everythingthatswims

I doubt a c-rig works very well through the ice if we are talking year-round presentations in your area! I like a c-rig in the spring and summer, I tend to go towards a football jig if I'm fishing deep (slowly) in the fall. I fish a drop shot year-round but spring and summer are when I catch the most fish on it. If I had to pick two deep water techniques, c-rig and drop shot would be the two. Find them with the c-rig, then catch every last one of them on a drop shot!

Arthur?

I can't even fathom how many fish are in there. It must have big tournaments almost every weekend now, and it still kicks out tons and tons of limits, not to mention how many of those limits are over 20lbs!

Never ever buzz an ultravibe speed craw. Doesn't work

Almost always have to be throwing them around grass to get bit in my experience. Clear/dirty doesn't matter as long as you've got grass!

Don't tell anyone about this. It's the latest and greatest. Key components are the 50lb braid mainline, 15lb fluoro leader connection, and a bright green 1/32oz crappie jighead for the swimbait. Patent coming soon.

Braid with a leader is great for panfish. Just make sure you use a leader.

Don't overlook texas rigging with a #1 or #2 EWG or offset worm hook. Hookup percentage is extremely high with that setup. As others have said, gamakatsu split shot/drop shot #1 or #2.

I've caught bass with mint condition 3-5/0 EWGs lodged in their gullets, they are pretty resilient creatures. I also remember a bass in my neighbor's pond when I was just old enough to start biking down there alone to fish, it broke off a line above a bobber in the fall, and I don't think I was able to snag the line and remove the bobber/line from the fish until the following spring!

This past week I was in Bemidji, Minnesota, for the BASS College National Championship. It was an awesome experience for sure. In addition to competing in the event, I got to take over bass nation's snapchat for the first day of the event, received some cool new products, and met several pros (including Jordan Lee). The fishing on the lake where they had the event (Bemidji Lake) was not exactly something I am glad I drove 1300 miles for. We placed 44th out of 90 teams with 5 fish for two days, a total of 9lbs and change I believe. That alone should be a statement as to how tough the fishing was. Tough fishing doesn't bother me, it's the fact that we were so crowded, that when you fished something, you would probably be the 5th-10th boat to do so on that particular day. There was one area of about 5 acres of water, that I guarantee 30 boats were sitting on during the 2nd day of the event. My partner and I found good fish in practice, and had 4 good waypoints that we knew held fish. On the first day of the event, right after blastoff, there were 4 or more boats on each waypoint! And this is shallow water flipping/frogging! A few boats did put together some respectable limits, and they surely earned them, especially the leaders who pretty much blew it out of the water, even with only 4 fish on day one. I am looking forward to competing at these events in the future, hopefully we will have a little more room next time, feeling crowded is the worst way to fish a tournament IMO. I will say that there are some PHENOMENAL fisheries in Minnesota. Every place we heard about had nothing but good reviews from other anglers (aside from the lake the tournament was held on). My partner and I fished Cass Lake, about 10 minutes down the road from Bemidji, and it was absolutely stellar all three times we went there. Shallow water, heavy vegetation, up close and personal with heavy rods and straight braid, it was a blast! You would pretty much have 12-14lbs within the first 5 bites you had, the fish up there are built like footballs! There were also thousands of crawfish all over the bottom, the water had about 10' of visibility so you could see them scurrying around when the trolling motor spooked them. Here are some pictures of some Cass Lake studs!

My tournament partner and I made it to Minnesota for the BASS College National Championship this week. We fished a lake for fun yesterday and had a blast! Practice today wasn't too shabby either with a 4.8lb kicker. These fish are all built like tanks up here!!

He's gotta come back now, the local facebook fishing report page now has a *requirement* that you post the location, lure, technique, depth, etc along with the pictures of your fish. I don't mind sharing that here but it's tough when you know everyone on the page fishes the same waters as you!

The non-penetrating variety. I made my own with an old stringer but the college tournaments I fish require non-penetrating tags now.

