IndianaFinesse

Megabass vision 110, lucky craft pointer, and a doctored suspending cove.

Just don't use the weight calculator here on bassresource, that way overestimates the weight. I've tested it against my scale, and it showed that for the length and girth of a bass that I knew weighed 2.4 pounds, it said it weighed 4.1 pounds! I've also tested it against several other fish, and each time it guessed the weight to be nearly double the actual weight of the fish. I used that calculator on what I thought to be my pb a couple years ago before I bought a scale, and it showed it to be 10.3 pounds. Looking back on it, it probably only weighed around 6 pounds, so I guess I should change my "pb" to an 8.2 pounder that I caught and weighed on a scale.

Get another one from joe's bait and tackle, they are currently 10% off. You will be glad you did.

The blade bait and jerkbait are two of my top producers in the winter, but other than them the ned rig and 1/8 or 1/16 ounce Bucktail jigs work very well to.

My mistake then, I didn't realize you had actually closed it. I guess that's what "so long and thanks for all the fish" meant, I wasn't sure what to think of that. I'll miss your posts on there. Oh, and to avoid snagging those catfish, i'll just use tip-ups baited with small pieces of cut shad, that way it's impossible to snag them.

I know i'm gonna be the odd one out on this, but I really love white bass fishing. I probably spend almost a quarter of my time fishing pursuing them. They fight harder pound for pound than any other freshwater species I've ever caught, they just go nuts when they're hooked. Plus they aren't usually picky eaters, white bass will eat almost anything thrown at them. White bass also tend to be in large schools, so it's easy to catch a bunch in a hurry. In the average four hour trip, I usually end up with around 40 fish, and occasionally over one hundred fish are caught. I enjoy fishing for anything that swims though, catfish, carp, white bass, crappie, bluegill, pike, bass, trout (trout and pike aren't hardly in central Indiana, so I have to fish outside of the state to catch those), I target all of them at some point during the year.

Looking forward to seeing some of your reports next year. If the "blog" your talking about is Big Indiana bass, then it is still up and running after a short break last year. I read that site a lot to, I'm pretty sure I've read everything ever posted on there by now.

Now that the lakes around here are iced over and i'm done for the year, I finished with a total of 268 days fishing. I would like to hope that the ice will be thick enough to get out ice fishing on before new years, but I doubt it will.

Another thing that works well is to wrap a few pre-rigged ones around sections of foam pool noodles, that way you can stick the hooks into the foam to prevent tangling. Or roadwariors' toilet paper roll idea would work to.

Just about any lure I own. I go swimming for ned rigs, senkos, jigs, just about anything is worth attempting to retrieve in my mind. The hardest I've ever had to try to get my lure back was when I got a whopper plopper stuck 20 feet up in a tree, no idea how I managed to cast it that high on accident. I tried climbing the tree, but I couldn't get that high because of how thin the branches were. So I broke it off, drove home, grabbed an extendable tree trimmer, and drove back to where the whopper plopper was stuck in a tree. I managed to get it out by climbing part way up the tree and then cutting the branch off that it was attached to. The only lure that I own that has the undefinable "it" is a magnum pop-r, that thing always outfishes the exact same pop-r, even though almost all of the paint has long since been scraped off.

Done that a couple times. Got a wind knot while throwing a ned rig, a few minutes into untangling it I felt a bass tugging on the end of my line. I had to bring it in hand over hand, which was actually kind of fun.

Slim swim-z on a light jig head.

Does doing it that way just reduce hook tangling, or is there another positive?

basspro.com/Marcum-VX1i-3color-Sonar-Flasher-System/product/1504281057 Here's a link to a flasher. I haven't used this one, I just pulled it up for a visual reference. They tell you the depth and show cover etc. like a depth finder, the only differences are how it's displayed and that a flasher shows real time, so you can actually watch your bait and how the fish react to it. It takes a little practice to learn how to read one, but it's well worth the effort. Another cheaper option is to get a regular depth finder, and mount the transducer on a metal bar or something to stick down in the water.

This one was actually hooked in the mouth. And don't worry, I don't keep anything over six pounds anyway.

Your right, they don't have spinning rod guides. I use a spinning reel on it anyways for when i'm pitching jigs, or if fishing vertical I like to switch it out for a casting reel. Seems strange to use it with a spinning reel, but it hasn't caused any problems for me. I've also seen a couple videos of guys using them with a spinning reel, this actually seems to be the norm. I use mine for making short pitches with jigs, but if you want to make longer casts a shorter rod will work better.

