Swamp Girl

Nice setup, Standard. I once drove an Xterra too. Someone else will have to field this question, as I don't fish water with motorboats.

More great advice. I plan to have my own pincushion soon!

^I did not know this!^ I'm going to go try to do this right now. Thanks soooo much! I did it. It was easy-peasy. There are way more weeds that I would have guessed, which makes me even more excited!

That sounds super exciting. I was fishing below a waterfall in northwestern Ontario once. The water was going every which way. I cast a leech under a slip bobber into it and let the current carry it away from me. The bobber would be yanked to the left and right by the current, but then it would slowly disappear. That was a walleye.

I fished 14 ponds/bogs this year. I didn't start fishing until July, so I would have fished more if I'd fished the spring and early summer too. I'll be fishing my 15th pond Tuesday morning. The state of Maine has depth maps of most ponds, but not this one. It abuts the last pond I fished and that pond was deep, so I expect this one to be deep too. I study it on Google Earth and have noted some promising places. I won't have electronics, so my fishing will be visual. I plan to work the backs of some bays and points too. The Google Earth image was shot at a cold time, so I can't see any weeds, so when I arrive, I'll be weed hunting. I get so excited about fishing new water and especially this pond. It has zero cabins/homes and is a quarter mile across and nearly a mile long. It does have some boulders here and there, but no islands. We've had a ton of rainfall, so the inlet will have strong current. I'll focus there too. I LOVE this part of fishing, the planning and the imagining. It's like being a kid and studying your Christmas gifts under the tree and shaking them and chirping about what might lie under that wrapping paper. It's the planning that'll get me through the winter. I've also already lined up 15 other ponds I'll fish next year.

I should have written in the initial post, "the drawbacks of my canoe," which is a slender, Kevlar canoe. I would quibble that a boat so wide that it has oarlocks isn't a canoe, even though they market it as such.

Great tip. Thanks!

I've never fished through the night, Phish, but I sometimes begin the day shift so early that it's still night. I find it thrilling to hear my Whopper Plopper churning and then there's the splash and it's game on! I pray and pray for this fishing boat one day.

That fishing circus sounds awful. I like quiet fishing. No, I love quiet fishing. Gluttons trampling gluttons sounds awful.

Its head is so big that it could eat itself, if it started at its tail.

Huge crappie, Phish! You're a heckuva fisher.* *Sorry 'bout the cussin'. The crappie made me do it.

I would love the mystery of not knowing what's at the end of your line. I catch 80% largemouth, 15% smallmouth, and 5% pumpkinseed/yellow perch/chain pickerel.

In other threads, I've been extolling the virtues of a canoe, like gliding over lily pads, snaking through reeds, carrying more gear than a kayak, and being sneaky. Here are the drawbacks: 1. You can't stand. This is a big deal because it's harder to set the hook lower in the water and there are times I really want to stand and look over the reeds to see what's beyond. 2. They are tippy, some more than others. My canoe is especially tippy. When I first step into it, it feels like I'm on a fence rail. My canoe has what is called poor primary stability and good secondary stability, meaning that it feels tippier than it is. 3. The high sides, as opposed to a kayak, means I get blown about by wind. This is also a big deal when you're fighting a fish and and it means a lot of positioning corrections by paddle. 4. It's Kevlar, so it's delicate and has to be babied.

Heck, yeah! I even like when they splash me.

I love when we appreciate fish for more than just their size.

Beautiful fish, Steve.

Your PB is DD. You grow ginor-giganti-gargantu-uge bass! If your Florida-strain bass were magically moved to Maine, the Maine bass would yell "YIKES!" and your bass would say, "Yummy."

I feel the same way about spotted bass. One day, I will make a trip down south....

I'm going to try it, but I do have, as the medical community would say, a mild to moderate case of fraidy cat.

This is top-class storytelling. You really put me in the boat and each time, I suffered with you! The fish that jumped reminded me of a largie that jumped on me.Twice. Both times I could see her glory.

This should be my tagline: "At this point with all the fish I've caught in my life, it just seems strange that I would miss as many as I do sometimes." As I shared in another post, one reason I miss fish is because I get a lot of my hits at the very end of a long cast with stretchy mono. Another is that I'm in a light canoe and the wind is always moving my canoe, meaning there are times when I'm trying to set the hook over my shoulder. Yet another reason is that I'm sitting in a canoe, with nowhere near the leverage to set the hook that you get when you can plant your feet. I'm also old with a little arthritis in my hands. Still, there are moments when the stars align, like yesterday with a 19" bass that had a single hook of my six hooks just barely in her lip. I could see that this was the case as she started thrashing by the boat, but I managed to get her in the net. As someone posted here, sometimes we're the windshield and sometimes we're the bug.

I think A-Jay's massive smallies are orange.

Tennessee is having quite a year.

Mike, I miss fish nearly every time I fish. An average day for me is missing as many fish as I catch. By miss, I mean a fish will hit a surface lure and I won't hook it or I will hook it for a second or two or I have it hooked for a nearly full fight and have it beside the boat and it comes unpinned. I had one morning this year where I caught nearly every fish, but they were inhaling my wake bait that morning. They weren't flirting.