Sphynx

I've been told in no uncertain terms that dinner is the price of getting to go...guess the pressures on!

Kinda depends man, I sort colors into two pretty broad categories with regards to soft plastics, natural/match the hatch, and bold/attractor colors. I'm pretty sure we way over think the color thing, lots of us act as though fish somehow can't see or find natural colors when the water goes to chocolate milk, but somehow or other I don't believe that the bait is going to be kind enough to turn on the neon colors to help them out, or that the bass simply stop feeding until the water clears up. I still maintain that getting a bait in the right place has far and away more to do with catching fish than what specific bait or color ends up in the right place.

Definitely agree with the advice of checking out the best of articles. There's a certain learning curve between learning about bass fishing and hearing someone say "fish the points" and actually having an idea of what that looks like in a real life application, and everybody goes through that growing pain sooner or later if they get into fishing. Struggling is really the normal situation and that's because your doing it right. Ignore the seemingly simple and rapid success that a lot of YouTube folks show, where you watch a 10 or 15 minute video and see them landing fish after fish, that will not be how it works for you for a very long time, and even then it'll probably only happen reliably on your home lake IF you fish almost every day and keep up on what your fish are doing. You will eventually learn what shortcuts you can take where to solve the puzzle, but until then, the very best thing you can do for yourself is to get out there and try new things, failure is ok, because it's giving you a list of things not to do.

No license required, crap weather being called for, sounds like I have a reasonably good chance of being the only guy dumb enough to chase trout this weekend, if I limit out before I get too worn out I'm going to head to another spot and try my luck with the bass!

I mean, this sounds pretty unusual by "industry standards" as it were. Now, the not taking credit cards I can understand because take it from someone who knows those folks aren't your friend, but I don't do business for my company in my name, my company writes me checks, not the other way around unless I am a customer (which has not happened to date) so I would avoid this one.

I travel often and fish, and 3 lures is definitely limiting. I think I would need something to cover all three levels of the water column, probably a casting/arkie headed jig like a Dirty Jigs TL Pitching Jig, probably something with some combinations of brown, orange, purple, black, blue, watermelon and green pumpkin, for a trailer it would probably have to be a Reaction Innovations Sweet Beaver, you can handle almost anything on the bottom with this, or swim it, so it covers at least 2 levels of water. For top water I think I'd be hard pressed to pick something other than a whopper plopper, walk it, do what it was designed to do, use it as a stop and go, also very versatile...bone, munky butt, and one of the chrome/reflective colors. The last one is probably the toughest one for me, it'll be a baitfish imitation, but I don't know if I'd go with a crank, a Rat-L-Trap, or a jerkbait, I am leaning towards Rat-L-Trap. The colors would be a reflective, a bold, and a natural/ghost type color.

I am occasionally a fan of novelty items...lol

Nope, tie directly to the ring, and when it comes to jerkbaits in Vision 110 prices, re-tie after every fish or two

A bunch of tippet spools for making steelhead/salmon leaders...having a heck of a time finding any maxima ultragreen 40lb spools

You can pick up one of those Shimano Vanford reels and an Expride spinning reel for around that much, should put you in some pretty familiar territory and might even leave you enough change for lunch if y'all jump on the memorial day offers from TW

I used to fish out in Clearwater MN a fair bit, mostly caught redears, largemouth and bluegill, occasionally a smallmouth, and one pike, that was on a 9ft5wt fly rod on like a size 20 psycho prince nymph, I cut him loose whenever I saw the teeth, because I had no idea how to land him at the time lol

Man, one of these days I'm going to have to get a trip figured out specifically for pike, they look like they are fun as hell

Definitely a M/F spinning rod, somewhere in the 7' range give or take, you looking for a complete setup in the $500 or are you just hunting a rod?

I have caught three fish all within a few days of each other that were around 3-4lb on the Columbia that would count as my PB, the first two came on back to back casts in the little boat launch just off the main river, they call the area a lake but I wouldn't agree with that description given the current there the one time I had to go swimming to retrieve a whopper plopper. The other one was in the main river channel, and caught on a pop-r, that ranks right up there with my most exciting catches ever, 6lb leader, M/F spinning rod, and one heck of a wild ride.

Honestly I have never even considered anything but the Zoom flukes in one form or another, dirt cheap, tons of different colors, salt contents, sizes, and I have caught piles of fish on them. I might grab a bag of a few different brands this year to experiment with just for fun.

I don't know the area to say with any confidence that a specific bait will definitely produce...but I can tell you that I couldn't even begin to imagine fishing for smallmouth without tubes, pop-r's, jigs, paddletail swimbaits, flukes, squarebills, lipless, and ned rigs and drop shots. If I can't get bit on one, one of the others will cover me on a typical day on the river.

That may be true some places, but there's spots up and down the Columbia River in Oregon and Washington where it's a sheer drop 15+ feet some times of the year, hook into a big bass on a M/F Spinning rod running 6lb or 8lb leader on 15lb braid and your in real trouble, because there's no way your landing that fish, it's just plain irresponsible to fish that spot when the river is that low. I bet there are other rivers/lakes with a similar issue. There are plenty of terrain based challenges, you just haven't fished in those spots if you believe they don't exist.

I generally agree with this idea. @Catt is right about access, lots of places simply cannot be fished from the bank, too steep, too far from safe footing to the waters edge, too much vegetation of one kind or another, certainly limits your options. That said I find that the high level take away from this is MAP YOUR FISHING HOLES. You can do it with electronics if you have them, either on a boat or use something like the Deeper device to do it, or you can drag a bottom contact presentation slowly and work out where your finding underwater vegetation, brush piles, rocks etc, you can take it a step further and figure out depth in a general sense with this approach too, and using a fixed float will get you even more accurate. If you aren't actively obtaining a map (mental or otherwise) of what your fishing, your really just guessing and hoping for the best. If you only have one casting direction available it applies just as much as being in open, unobstructed water, personally I don't prefer to use skirted jigs for this simply because it costs a lot more when you lose them that T-Rigs or other, less expensive heads, but that's just personal preference really.

I doubt it, weather is promising to make it an indoor event, probably guitar and baseball. If I DO get to get out, it'll probably be to either the Clack or the Sandy with a fly rod, the intolerable prices of salmon/steelhead licenses makes it an imperative that I get my fill of them both on the line and in the freezer. I can take along a popper and a few buggers though and just might end up with a smallmouth or two on the line.

Absence of proof hardly counts as proof of absence. Unless you end up with a bunch of dead smallmouth over the next month or two, my bet is that you have a reasonably healthy and not overpredated water body. If the smallies have munched all the perch etc, they'll start dying off until there is enough bait to support the current population again. My guess is that the perch have either moved to a new place, or simply aren't interested in feeding on whatever your offering, seems a bit premature and irrational to jump straight to the conclusion that the perch are all gone because a few trips failed to produce any when your fishing historical patterns rather than current conditions.

I've bought a ton of tackle, don't regret a bit of it either. Now do I regret the order in which I bought things? Yes, I definitely get more mileage year in and year out with some baits, like tubes, and poppers, and lipless to name a few. I definitely did not buy those before a bunch of other things and probably missed fish because of it, but that's just the way it goes I guess. I have a LOT of tackle, enough to run a small store really, and plenty of it goes unused for entire fishing seasons at a time, but I tend to find that in my usual haunts that certain lures every year are "on" and it is rarely the same ones year after year except a few. Last year I absolutely smashed on paddletail swimbaits, spinnerbaits and walking baits, the year before I couldn't buy a bite on any of those, it was all about the squarebill 1.5 size, and occasionally lipless and poppers, so knowing that somewhere in my collection I have the right key is comforting to me, it's just a matter of going through the process of elimination until I find the right keys

These guys are right on, look for seams in the current, not terribly unlike trout fishing if your familiar with that at all. If you find a spot in the river with heavy current, rock/hard bottom, and a point projecting into the river so that the current Eddie's into a pool I'll bet dollars to donuts that you'll have at least one, usually multiple, smallmouth in that Eddie, if you see a spot where there is shade covering the current break and a nice bit of rock or other cover right next to that current break, you'll have found your big fish haunt.

Could save $800 a month if you bought a tent too, in fact that cuts out your utilities as well, extra grand a month, kids are going to grow up with that big money.

I guess for colors I try to keep things as simple as possible. I keep natural colors, in this category I include crawfish colors, shad colors, sunfish colors, and ghost colors. I keep bold colors, things like clown, heavily chartreuse colored baits, fluorescent colors etc. Then there's reflective colors, which are pretty self explanatory. In these categories I like things that overlap for depths, so one of each color group most representative of your water conditions going 1-3ft, another one going 2-5ft, then maybe 4-10 etc. I have way too many cranks, and have pretty much something for every occasion, but you definitely don't need that many to get going.

If I walked into ambushes this easily I'd never have made it home...for the record, I'm screenshotting responses and preparing bank accounts for bribes and hush money! ?