Swamp Girl

I love the quality of the light in the third photo. I also love that you always catch joy. You are a master joy fisher. I'm actually going fishing tomorrow afternoon, Alex, and won't be able to fish for at least five days after that due to a visit from a Tennessee bud who doesn't fish. What's wrong with him??? Anyway, I'm loading my rods with different lures: a soft plastic swimbait, a lipless crankbait, a real nightcrawler, and a Ned bait. My catch has been cut in half my last two outings and I want to see if different lures will help. I am going to also use a wacky worm since that's still producing. P. S. - I'd love to catch a rock bass. I haven't caught one of those guys for more than half a century.

Man, oh, man, you guys catch great fish!

No limit, Mr. 46! The winter is coming to Maine. Fish pics are like coals on the fire for this old Yankee. However, Dwight didn't exactly post a fish pic. Clearly someone painted the Goodyear blimp to look like a smallie and Dwight posed with that. I love the color and striping of the fish that A-Jay catches. I was hoping he'd add one or two to the gallery. Woody, yours is the shiniest bass I have ever seen. It looks like it's varnished! SoCal, that's beyond a football shape. It looks like the football that a Tom Brady-hater pumped extra full for revenge.

I have never fished a chatterbait nor a Roboworm, Alex. My 50-year pause in catching LM has left me so far behind the times! Beautiful bass!

king fisher, your bass has an otherworldly beauty to it. Its belly is as white as freshly fallen snow, which makes its dark markings even more striking. Mr. 87, that's a heckuva first fish on a jig! Alex, I do appreciate the beauty of spots, but of all the bass, I think golden and green smallies with strong striping like Mr. 46's are the most beautiful. Glad you're enjoying the photos. I am too!

I can see why you couldn't decide, Mr. Pig. Both spots are stunning. A half mile of river, Way North? Whoa! Now I'm a Smuckers' factory of jelly.

You have bass in your backyard??? You have turned me into a jar of jelly!

I reckon you're right.

^That is a beauty!^ Thanks for sharing. I love fish pics.

This is a beauty pageant. What was your most beautiful bass of 2022? The beauty criteria are yours to set. It might be the bass's coloration or shape. It might be the circumstances of the catch and your personal circumstances when you caught that particular bass. Here's mine and I picked her because most of the big bass I caught this summer were the offspring of a Cro-Magnon female and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. The dame below was as lightly colored as a yearling and as symmetrical as a candy drop. She looked daisy fresh too, as if she'd miraculously avoided life's chisel all her years. She was 19.25 inches and a bass of the far north, so she'd lived a few years too.

We already have top shelf fishing experts here. They might not have the celebrity, but I'm pretty sure that they've outfished most celebrities. Their sponsorships might make them a less valuable addition than others already here. I like JonB on YouTube, but am also annoyed by him hawking everything from his boots to his rod to his lures.

Then I too am a hot mess, for what you described is pretty much my fishing life. It's good to meet another hot mess!

Great link. Thanks!

Palin, I'm fishing my first New England fall. How will the LM fishing be in the second half of September and the first half of October? Will it have to be warm for the bass to bite? On Wednesday, after several days in the fifties, it will reach 68. Will that nudge the bass to bite? I know you don't know for sure, but I'm asking for your best guess.

My catch was just about cut in half my last two outings. And the last outing, the average size was down too. I haven't lost all my mojo, but half of it for sure. No mo' mojo. Just 'jo.

Thank you, Dwight.

My bedroom is decorated with old fishing magazines. I love the art of the old mags and hate the busy-ness of fishing magazines today, which are littered with breathless lies, like "37 Surefire Way to Catch Bass!" I also love the articles inside the old magazines, which weren't a whit about promoting tackle and were largely about how it felt to be on the water, dancing with fish, blessedly alone or equally blessedly with friends and family. There is still one vestige of the old magazines and that is Gray's Sporting Journal, whose writers plumb what it's like to work with a Springer or Pointer, knowing it's your last, bittersweet time because knees and eyes don't last forever, or how it feels to loft fairy flies to rising bass beside your son or brother. Today's magazines are all P.T. Barnum and no T.S. Eliot. As fishers, we are attuned to language, as we're attuned to water and woods. I heard this when I went north with 19 musky fishers for a week. One was a retired fighter pilot. A couple rode Harleys. One was a ex-football player. Another a bouncer and yet another a race car driver. They were manly men, but all used language in surprising ways: They were sometimes raw, often funny, but nearly always they expressed with concision and precision. Each strove to capture and convey what they'd seen and felt on the water because those moments mattered and will matter even more when we're too arthritic to cast and catch. Those callused men wanted our trip to last, so they went into the burrows where words bunker and wrestled them out. I see that here at bassresource.com too, a love of language that is necessary to say what we saw and felt this fishing day. C'mon, Field and Stream, fishers are poets, not marks for carnival barkers!

About ten days ago, I hooked and lost three four-pound bass on consecutive casts, all from the same spot. I was fan casting and throwing my Whopper Plopper, which casts a long ways, but those three gals were all in the same vicinity.

Tim, my biggest was 47", which isn't big to most serious musky fishers, for their cut-off is 50" and 47" is a long way, weight-wise, from 50". Heck, yeah, they do! As I nuzzle them up to my canoe, they're closer, "Closer, closer. Just a little bit closer and I unleash wet Heck!"

You had me at "canoe." The good fishin' was just frosting on the yummy canoe cake.

Whoa, Bassman! Beauties!! Thanks, Tim, for all the teaching. Speaking of teaching, I taught a year in South Bloomingville, west of Logan, and right by Old Man's Cave.

Thanks, T-Billy. I had to Google a couple of your words, which tells you how farm fresh your info is for me, and I'll try swimbaiting for sure. Nope, Alex, we'll have hard water come January. I frogged last night and this morning and triggered one tiny bite that was likely a pickerel. The lily pad bass have lost their frog appetite.

Be careful what you wish for, Alex. Muskies are scary! Their baleful glare boatside is just the beginning Then then there's tendency to strike a foot from the boat. And they leap like smallmouth. What's even scarier are the damage reports, i.e. the stories that musky-fishers tell of the damage musky lures have done to them. When I fished muskies from a canoe, my approach was to never bring a fish into the boat. The bonus is that they're no healthier release for a musky than a full water release. T-Billy, I like when fishers share tips on protecting the fish we love.