hawgenvy

I am into a million different types of bait. But of all of them, my overall most productive bait for LMB is the Rage Menace grub, simply t-rigged with a 4-0 EWG hook and a non-pegged 3/16 oz tungsten bullet weight. Blue/black or green pumpkin. I always break apart the tiny tail connector. I think having a bullet weight, at least a small one, makes a big difference with the Menace. With it the tail will kick as it falls, but without the weight it won't unless it is actively retrieved. The Menace is a great jig trailer also, a bit more subtle than the Rage Craw (which is an awesome trailer as well).

I haven't literally seen bass on beds, but a fishing buddy caught a fish a few days ago with a fat belly that was dripping eggs out of her cloaca. And a friend and I caught 20 nice bass in the hour before sunset this evening, so I'd say the pre-spawn/early spawn season is here.

Had a half hour to fish today between work and sunset, so I raced over to a local pond. The bass were going nuts all over the place chasing little fish. I threw out a Menace grub and caught about ten 1-2 pounders in 15 minutes. I then tossed the grub to a wooden retaining wall and something big grabbed it, but I lost the fish on the hookset. I tossed to the same spot, and same result! Third time I had him, and after a spirited fight -- he was pulling out drag on 17 pound fluoro -- I landed, to my great surprise, this huge blue tilapia. Must have been at least 5 pounds. I should have weighed it but it didn't occur to me at the time. The gash in its flank may have been from one of my prior hooksets. It is unusual for tilapia to bite a lure, so my guess is that the fish was defending a bed and not trying to eat it.

It's almost always an adventure fishing in south Florida, even when the bite sucks, like this morning. My friend and I fished the canal on the Boca Raton/Delray Beach line. The first interesting sight was a great blue heron on a dock trying to swallow an large oscar and practically choking on it. He finally managed to spit it out onto the deck and just stood there looking at it not knowing what to do next. Fishing was a struggle, just three small bass and a miniature peacock. A boat near us, though, landed a clown knifefish, quite an interesting creature. And then I caught on a jig, for the first time, a jaguar guapote, seen in the photo. I thought it was a crappie for a few seconds, then I noticed the cichlid fin pattern and recognized it as a guapote from photos I had seen.

Went tonight to the Horrendous Pads with my brand new flipping stick, a Dobyns Champion XP DC766FLIP that arrived on my doorstep last night. This fish was my only bite but it was a good one. I was impressed with the new rod -- much more sensitive than my other big stick. It was easy to pitch the hefty jig accurately and I was able to control the fight. The fish tried to wrap me around the leaves but I was able to lead her out of the nasty stuff nose first. Also, I think a heavy weed guard on a jig helps get fish out of thick pads.

It was two weeks ago. Naturally, I had just spooled on some fresh #17 fluorocarbon before heading to the lake with the one rod for a short evening outing. I executed a perfect hookset, driving my jig into a fat bass that I cajoled out from the mouth of a big metal pipe. I knew I had her pinned solidly, and after a short battle I decided to flip her into the boat. As I lifted up on the fish, somehow my thumb pressed the cast button. I nearly tossed my rod into the air when the big weight of fish suddenly vanished, and as my jaw dropped in shock the spool exploded into a gigantic mess that I realized could be only remedied later, and only by knife. I had to hand-line the line back. To my surprise the fish was still there. I tossed her back in and went home -- feeling, since I had at least landed a fat fish, only half defeated.

Hey, Slade, that Bienville Plantation sounds pretty nice. Too bad it's 360 miles from home. Is that a private lake for plantation guests (which would be awesome) or is there a public ramp?

There are plenty of really good guides in S Florida that fish artificial baits. If you end up coming down in our hot, sticky summer consider snook fishing -- kind of like bass on steroids -- and the salt water areas are more tolerable temperture-wise. Anyway, if I were traveling as far as you're going to in order to catch bass, I'd probably go to El Salto for LMB or to the Amazon basin for giant peacocks.

Boudin might be messy, but smoked anduille halved lengthwise on some french bread with a dab of mayo might be a darn good snack out on the lake.

I often hear gunshots while fishing in the Glades or on Okeechobee. It's already creepy enough. This will, next time I'm out there, remind me that the flying lead may be coming from illegal target shooting behind the tall grass I'm flipping. I might be interested in purchasing a Kevlar lined PFD! I hope the lawsuit against the shooters will lead the authorities to crack down on the phoney ranges.

As a kid I used to catch huge bullfrogs by dragging big nightcrawlers across the duckweed on the surface of a neighborhood pond in NY. Twenty years later I went back to the same pond with two of my kids. The frogs were still there. This time we used barbless hooks. The kids definitely enjoyed the enterprise.

Papajoe, is THAT what you meant by "take a kid fishing"? Anyway, try dragging slowly along the bottom, or short hops. Sometimes dead sticking is effective, but takes more patience than most bass anglers have with babies.

