the release site and opened the door, they'd just sit, watch, and wait. I found bear tracks in my front yard this morning. It better bed down pretty soon. Your first bass is so colorful that it looks like a tropical reef fish. Fat too! Beauty!

I. Am. Spartan! This is me becoming slightly peeved if anyone suggests I need more than a canoe and a shack.

It's got that old school Rapala balsa core and new school finish. It's heavy too, so I can chuck it a long ways, which I believe lands more fish. I catch about 40% of my fish within the first two or three feet of where my lure lands and I often cast as far as I can.

I'm glad you approve, Alex. I listen. And I try to learn from you guys. Alex, I think the 6th Sense Crush will be a winner. I know you love them and have scored with them. I like that they run at five feet. I fish a lot of shallow water and I want something that lets me just tick over the weeds, hopefully to yank some bass out of them. Here's what I bought Mr. 46. I think it looks amazing. I found some rock bottomed parts of a few pond with boulders where I always catch smallmouth and I though the smallies would prefer the minnow shape to my fat wake baits:

I've topped off my tackle box for 2023 and I'm all set. Here's what I bought: 5 more Whopper Ploppers, my go-to bait for 2022 and I changed the hooks on my scarred, used ones 8 6th Sense crankbaits, both the Crush and the Movement 80x 4 Rapala minnow-shaped wake baits Various Roboworms 3 Z-Man chatterbaits I'm not going to buy anymore because there's so much to learn ^up^ here. I plan to use the Movement 80x and the Rapala wakebaits a lot before the weeds thicken in May and early June. I'll watch some videos on chatterbait and Roboworm fishing. I'll spend the rest of the winter studying the new ponds I'll be fishing in 2023. I'll return to many of the old ponds too. C'mon, 2023!

Here's how I feel about this thread: