Swamp Girl

"Thank you so, so much," Alex rightly says to the bass. "Thank you so, so much," we video watchers say to Alex. Alex, in a perfect world, given how much you love bass and how grateful you are to catch them, you'd hook a DD every week, but a six-pounder is an almost perfect world and I'm smiling like this: My wallet too. I bought SEVEN 6th Sense Crush Flats because of you, Alex. Some of the blame is shared by all of you who boat bass with square bills and these are my first square bills. I'm ordering the Sixth Sense lures that run shallow (2 feet) next. So, yeah, it's a black hole, but Alex, most men can go a year or more without getting as excited as you do when you boat a beast, so you're buying bargains. I also replaced by primary Whopper Plopper's (loon coloration, 110 size) hooks this morning. My old hooks looked like this:

This is a cool thread. The only lure I found this year was a small Jitterbug. I'll likely never use it, but I was glad to remove it from the bush.

Heck, yeah, I'd be fishing in a powerboat too. Big. Stable. And you might be able to reboard it if you fell into the water.

I fished a couple mornings in the high thirties this fall, but it's the water temps that put my canoe away for the winter, for as much as I love catching bass, they aren't worth risking hypothermia and maybe death in my canoe.

Thanks for working so hard to free that bass, Bob. You lost the fish, but caught a heckuva yarn.

acoker, please keep your Everglades bass in the Everglades. If you bring them north, they'll eat our biggest bass. Thank you.

Alex, I agree that surface fishing is tops, literally and figuratively. I'd rather catch one musky/largemouth/smallmouth on the surface than two beneath the surface. Then there's froggin', which is Surface Fishing 2.0 Ultra XXXL, since they're hunkered under the lily pads a couple feet from you and whereas they want to eat a Whopper Plopper, they want to obliterate a frog. Like muskies on the surface sometimes do, I've seen bass make those V's in their haste to clobber my frog and if they could talk, they'd say, "Bass smash puny frog!" hokiehunter lives in Heaven. This is me looking at hokiehunters' photos:

I caught a lot of fish, but I also got some big fish...for me...for Maine. I know they're not Texas/Florida/California-sized, but here are some of them:

Alex, I've been in Canada when the smallmouth were surface feeding. They'd snatch something from the surface and then you had ten seconds or less to land a surface Rapala within a three or four foot circle of where they hit. If you were quick enough and accurate enough, it was FISH ON! It was the best kind of nervous, wondering if you could meet the two criteria of speed and precision casting. White bass, on the other hand, are much less demanding. When they're chasing shad to the surface, "general direction" catches fish.

Chunky bass, Mr. 46. Alex, you're pulling the Bass Resource wagon. It's as big as a Budweiser wagon because it's chock full of a million lures and there used to be a herd of Yankee horses in harness with you, but we northern horses are all growing fat in our feed bags and barns. You and a few others keep these threads alive because you keep pulling and thank goodness for that. Seeing you catch fish is the next best thing to catching fish and especially when you're catching them on the surface. Alex, I just watched that school video. It's. Your, Best. One. Yet! Too exciting. I love seeing bass on the surface and casting to them.

Scooting from pond to pond sounds like a blast!

^I love that you participate from Portugal!^

I didn't fish May, June, and half of July, but once I realized that there are bass pert near everywhere, I got busy and caught hundreds. My best session, morning or evening, was 57, but I had many sessions in the forties. As most of you know, my main lure was the Whopper Plopper, but I also caught fish with a wacky-hooked Senko, a wakebait, jerkbaits, crankbaits, Mepps spinners, and froggin'. My challenges were: 1. Learning to fish weeds after decades of fishing rocky lakes in northwestern Ontario for smallmouth. 2. Froggin'! Man, it's hard, but it's the funnest form of fishing I've ever done because that frog makes them so mad and they often hit right beside my canoe and then you have to fight them in the half-liquid of weeds and water. 3. My dang nets. I bought three of this summer, but became wary of netting a fish because the hooks would tangle in the net. I'm hoping my third net, made of rubber and aluminum, will be the winner next year. 4. Becoming up-to-date on the new lures for largemouth. You guys reference so many lures and brands that I don't know. I made a little progress, but I have much further to go. 5. The dark. I've had such good fishing before sunrise and after sunset that I started fishing earlier in the morning and staying later in the evening. In the wilderness, there's not much that scares me, but when people might be near, I get the heeby-jeebies. So, I started wearing a knife, a tactical flashlight, and seriously potent pepper spray that's about ten times as powerful as bear spray. And I stop and listen sometimes in the dark, to discern if someone is afoot. My current challenge is waiting for next year!

