MIbassyaker

I was throwing a 3/8oz bladed jig with a trailer on a medium Pfleuger Trion combo for awhile monday, and it felt OK (although I didn't catch anything on it). 3/8 is about as high as I usually go on that rod, but I've used it for crankbaits up to 5/8oz, which is fairly heavy for it, but doable.

I haven't lived here long enough to know how exactly how the rules have changed, but I think drop shot used to be illegal in MI. It's still not legal everywhere. IIRC, it's based on a concern about salmon being snagged. From http://www.eregulations.com/michigan/fishing/lawful-methods/ : Drop-shotting: The practice of having a weight suspended below a hook that is tied directly to the main fishing line is lawful on inland lakes, Great Lakes and Great Lakes Connecting Waters only. This gear may not be used on rivers, streams or drowned river mouth lakes. Further clarification about the history of this rule from native Michiganders needed!

But...you're negative in the first place BECAUSE they're already avoiding your lure, no? What I mean is, you're negative because you're getting skunked. If you're already getting skunked, you're already doing something wrong. Unless you figure out what it is that you're doing wrong, you're probably not going to fix it. So you're going to keep getting skunked. In that case the attitude is not the cause; it's an effect that gives the illusion of being a cause because you don't know what the real cause is (if you knew, you'd just fix it!). The real cause is some aspect of location or presentation you haven't figured out.

OK, those work fine for me in lakes too, and for both largemouth and smallmouth. I also use only spinning, in both lakes and rivers. I use heavier or lighter mono or braid, depending on the situation, but I'm very confident I could get by almost anywhere I fish with just the two I mentioned. I don't bother with fluoro at all.

Well, sounds like I need to find a new excuse.

We have a 6'6" MH ugly stik GX2 at our house, and I would recommend against it. It's awkward even for an adult, unless you're fishing something stationary like live bait under a bobber. And the reel that comes with the typical combo is very poor quality. It does not crank very easily or smoothly, and online reviews show a lot of people complaining about them breaking under very minor stress. The Daiwa you say you got for yourself seems alright -- is there a smaller version, (under 6', and a 2500 size reel or smaller)?

You said you use spinning only, and you are fishing a river for smallmouth. Is that right? For that I use 8lb Trilene XT mono or 30lb Power Pro braid (8lb diameter mono equivalent).

Shrug. I'm sure it's not for everyone.

I like ribbontails more (I think they look cool), but straight tails are more versatile. So straight tail if I could just choose one.

Hey, anything over keeper size up here is a quality fish, as far as I'm concerned! And I don't actually mind a day of dinks, either. But numbers and sizes have both been lower than usual for me this summer.

Here is something for river smallies that seems to work for me well in clear water in the summer, but I don't hear recommended very often: a 4 inch worm rigged weedless on a Slider Head or an Owner Bullet Ultrahead. I use Berkley power worms in black and pumpkinseed color and a 1/8 oz size head. I look for deeper pools to drop it into and hop it along the bottom with the current.

I wish I had some big bass to show off like everybody else. But I don't, so I'll show off the best of my recent little bass instead. At a new lake one morning around 8:30, two old guys sitting on a porch see me paddle up to some pads and start taking about me, kind of loudly: "Look at that! He's fishing out of a kayak! it's got rod holders and everything! If he gets a big one it will drag him all over the lake, haha!" Kayak Fishing: Still kind of exotic, it seems! First cast to the pads, right in front of them, with a weightless t-rigged senko...2lbs even. I should have gotten the old guys in the picture. And I believe these may be my first two buzzbait fish ever, on a Cavitron yesterday morning: Under 2lb but both keepers. A third one that seemed bigger came unbuttoned kayakside, unfortunately. And there were a few more strikes I couldn't hook up with. I have had buzzbaits for years and used them off and on, but i don't remember ever getting one to produce before yesterday morning.

I don't know where you're fishing, but I can assure you, there is definitely no shortage of "bucket fisherman" who are "white guys"

Now that's worth pinning for future reference. (kidding. but only a little)

I fish out of a kayak too so I only bring a fraction of what I have each time I go out. I still bring way, way more than I ever use. I have gotten a lot of my plastics from grab bags and random bargain buckets, and most of those have gone straight into worm binders after sorting. When I buy plastics in a package, I keep them in the package, and just toss them in a backpack if I want to bring them with me. I've decided I actually prefer the "loose packs in a backpack" approach, and have been phasing out the worm binders. I still bring the binders with me, but now if I ever repackage plastics, I just use clear laminated bags ordered from Do-It Molds, and leave them loose to throw in the backpack with everything else.

I bet all the cool kids were wondering, "what does that kayak guy know that I don't??"

