galyonj

I ordered yesterday. So excited. I need some new jigs anyway.

Have mercy. I wish I could accidentally pin a football like that. Rude fish, though. Interrupting your testing sesh like that.

Another lunchbass. Caught it on a lipless between bites of my sandwich.

Totally does. In the absence of rocky structure, just look for a drop off. And this is a relative thing – if 10' is the deepest you got in a given body of water, that's deep enough to count for the purposes of this exercise.

You instincts are mostly correct, but you can still get hit at the top of the water column in cold water. Fish are weird, dude. Think of it this way: Under normal, non-spawn circumstances, they wanna be either where easy food is, where they've got easy access to a temperature they find more comfortable, right? Now consider that most baitfish don't tolerate cold water well at all – we'll generally see shad die-offs when the water temp dips into the 30s. These two points are part of the reason that jerkbaits work so well in the late fall/early winter. Bass are ambush predators, and they're hella lazy, so they're all about the possibility of snatching up a dying baitfish. Just about all the lakes where I'm at in East Tennessee are TVA reservoirs, so there's miles of riprap banks and shallows that creep ever-closer to the main channel as TVA drops the water level for winter. So at my home lake(s), what I'd do with a jerkbait like that is I'd find some shallow riprap, because that's where the warmest water's gonna be, which means that there's still some algae there, so that's where the shad's gonna be, which is pretty close to where the bass are gonna be. And I'd do my level best to give that jerkbait an oscar-winning death scene. Edit: If you really just hate how fast it's rising, you can tune it up with bigger hooks or adding weight some other way. But it's a free lure so you're ahead of the game right now anyway.

Yessir. Here you go.

Bring a sledgehammer and you can pretty quickly unfreeze part of it if that's the case.

This is just me, mind, but I prefer to throw jerkbaits and walking baits on a MH rod rather than a medium. Either will do just fine, and it's good to experiment to see what you like the feel and response of better. With regard to the retrieve speed, you're probably better off using the temperature of the water as a guidepost here. Anything moving or twitching real fast in cold water is gonna stick out like a sore thumb, and not in a good way.

Especially if it's got a big knocker in it for sound, working that right will call them up to you.

For my birthday I was gifted a couple whiskey glasses from them with .308 rounds in the side. They're pretty sweet glasses.

I don't know the brand, but your OP is a pretty accurate description of a floating jerkbait. There are generally three different flavors of hard jerkbait – floating, suspending, and sinking. They all do pretty much what it says on the tin.

Did you see the video where Latimer went fishing with Swindle? They had me horse laughing.

It's hard for me to separate fishing-focused channels that are purely instructional from those that are purely entertainment when I scroll through my subscriptions list, because I find so many of them to be as entertaining as they are educational. So I guess I'm just gonna go through my list: Alex Rudd Fishing (Who's local to me. I keep hoping I'll see him around so I can talk my way onto the boat with him.) Bamabass BassGeek Brain Latimer Debo Fish the Moment Bassresource Mikeybalzz has some good stuff, but I end up skipping him in the recommendations as often as not Realistic Fishing Saw Grass Bassin' When I first got back into fishing after going 20-ish years without it, I watched a few videos from dudes that I now recognize to be on the Googan Squad. They're pretty entertaining, but that's about as far as I go. I haven't learned anything from them, and I don't follow them. Honestly, good for them getting to turn something they love into a career. We should all be so lucky.

I quite liked High Percentage Fishing.