I have a personal preference for the Strike King Hack Attack Heavy Cover Swim Jig even though I generally don't swim it. It just works for me. I get a great hookup ratio with it. I can skip it, too. I just use black/blue and green pumpkin in 1/2 oz. I put a Rage Craw or Menace Grub on the back.

Hadn't been fishing in a while, until tonight. It's been hot and fish have been in the summer mood. Though the air is still in the high eighties, the shorter days are causing the water to cool slightly. I went out bank fishing on a pair of golf course ponds tonight and caught a dozen 2-4 pounders and a 5 pounder in an hour, most of them from under a wooden foot bridge. It was phenomenal. All of them smashed a green pumpkin chatterbait with a matching trailer. The fish were strong pullers tonight and I think they are becoming activated by the cooling water. We are expecting finally a cold front this week and after that the bass should be actively chasing schooled baitfish and go nuts chasing my collection of jerkbaits.

Sensitivity is likely something that can be measured objectively, but first it has to be defined more precisely. In other words, what exactly is sensitivity? From the angling perspective, we may say it is the ability to manually detect acceleration that occurs at the end of the fishing line. In the realm of materials science it may have some relationship to vibration transmission, and that will vary in any one particular rod with the frequency of the vibration. Perhaps if we can identify the frequency (probably low frequency) of the transmitted vibrations that we would encounter in bass fishing, and duplicate those vibrations in the lab upon a line extending from the end of a rod, we can easily (by means of a simple vibration meter placed at the reel seat) measure the amplitude of the transmitted vibrations. We could then compare it between rods. The problem remains, though, whether such measurement will reveal any valuable information that relates to the subjective feel, effectiveness, or fishing enjoyment of any rod. I have always wondered what parameters are used by rod blank manufacturers, and by the major rod makers who chose the blanks. Probably trade secrets that we will never be privy to. My favorite rods, out of the three or four brands that I have fished with extensively, are the Dobyns Champion series, which seem to me light and sensitive, and give me a sense of liveliness, fun, and confidence when fighting a fish. But, who knows?, it's probably all in my head.

While we're on the subject of aquatic plants, has anyone heard of the 1910 American Hippo bill (H.R. 23621)? Many aquatic plants (hyacinth, hyrilla, milfoil, etc., etc.) are invasive species. One of them, water hyacinth, so choked Louisiana waterways in the early 1900s that there was an effort to introduce African hippopotamuses to the bayous of Louisiana to eat the hyacinth. In turn, Americans would eat hippos. Some Louisianians were anxious to become hippo ranchers. The bill was proposed not only to solve the hyacinth problem but also to help solve the meat shortage of the time. Unfortunately, the hippo bill failed by only one vote. Too bad. And by the way, hippo meat is supposedly quite delicious. http://www.cooks.com/recipe/6i91m04e/hippopotamus-stew.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtzG0QUUfLM

So much of bass behavior remains mysterious. In the first few days after Irma I went bank fishing in several pond locations around Boca Raton and the bite was very aggressive. The water everywhere was high and muddy and for some reason the bass were hungry and plentiful. I recall catching a seven pounder in a pond surrounded by gigantic fallen trees. The effect seemed to last about a week. Last year while waiting for my fishing buddy I was chatting with a fellow in the bait shop at Slim's in Belle Glade. He was musing about the effect of hurricanes on bass fishing, and was going on about how giant bass were being caught everywhere by everybody in Lake Okeechobee for the first three days after a hurricane -- I think Wilma -- that had blown through several years previously. Go figure.

Maybe I'm a slow learner, but I have finally figured out that when fishing super dense emergent pads a flipping jig gets in and out much better than a t-rigged worm or a standard flipping rig (pegged weight, snelled flipping hook, plastic creature). The weed guard pretty reliably allows the jig to glide out past the treacherous vee in the pad, where the stem meets the leaf, the point where my usual set up always got stuck. Of course, the hardest part is getting a fish out of that stuff, but that's no more difficult with a jig than with anything else. This theory doesn't apply to other types of heavy cover. The bite was slow tonight but I managed to catch this 2 pound puppy out of some nearly impossible pads, using a 3/4 oz jig.

I find when I get overconfident, I may neglect to put my thumb down as the bait hits the water. As long as I do that simple step of stopping the spool at splashdown, I don't get a backlash. Then again, I tend to keep the centrifugal brakes most the way up. A good way to practice is to cast a spinnerbait directly into the wind during one of our Florida hurricanes. Once you are proficient at that you'll never get another bird's nest.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Next time take a photo. Even with a photo, it would be a stretch for a skeptic like me to believe there are smallies (or, say, moose) in the wild in S Florida.

Just try it out on the water with normal drag, spool tension, and brake settings. It'll probably be fine.

I live a half hour from BPS and 20 minutes from Dick's. Whenever I go to the stores I typically can't find what I'm looking for, anyway. Besides, hands-on doesn't help much unless you're actually fishing. Unless it's apparel that I need to try on or something I need right now, I'd buy online even if the store were next door.

This is a nice little article about the effectiveness and safety (to fish) of circle hooks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_hook