fishwizzard

I have settled on the Owner Ultra heads for my weedless ned head. It does really want to have the lure glued on, but I bought some tiny fly fishing hooks and over the winter i am going to try my hand at tying them on as a weedguard.

I had not, but wow, totaly unexpected! I really did complelty forget that they even existed after I got them home. I am even more excited about them now. This might be a sign I have too much tackle though, but lets leave that idea aside for a while.

I fish the ned a ton when wading small streams and rivers and a favorite presentation is to cast it up on the edge of the bank right above a hole or a cut. I give it a slight pop into the water and start my retrieve. It works very well and the reduction in hook ups from using a weedless or tx rigged jighead is worth it to me for the reduced hassle and time spent snagging. I also fish a narrow canal with a really slow flow and weedless lets me pull it through the tops of the grass more easily and with less ruined casts. Open hook seems to work better for most other cases though.

I use it on my 1000 sized reels and I think "not great" is too strong. It is clearly "not amazing", but I found that after an outing or two it settled down and I stopped having any issues that were not at least partially user error. I like the bit of stretch it gives when I run small inline spinners and cranks for while peach but it still has enough strength if I get a surpise striper or pickerel on the line. The worst thing I will say about it is that it seems to not deal well with sharp pops of pressure. Trying to pull even a very small spinner with fine hooks can break a knot where if I give a slow steady pull I get it back more often than not.

Lew's sells a Ned rig specfic rod, the TP167MLFS. The MSRP is like $99, but I have seen it for around $80. I have never even held one, but I keep looking for an excuse to pick one up. My current MWF rod is an inexpensive custom I went with due to some specific non-standard features I was looking for, but before I got it I was using a 5' UL Uglystick and was still catching them just fine.

Yea, they look real enough to fool an aquatic insect biologist, or maybe my buddy is just a fool . I haven't even played with them in the sink, I have no idea how they will have any "action" to speak off but I for some reason have a strong feeling that they will work very well just dead drifted.

Have you used the Savage Gear Mayfly before? I have a pair of them I picked up last BF and promptly forgot about until I saw your post.

I am just getting into fishing small jerkbaits and am thinking of giving snaps a try. I only carry a single rod when fishing on foot and find that I am always seeing a great deep hole when I have a shallow/floating lure on or a nice shallow weedline when I have a deep/sinking one tied on. I would love any suggestion from you snap guys on which ones you prefer.

This drives me crazy too. If you give each one a good long stretch and lube them with a bit of megastrike they sway around nicely.

Sure, but with a spinning reel you risk the bail popping down during the cast and the same thing happening. I sent a 3oz Kastmater clear across the atlantic doing that last fall. I have seen guys who have removed the bail wire to prevent this, but I am not there yet.

I bank fished a small river this week and managed to get a few smallies by throwing a wacky 4" Ocho worm into every deep pool or cut bank I came across. I like the 4" Ocho a ton, it addition to being short it is far thinner and lighter than most other 4" stickbaits and has great action on the fall. However, the lightness does make it hard to keep it in the right spot in much current so I am going to dry to use a very light (1/16 or 1/8") drop shot rig next time to see if that helps. In the calmer pools I was able to vertically jig the worm in place and got almost half my hits that way. Some times it took like 30-45 seconds of movement to get a bass to dart up and grab it. So far I have yet to bust out the waders, but that time is coming soon. As all the bass I have caught so far are on the edges it will be great to be able to fish both sides at the same time by wading up the middle.

I only first heard of the concept of back-reeling maybe three or four months ago, somehow I never ran across a reference to it before. I don't feel confident that I am coordinated enough to pull it off, but I I plan on trying it. I have an old Okuma 500 reel with a failing drag that I use for perch fishing. I hooked a 17" striper with it this fall and it was all I could do to keep him from spooling me while I got him under control. Next time I have the rod out I am going to try back-reeling into the fish and see how it goes.

Other than small Roadrunners, I have never used a underspin jighead. But, I do have a good sized stash of these guys: I bought them during a TW sale with an eye to use them for kayak trolling for striped bass. I tried them a few times for freshwater with a Fat Impact, but they the blade would snag something fierce on any vegetation they would encounter. I was using a MH rod and could rip them out, but the blade wouldn't spin anymore until I cleared it. Is there anyway to prevent this, or just try and keep it out of the weeds?

