TriStateBassin106

This was the pond during a summer drought, lowest it usually gets due to it being a retention pond, the spot in the first pic is visable and you can see the rocky bottom contour. All that exposed bottom is now underwater lol. Also that pier is a great peace of cover. Lot of bait fish hang out there.

Both ponds are man made and are surrounded by bushes like this. At pond number 1 this was the normal water level during the summer but now the water is so high most of those bushes are now 25% halfway in the water. My guess is the bass are deep in them, I usually walk into those bushes or paths between them and pitch around the rocks but the dry land I used to fish around there is also now a foot deep of water.

Tall grass and bushes that are usually a foot or 2 away from the shoreline. Both ponds eventually will recede the water level and these plants you could walk right by.

What would you recommend throwing?

We got a bunch of rain last night here in NJ and both my park ponds I fish at are currently raised with water, I tried fishing today at both spots and only got 1 bass per spot, my strategy was flipping and pitching into pieces of cover, before the rain these cover spots were at least 2 feet away from the shoreline, now they're submerged with water, I'm aware that bass hold tight to cover during flooding but what else could I throw during this time? Will the bass hit any moving baits? Also the water quality isn't great, greenish murky at both spots but it was already like this before the rain due to algae blooms.

Pitboss was definitely MVL for 2019, had sucess on the pitboss earlier on in the season but once july came around It faded out.

I'll make one in December lol.

So in the world of professional sports we all know the phrase of MVP. (Most Valuable Player) and the accomplishments athletes can do to achieve this award. Now In terms of bass fishing for the 2020 season what lure would you rank as Most Valuable? Did this lure exceed all expectations from you as an angler? Did this lure catch your PB? Did this lure catch hundreds of fish? Leave your comments down below for your lure or choice and why! (My lure is the chatterbait. It did it all for me this year fished various types of ways and I caught plenty of nice sized fish with it, honorable mentions are the senko and flipping jigs.)

Sorry I haven't posted in here for awhile. The bite shut down during the last week because of higher temps. But I managed to get a few finesse fishing including a nice 2.16lber,

Fall here in NJ has been weird so far. 3 weeks ago we were getting days were it barely reached 70 degrees and cooler nights, this brought down the water temps and enticed the big gals to feed, like this 3lber below, but since last week the temps shot back into the 80s and the bite totally shut off, got a couple after slowly fishing senkos but it took awhile. Temps are supposed to drop again into the mid 60s for the rest of the week and I'm hoping that the bite finally turns back on.

Temps shot back up into the upper 70s and lower 80s here, bite has been brutally slow, still catching a handful of fish though on finesse tactics.

It's actually pretty common to stock bass in golf course ponds even if nobody can fish it. Bluegills are stocked to control the bugs, bass are stocked to control the bluegills and carp are usually stocked aswell to control excessive vegetation. There's a million golf course ponds around here that I know are loaded with bass lol but if I tried fishing em I'd go to jail lol.

Got on a bunch of quality fish recently including a 3.7lber and a 2.4lber. All fishing out deep with deadsticking finesse jigs and some soft plastics. The smaller fish were all caught on a war eagle double willow spinnerbait in chartreuse.

Bed pan while fishing for cats at the river a couple years ago.

Cold with temps not even breaking 70? Yup sounds about right, just be ready though because this hot bite is an anomaly and will end as quickly as it began once the temps go up again.

2020 has been a awesome year for me in terms of catch rate. I've only been skunked less than 10 times probably and caught over 135 fish, if anything the added people pressure is an advantage for me because a lot of idiots are now on the water. Bass fishing is a huge learning experience and not everyone has the capability to learn it. If you fish with a bobber and crankbait tied together and don't realize what your doing wrong I'm not helping you learn how to catch them. If anything i'll encourage you to keep doing it. It saves me fish.

Take license pics if you see people taking bass. Busted a crap ton of illegal trout fisherman last year in North Jersey, I'm talking about buckets full of breeders and below the limit size.

New Jersey.

Yes! I fish many smaller lakes and the bigger fish have been out feeding! Much needed since my summer was full of dinks!

Has the bite for you guys changed from being shallow and parallel to the bank to out deep or near the middle of ponds you fish? I fish two relatively small ponds near me. One is a simple retention pond with a fountain and max depth of 8ft. The other pond is part of a public park with 3 fountains and a max depth of 15ft, these two ponds are mostly featureless v shaped bottoms and some scattered peaces of cover that usually produce in the summer when casting parallel or around the cover. But for the past week and a half all my bites have either been in the "middle" or near deep pockets around the fountains. Is this normal for bass to migrate to the deeper pockets during the fall/fall transition? Am I the only one who is catching them out deep? And do the fish still stay shallow?

I'm only able to fish pressured ponds around here so a good day of fishing for me is 5 to 7 bass and a fair day is 2 to 3 fish over the span of 2 hours, usually the low number of fish are the result of me targeting bigger fish which I'm usually rewarded with, I don't go after anything less than 14 inches and below a lb. If I did though I would catch a whole bunch lol. Water temps yesterday were 75 degrees and it's starting to get chilly out, managed to get a couple on a war eagle spinnerbait though.

Black n blue = Dirty water all weather conditions/stained water on cloudy days Green Pumpkin = Stained water on sunny days/Clearer water cloudy days Watermelon Red flake = Clearer water sunny days, the Yamamoto Watermelon Red senko that shade is really good for stained or slighty dirty water IMO I hate white soft plastics, I've never caught anything on them. Also I'm not really sold on the different flakes. If I can't catch anything on something with green or purple flake it's probably the fish just not being generally inteterested in anything. I've had days where I've caught fish on both Straight black worms and also worms with blue flecks added to em.

So it appears a good chunk of the country is currently under a smokey haze from those wildfires out on the west coast. In the northeast we have been getting some wicked and weird sunsets and sunrises. I'm currently not aware of how long this will last but I had planned some outings during this time..does this haze effect the bass at all and if so is it negative or positive?

As I said last week the bite was good but the quality ones still haven't showed up, well last night they sorta did...landed this hog under the pond fountain slow jigging a war eagle finesse jig black and blue paired with a baby rage menace trailer, based on his fat belly he was probably feeding on shiners which are plentiful in this pond and are big.