@Looking for the big one When I do get skunked, I usually know that the odds of it are high before I go. This would be fishing in horrible conditions (flood/mud/COLD), or when I go looking for a big one armed with my telephone pole and pet trout. Getting skunked is pretty rare for me once water temps hit maybe 48, I don't think I have been skunked this year since March. I have definitely come close a couple times. I catch a lot of fish but I also have 2 or 3 fish days on occasion. As for fishing public access points, I RARELY do this. The fish that live there see every bait under the sun, lots of live bait too usually, and often they see the bottom of a cooler or bucket. Typically on large lakes and rivers, bank fishing just isn't going to get you in front of many fish unless there is a lot of access and you can move around. So I would suggest fishing smaller waters, try to go where others don't, and fish the places with a large number of access points. Also, go back where you have already been, and expand on what you did, especially if you had success.

You should see the yellow perch that come out of that place. Surprised @deep didn't put up a picture of a length citation of one of them!

Pm sent Also, Kentucky is just a nickname for the northern strain.

I really don't know how they got into the lake, we have a few places in VA that have Kentucky strain spots, but these fish are way different and after going to Lay Lake I can confirm that they are definitely the Alabama strain. Someone must have done a lot of work because as far as I know, Lake Norman is the closest lake with those particular fish. My brother and I got on a really spectacular bite fishing Carolina rigs on points and drop offs. Strange that we caught them that way, it was raining like crazy and blowing 15mph so you would think the fish would be looking for a moving bait. The lake mainly has largemouth, we caught lots of those today, and 6 spotted bass. Our best 5 today went 14lbs. Spotted bass sure are an interesting creature! "Bycatch"

For a Kentucky Strain spot, that is huge!

Oh jeez it's that dadgum damiki rig I should be back in the fall and winter when that thing is intended to be used on east TN reservoirs and will certainly give it a shot then.

I recently had a humbling couple of days on South Holston Lake, and I want to hear some of the ways you guys target fish behaving how the ones I found were. South Holston is an extremely deep lake, the boat is rarely in less than 30 FOW when you are fishing any bank (IF you are fishing a bank). It has a lot of limestone influence, so it looks really clear but probably isn't much more than 6' vis, it's just blue. The lake has gizzard shad, threadfin shad, and alewives. The smallmouth we were targeting were eating threadfin shad in the 2-3" range. The fish would be scattered in very large areas in the 50-150' range, I don't think depth was a concern to them. You could see the smallmouth chasing the shad on the surface. Typically it would be one fish (sometimes 2-3, but very seldomly), that would surface, blow up 2-4 times, and vanish. They were chasing individual shad, sometimes in groups of 10-15 (the shad), but once they got one, they went back down. Occasionally you could get one to eat a walking bait if you could get it to the fish in time, which typically didn't happen because of how spread out they were. We could see the fish on the graph suspended in the 20-35 foot range, and there were LOTS of them. We tried dropping drop shots to them, and the fish showed interest, but wouldn't bite the baits, they would just look at them for a while. I fished a deep diving crankbait that I know got in front of them, but to no avail. I fished a spybait, and I ended up catching one fish on that, but that was all. Tried a swimbait on a jighead, nada. Jerkbait (both deep and normal depth) nada. We tried several areas of the lake, and it was pretty much all the same. Normally I would chalk this up to the fish being too keyed in on specific forage meaning they were basically uncatchable, but the problem was, we caught several 18-20" smallmouth while trying to target the brown and rainbow trout in the lake. They were hitting kastmaster spoons trolled behind 1 and 2 ounce weights. Any advice or at least some sympathy? I really don't like it when I find the fish but can't catch them, and this was most definitely the case here!

I bet that's what it was, I have the little Rapala one that loves to do that from time to time. Thanks for catching that! Now I know it was 3.4lbs. I guessed 3.2 before I put it on the scales

Had a fun morning drop shotting some brush piles. 11 bass, two pickerel, and one pretty nice one! Fish was 19" and scales said 1.53... Time to get a new set of scales.

Day two on South Holston was TUFF! I caught 5 bass from 5:30-2:30. It was extremely frustrating, we found tons of schooling smallmouth but they were really spread out and would only be on the surface for 3-5 seconds before they vanished, and it would be individual fish. We could see them suspended on the graph at about 20-30 feet, and they would look at a drop shot, but not bite it. It was like that all over the lake!

I spotted bass

South Holston gave up some fine brown fish today