I used to live down the street from these guys when they were at their old warehouse and while they didn't have a storefront, they would let me order stuff online and walk down to pick it up to save on shipping. Real nice bunch of dudes.

How much life do you get out of these? I have a "normal" height pair I got during a store closeout but I have not worn them enough to see how long they last for. I do a lot of hiking and almost always hike near water, which around where I live means marsh/wetlands. I keep thinking that if I had kneehigh waterproof socks I would be the king of cold weather stream crossings. But buying a $60 pair of socks is pretty intimidating. As for boots, I had a pair of lightweight North Face boots for the past two years that did ok, but the waterproofing began to fail during full submersion after maybe a year, but worked fine for wet grass and the odd "oh god that bank was a lot softer then I thought" moments until I moved them to "spare car shoe" status last week. I replaced them with a pair of Lowa backpacking boots, which are much heavier and much stiffer. I am taking them on a good 6-8 mile test hike tomorrow but have worn them around the lake bank fishing a few times this week and like them so far.

I would think that a surf rod would do it, I have a "little" one at 9' and like a 5oz max rating and have thought about giving a swimbait a go. But I don't want to fish it from shore and I don't think I could cast it from my kayak. If I ever find a friend with a boat (and they don't mind laying on the deck while I cast) I would like to try it.

Yea, most of the intel I have for over there is salt stuff, I don't know many freshwater kayakers. This past year I was obsessed with wading for smallies so my yak sat neglected for far too much of the year.

I keep meaning to drag my kayak out there, but without a GPS I am leery of waters like that. I got super turned around in Jug Bay once and even with my phone I ended up making a bunch of wrong turns on the way back to the launch. If I were smarter and could resist poking around every tiny little branch of it would help as well. I want to explore the Eastern Shore a lot more next year, I live so close to the bridge it's silly that I don't hit at least the ponds there more often.

Wow, I had never heard of this place, most fishing stores in MD are very saltwater centric so a more freshwater bass focused place is a great find. It's nice and close to Loch Raven Reservoir too.

Oh man, I saw this guy the other day maybe 20' up a very small tree trying to retrieve a crank. He was only above like a 2-4' deep creek and I was ready to call 911 as soon as I heard the splash. When I walked back by later the crank was gone and the bank was dry, so I guess he got it.

I discovered these when reading up on striper fishing where they seem to be popular. I bought a couple and while they have great action, they don't seem to suspend at all, floating up pretty quickly. On the bright side, the aggressively ribbed bottom holds the suspend-dots very well and one or two of them seems to do the trick.

I see you are from Olney, so here is some very specific advice. Head to Trideaphia reservoir right now. The water is super super low, exposing an enormous amount of the shallow flats that are covered in the spring and summer. Take a ton of pictures of all the dips, channels, rock-piles, stumps, etc that dot it. Make sure to include enough landmarks so that you can find them all again when the water is up. Then, next spring, drag those worms around and across all that stuff. The bottom there is perfect for slider fishing and most of the bank guys I see seem to ignore the shallow flats. When I get frustrated trying to find the big kids I will anchor my kayak right at the drop offs and can usually do pretty well for small bass fishing dragging small worms across those flats.

I get a huge thrill when I find a lure, even if it is just a rusted out spinner. Today I removed a small booya frog from a tree. It took me about 15 min and I managed to slash my finger open on it, but it was still totally worth it. I fish from a kayak a lot and manage to get a ton of lost lures that way. I have a 30" telescoping magnetic pick-up tool that I keep in my yak, it has made lure harvesting much easier. I keep tying to think of a way to mount a safety cutter on it, then I can really start getting them.

I just gave them a pile of old rods that were cluttering up my little "den" and a tackle box full of random stuff I bought during my initial "fishing is awesome!" phase. Even now I cannot resist buying a ton of crap during the winter flea-markets, so it's nice that someone (other then the seller) benefits from my poor impulse control. I did slip a Clackin Crayfish into the box and I feel a little bad about that.

I was kinda weirded out by this decision too, but after thinking about it I couldn't come up with a single time I was ever like "oh thank god this reel has a reverse".