Great video, Alex. I laughed and grinned through it. I love your excitement and I'm going to add buzzbaits to my tacklebox next year. I have NEVER caught a bass on a buzzbait. Heck, I've never even used a buzzbait for bass. I have caught five fish on a buzzbait, all muskies, in a single hour, which was perhaps the greatest hour of fishing I've ever enjoyed. I was fishing a strait with a wind howling through it and I needed something that could be heard over the chop. At one point, I had two V's/muskies chasing my buzzbait. If I'm smiling at the moment of my death, it's because I'm remembering that hour. Heck, yeah, Bob! I felt the same way!

I also try to drop a lure as lightly as possible onto the water.

I figured it was a raccoon. Well, my mini-carabiners arrive tomorrow. We'll see if that wily coon can solve them. Ha, Bob! I was a basketball coach for years. One year, at a tournament, the hosting high school hadn't turned on its hallway lights. I took a little walk and saw that they'd done some fancy brickwork, with bricks sticking out here and there. So, I fetched my girls, sat them in a circle, and told them that there used to be some seriously mean girls in that school, girls so mean that they drove other girls to suicide and after the deaths, they repented and asked that the girls who took their lives be buried in the walls of the school so that they'd feel like they finally belonged. Well, they intended well with that request, but what they didn't realize is that the girls in the walls heard all the laughter in the halls and grew angrier and angrier that they were missing out on the good times, so when it was dark, they'd push the bricks out of the walls and have their own good times in the dark. "C'mon," I told the girls. "I'll show you where they're buried." So, I took them down a horribly dark hallway and told them to feel their way by grazing their fingers across the walls and I led them to those jutting bricks. You should have heard them scream and laugh and watched them run when their fingertips touched those bricks!

Oh, yeah, he's my big brother, for sure. He used a plane to scout. I use Google Earth, but when I was a kid, I'd take my bike to scout for farm ponds right after a heavy rain when the ponds would leak and I could follow the the rivulets to the ponds. About ten days ago, to access a lake surrounded by private land, I baked some cookies for the landowner, much like Pat would trade accounting for access. And they were great cookies, with giant dark chocolate chips and roasted, salted pecans and real vanilla, so I know that landowner will remember me next spring! Pat is also sound conscious, like I am, and fishes the lesser fished water, like I do. He even used/uses 17 lb. mono like me! I'm only 1,113 ten-pound bass behind him, but my 19 and 20-inch bass thrill me like his ten-pound bass thrill him.

This is a great article about a great, great bass fisher. Thanks for the link, Alex. P.S. - When a man who's caught more than a thousand DD bass says he's hooked the new world record once or twice, I so believe him.

You and I really get into the shapes and colors and patterns of fish. Of course, we both love them big and fat, but there's more to enjoying a bass than simply its size. You once compared gardening to fishing and as a gardener, I would be silly to only treasure my biggest trees and bushes. Sure, I love, love, LOVE a big tree, but I also enjoy my lesser-in-size trees, but greater in color and form trees.

Do tell that story, Bob, when you have time. Say, TriRiver, since you're a critter professional, I have a suet feeder for the woodpeckers. Something keeps opening it and eating the entire suet cake. I have ordered some tiny carabiners to secure it because my twist ties didn't work. What do you think is stealing my suet? It eats the entire cakes. I find not a bit at the base of my post, suggesting it's a bigger animal. Also, if anyone ever rear ends you when you have skunks for passengers, they are going to be sorry.

Yikes, Bob! I have one of those traps too. One time red squirrels visited my bird feeders. They were so cute that I bought some treats just for them. A couple months later, they were everywhere, including my porch and roof thanks to my inadvertent squirrel breeding program! I trapped 33 and relocated them to a wildlife refuge, one at a time. It took about two minutes and one peanut to trap one. Say, how do you move a skunk?

I like you already, Jamo. "Why?" you ask. Or perhaps you said, "Huh?" Well, here's why: You fish overlooked neighborhood ponds. That's my shtick too! I even fished those overlooked ponds when I was a kid. And I fished where everyone else fished, I'd fish the farthest, nastiest corners of those lakes and reservoirs. I once fished where a pond emptied its overflow under the road into a bitsy pool on the other side. I could have hopped across that pool, but it was full of the biggest bullheads I have ever caught. I think they just lay in that pool with their mouths open and grew and grew and grew. Your fishing kin, Ol' Crickety

Congrats on another fine fishing trip, Alex. That first spot is beautiful and that third fish is on its way to becoming one of your beloved five-pounders. You can safely consider it a pre-five-pounder. The lm in the second photo too!