Swamp Girl

I love this thread.

Congrats, Smells like Fish! A pond has been my lifelong dream, but it will never happen. I've simply circled the Sun too many times, but if Alex ever makes his dream pond a reality, I'll be pawing at his door, begging for five casts. No, ten. No, twenty. No,....

In a similar vein, I was fishing in the rain below some rapids northeast of Kenora when two Canadian women in a canoe came hurtling down. They didn't have dry bags. They had trash bags. They didn't have Gore-Tex parkas. Again, more garbage bags. They asked me about the portage at the other end of the lake. "To the right of the waterfall, but it's a tough one. A billy goat portage with a narrow path teetering on a gorge." "Sounds fun!" they said, smiling. Then I think about the kayakers I used to see with $5,000 sea kayaks on city ponds, who will never see anything like what those two, tough Canadians saw.

Great post, A-Jay. I rue that day, IF it ever comes, but I'm nearly always the only one fishing a body of water and I fished 15 bodies of water this year and will fish at least that many new ponds and bogs in 2023, so the bass aren't seeing a Whopper Plopper every day or even every week. Plus, as I stated earlier, I fish with five rods and only one has a Whopper Plopper. Generally all five rods catch fish, so I'm not a one-trick pony. I'm a five-trick pony!* *I know five tricks shouldn't be a point of pride, but it's all I've got. Well, to be frank, ^this^ is my trick. And stealth.

Go, Craig, go! ' When I posted about my low hookup rate while froggin', a couple fishers responded that their hookup rate was quite high. I'd love to fish with those guys and witness that. On the other hand, when I fish with a frog, I get lots of hits, so I don't need a high hookup rate and the misses are almost as much fun as landing the fish. I'm only laughing because that's me too, a child lost in the woods for days.

Spanky, do you fish with your old lures that can't be replaced? I don't. I'd be afraid of losing one. An old timer lure that isn't mentioned much at bassresource.com is the Mepps spinner. I know some of you use it, but giving the preponderance of newer lures that are thrown, today's bass might not see Mepps as much as they once did. I catch good numbers and good-sized fish with my most basic Mepps, the one with the brass blade and plain hook.

One day, you and I might be standing together outside a Bass Pro store, saying: "You go first." "No, you go." "I'd rather you go first." "No, you." Then maybe some younger, kind bassresource.com fisher will appear and say, "C'mon, you two. I'll help." And we'll both sigh and smile.

When I caught my first fish on a Whopper Plopper and wake bait, it was thrilling. Same with my first fish on a jerkbait, a lipless crankbait, and a soft plastic swimbait with a weight on the shaft of the hook. And my first fish on a frog was fireworks, hooking me more than the fish. I bought some square bills for next season and some slender Rapala wake baits too. So, I'm slowly joining this new age of choices upon choices, but when I read posts at bassresource.com, I'm reminded again and again and again of what I don't know. I don't think I'll ever reach the point where I can cite the maker, model, and finish of every lure like most of you do. I was raised in the era of Rapala, Pflueger, Mann's, Mepps, and Heddon. It seems like there are ten times as many companies today and fifty times as many lures. So, I'm both excited by the choices and overwhelmed by them and I haven't touched upon pitching, punching, flipping, and whatever other casting techniques are out there. I am working up to trying chatterbait fishing and roboworming too in 2023, but a part of me misses the old days of tying my outfit to my bike with string and taking five lures fishing. However, in the end, I do like choices. I fish with five rods and I'd fish with ten if I could fit them into my canoe without them becoming tangled. And sometimes, I make a single cast with a lure and then another lure and another, trying to determine what they want in that moment at that place. But if you ever see an old woman in a big tackle shop looking at the aisles and aisles of lures and you hear a slight whimper, you'll know that's me. P. S. - Of the new lures I'm buying, I'm most excited about the Sixth Sense Movement 80X because I fish some water as skinny as Twiggy and I'd like an option other than a surface lure.

I've always wished that every time a litterbug chucks trash, that a portal would open and the trash would immediately land on their bed. Alex, thank you. Oh, and thank you. P. S. - THANKS!

Bass love it, for sure. At least Maine bass do. Remember that I caught four doubles on my Whopper Plopper, i.e. two bass on one cast. Bass have to really want a lure to compete for it like that. I think your Alabama bass will love it too. Its sound is similar to a buzzbait and you've had good luck with that.

Cast the Whopper Plopper and wait a couple seconds for it to settle. If you reel right away, it will be submarine and take a couple seconds to surface. Steady retrieve works best for me, but sometimes I slow it and even stop it. You can also jerk it like a popper. That's a great color. I caught a lot of fish with that color. I'm about to pull the trigger on some Rapala BX waking minnow lures. Has anyone used them? I expect smallmouth to like them as much as largemouth.

Way North Bass Guy, you are one tough hombre. It's mid-November and you're still fishing. In Canada! CANADA!!! I found a little footage of you fishing. You must have fallen in the water, right?

"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!