I have yet to catch a buffalo, but I do carp fish occasionally. Biggest one yet weighed 38 pounds, caught her on the ned rig while bass fishing. It was spawning and full of eggs, so it was less energetic than a smaller carp, but it still put up an impressive fight on a medium lite rod.

Sam Heaton's super sensitive jigging rod (retails for about $60) has the best balance and is more sensitive than any other crappie rod I own, but I've also heard good things about the st. Croix panfish series rod (retails for about $160).

Fished in the rain on sunday for about two hours. A good part of my time was spent looking for ice fishing spots, but I stopped and fished at the schools i found to see what they were. I only caught five fish, but one of them was a nice channel catfish that measured about 30 inches. I would have entered it into the fish of the year program, but there wasn't anyone else on the lake to witness the measurement and the rules state that a non-family member must witness the measurement. More exciting than that is I found the concentration of catfish, so they should stay in that same spot all winter. The four white bass and the catfish hit the blade bait vertically jigged near the bottom. The white bass were in scattered schools in or near the channel, and the catfish was in one of the deepest parts of the channel near a brush pile. I would have tried to catch more catfish from the huge school the depth finder was showing, but by the time I had released the catfish it was dark. But when the ice gets thick enough to ice fish on in a few weeks I'll go back to see if I can't get some cats threw the ice, something I've never done before.

I don't have any trout in the lakes around here, so I have no idea where they would be. Probably deeper than the rest of the fish since they are cold water fish, but I don't know for sure. Bluegill typically congregate near shallow flats, but usually stay in the deeper water. I look for a 10-15 or a 10-20 foot drop off, and then find a brushpile placed along the drop off. The channel in the lake I mostly fish on is only 38 feet at the deepest point, so it is also common to find all kinds of fish on the edge of the channel where it curves, and they often school around a brush pile but don't always. Good lure choices are 1 inch gulp minnows on a jig head in the 1/32-1/64 ounce range, small jig heads in the 1/32-1/100 ounce range tipped with a wax worm or mousee, tiny spoons, a 1/64 ounce popeye hair jig tipped with a wax worm, tiny jigs tipped with two or three segments of the gulp euro larvae, plus assorted plastics under 1 inch long. Oh, and you are definitely going to need a flasher or at least a cheap, portable depth finder. It doesn't have to be fancy, but it's almost impossible to find them without it. Hope this helps, if there's anything else you were wanting to know just ask.

Besides the 25 days of christmas, the next sale isn't till memorial day I think. They've got some shimano reels on sale right now, i'm not sur eif it includes the one your looking for though. It's a 15% off everything sale usually.

I would never get to ice fish if I waited for that, and neither would almost anyone in the united states! It is possible to stand on only 2 inches of ice, but that's are assuming there aren't any weak spots. Four inches covers that chance, and I've never heard of anyone wanting more than six inches of ice. Most people are ok with 3-4 inches.

Just cause the rink is thick enough to skate on does not neccasarily mean that it's think enough on the lake. Your rink is much shallower than the lake, so it cools down much faster. Plus lakes often have a small amount of current moving threw them, which also helps slow the ice down. Some people will go out with as little as two inches of ice, but I prefer at least four inches. \ Generally deep water structure on the edge of and in the channel is a good place to start for a few different species, specific locations and techniques depend on what species is the target.

I've finally gave up on the silver buddy hooks now, they've broken on fish twice. I'm gonna swap them out for some short shank treble hooks, but I wanted to ask if it would mess up the balance of the bait? And what size should I use? Should I put split rings on them, or cut the hook eyes and bend them over on the frame, like the way they are out of package?

Been getting out as much as possible the last few days, before our lakes get totally frozen over next week. Ice is forming in the backs of coves already, had to plow threw some of it it with the boat for the last two days in order to get out. That's when i'm glad I have an aluminum boat with an extra thick hull. Water temperature's hanging around 38-39 degrees with the water clarity about 4 feet by the dam. Went out Wednesday afternoon, ended up with 13 bass caught throwing the ned rig at steep dropping shore lines, and the bass wanted it fished painfully slow along the bottom. Got out yesterday afternoon again, managed a couple bass on jerkbaits before finding a massive school of white bass while motoring between bass spots. Caught 39 white bass in just two hours, all of them on vertically jigged blade baits fished with a four second pause between jigging it just enough to feel the vibration. Got out again this morning for about an hour and a half hoping to duplicate yesterday's bite, but that didn't work out. We got completely skunked, hooked a few fish but failed to get any of them in the boat. It's looking like tomorrow might be my last day of open water fishing this year, hoping to make it a last hurrah to get me threw until the ice gets thick enough to safely ice fish.