You will go crazy trying to figure out optimum colors for every possible bait without trying them first. Start simple, see what works in your waters, then complexify, as needed. Blacks, greens, and browns are pretty universally useful for worms and jigs. Forage patterns: what do the bass eat in your waters? craws, shad, bluegill, perch, etc. Bright colors are good for visibility in stained or murky water -- chartreuse, bright reds and oranges, bubblegum, etc. Firetiger-like patterns cover a few of these at once and thus can be a good stained water catch-all. However, I don't load up on the the "brights" until I have clear sense of where I will use them. But if a color or pattern has caught your eye and is haunting you, just get it. It will continue to haunt you anyway until you buy it, which will happen sooner or later. Who knows, it might even work. Bullet weight color? Now that's really splitting hairs. Recently, like you, I was also unsure of what to get from Siebert Outdoors. So I ordered a "random jig pack" and was really happy with it -- I got an excellent variety of sizes, head styles and skirt colors to try out. I figured as long as I was uncertain about what I wanted, I may as well take SO's random judgment in place of my own random judgment.

Good call on the silver minnow -- I always forget about those. Sounds similar to a few of the little lakes I fish. These lakes sometimes have a few different well-defined weedlines where each type of vegetation tends to give way to others as you go deeper, pads or reeds, to coontail to cabbage, for instance. But the pads always seem like "low hanging fruit" to me; i'll start there, and move deeper only if/when it gets slow. (although I expect in this case you'd find the smallmouth deeper if the lake has both LM and SM). I'll rig something to run across the top and fall between the pads, something to run fairly shallow along the edge of the pads and over the next type of vegetation down, and something I can work more slowly in deeper water.

......grape.....raspberry.....plum....candy..... (I don't even know if you can buy senkos in those colors, but maybe you should be able to...) No doubt there is a marketing lesson here, somewhere....

There are so many "old" baits I've never gotten around to buying, let alone trying, but the new Zman baits are right up my alley, especially the tube.

Yup! The only way to learn how to feel is to spend some time feeling.

We've been having a cool summer up here -- hasn't hit 90 repeatedly yet. We may get over 90 this week, but not for long. Yet, the fishing has been slower than usual almost every time I've been out. Most successful presentations over the last couple weeks have been slow-falling baits fished early in and around fairly shallow emergent vegetation (pads, mostly) -- specifically, weightless t-rigged flukes and senkos and a Zero Gravity Jig. I have even gotten some strikes on my long-time nemesis, a buzzbait! (why is it my nemesis? I have puzzled over this myself -- everybody loves them, and there is virtually no disagreement, anywhere, over how and when to fish them; they have just never produced for me for some reason.). Still trying to get the hang of hooking up, though. Usually this time of year, on a couple clear-water lakes I fish, there is a good deep bite around submerged cabbage beds, 15' down. It's T-rigged worms/craws/creatures all month. But that has not produced consistently this summer. This is making something hit home that I "know", but clearly have not been putting into practice: Fish the current conditions, not history.

Believe it or not, there is an entire academic literature in applied ethics on the question of whether the choice to engage in catch and release fishing at all is ethically justifiable. The argument against boils down to what you say here: If I do it, I cause unnecessary harm and distress to fish and I risk mortality, whereas all I gain is personal enjoyment. That is, the net benefits do not outweigh the costs. Catch and keep fishing, however, like hunting, result in a harvest in which the benefits can outweigh the mortality cost (presumably, if you harvest for food, that means there is something else you are not eating instead, which is saved). Ergo, hunting and catch and keep fishing are actually more ethically justifiable than catch and release fishing. Note, it's not an argument about what should be legal, just an argument about whether one, at the moment of decision, is ethically justified in choosing to do it, compared to not doing it, or to doing something else. There are many possible responses to this, some of which are good and some of which are bad. But my response is simply to shrug and point out that the range of alternative activities I could do for leisure instead would impose worse costs, without any greater benefit, simply by moving around more, using up more energy, and taking up more space, potentially creating more waste, and creating more lucrative markets for resource extraction and exploitation. In the face of all the myriad things humans do natural environments and creatures within them every day, even If I accept their argument, I'm quite sure my own catch and release fishing is nowhere near the most ethically problematic thing either I or they do every day.

braid works just fine for crankbaits. But bring a plug knocker along with you. In addition to getting the lure back, If you get hung up and can't get it free, you won't have to cut off a long section of line.

I'm not sure why, but a lot of people seem to think if you throw it back you're "wasting" it, sort of like like throwing a rotisserie chicken in the garbage. It makes me wonder if they comprehend that fish are wild animals that go on back to their home habitat once released.