Lobocito

If I'm pond hopping I usually have a specific lure tied on I want to use before I even look at the water. Especially for pond hopping, my experience is that the lure doesn't matter nearly as much as finding the fish and making a good presentation. If I don't get any action in about 30 minutes I'll start rotating though. But I view my pond hopping mostly as a way to work on different techniques because I'm usually very confident I can pull a fish using just about anything from my favorite ponds. Rigging for a tournament or a big day on the boat though involves loading up 8-10 rods with everything imaginable and then throwing a jackhammer all day anyways.

I bought a bunch of pre-made skirts from tacklewarehouse a few months ago and was overall disappointed in most of them. Bought from mostly dirty jigs and zman. They looked good at first but comparing the quality of those pre-tied skirts to some jigs I've bought since is a big difference. Siebert Outdoors skirts are super high quality, just bought like 8 jigs from Mike and am super satisfied. He'll put together any skirt combo you want but he also has so many advertised already its tough to find a skirt idea he doesn't have a name for. I also LOVE my Sixth Sense jigs. I think the skirt quality on those guys is phenomenal.

Last Summer I bought my first ever jackhammer. Took it to the creek, caught a fish on my very first cast. Second cast I flung it into a tree 25 feet in the air. (I had barely done any creek fishing and was terrible at controlling my casts...) I let that sucker sit up there for 3 months until it was late November and the leaves had fallen off and the branches were a bit more brittle, took my flippin stick and a 1 oz jig out there and pulled the whole d**n branch off! Moral of the story is that it is very likely to still be there. If you couldn't wiggle it free you probably stuck it hard enough that it isn't going anywhere on its own any time soon.

I have the jig box and LOVE it. Has taken a little while to figure out how to get all my jigs in there both securely and without really messing up the brush guards though. Have spinnerbait box as well and its a great product but is significantly larger ("taller") than it needs to be.. even with trailers I feel like most of my wire baits are hanging several inches above the bottom of the box. I imagine there are definitely better options for spinnerbait boxes than the EDGE but I'm happy enough with mine. Plus it doesn't really "fit" with either 3600 or 3700 size boxes Finally I also have 2 3600 sizes for my creek bag. The water wicks are definitely a life saver for the creek bag because I tend to switch out a few lures and never really revisit it. Would love if they cut the price down just a bit though.

If "level wind" is just an older term for "baitcaster".. use whatever you want. Modern braid is awesome stuff and is by far the easiest type of line to handle in my experience. Chart below will probably vary from brand to brand, but basically the modern braid is rated significantly stronger than equivalent diameter mono. I use between 30# and 65# braid on about half of my reels and a bunch of flouro on the other half, but I probably wouldn't try flouro on an older reel unless you have a lot of confidence in it.

I might do it if I were gonna drag the swim bait along the bottom, but generally feel like you'll get better swimming action from a belly weighted hook or some kind of jig head. Absolutely no reason to not do it if you feel it will be effective though.. #1 thing to learn as a new angler is that you aren't locked into what Mike Iaconelli tells you what to do on his youtube channel. A lot of your very best fishing days will probably come from you making your own adjustments to your particular fish, and if for some reason your getting tons of bites on a texas rigged swimbait.. keep throwin it.

I feel like fishing hit a ridiculous growth spurt at least here in the US this year. Heavily attributable to COVID for sure, but I also think that a lot of awesome youtube channels getting a lot more traffic is driving some fishing love. I myself really got back into fishing in like October and have now reconnected with 10+ people from my past who have ALSO picked up fishing in the last year, and all were getting started well before COVID. Just really hope we aren't overfishing this summer with all the heightened activity!!

A few of my creek favorites: 1. Rebel Bumble Bug (mostly catches some good size panfish but the bass will swing at it occasionally) 2. Small rooster tails. Have a 1/16 fire tiger with the hooks bent every direction and the weight basically torn in half and the creek fish just won't stop assaulting it... hookup ratio gets a little worse every day but gosh dang they just won't leave it alone 3. Microjigs are fun but I don't get much production out of them 4. Trout magnets will catch anything and everything.. under a bobber or sitting on the bottom the panfish will take it, if you start jerking it around some surprisingly big bass will reaction strike it hard I use Light rods with either 4#mono or 15# braid w/ a 4# fc leader. I hear the concerns about overfighting fish but with those lures you aren't really targetting those 3+ pound bass, mostly sub-1 pound dinks and panfish. Actually caught a 27 inch bowfin on the light set up a few weeks ago, but he got flipped upside down almost immediately after taking the hook so the fight was extremely short.

And I think Team9Nine is saying that there is no real difference between reeling slow or reeling fast. If you gotta reel in 6 feet of line for your crank to dive 12 feet, it doesn't matter if you reel those 6 feet in 2 seconds or 10 seconds - the bait gets there when you've wound in X feet of line. So if your question is in terms of pure time from the second you cast to the second your bait is at max depth.. . just burn it

Recently I made a cast with a newer reel I'm still trying to dial in. Blew it up big time, whatever. Ultimate result for whatever reason is that easily 1/2 of my spooled line is now gone. In this instance I was running pure flouro. So now I have like.. probably 55-60 yards of flouro left on the reel. What do you guys do in these situations? it has enough line to fish but if I make a really bomb ass cast or hook into a 10 pounder I could definitely get spooled. At the same time, it is enough line that if I try to just tie more line on with an FG knot or something, I'd almost certainly be reaching that knot on long casts, and I feel like having a knot that deep in your spool that gets cast is.. not a great idea. Keep fishing it with 60 yards and hope I don't get spooled? Tie on a new line? Chop a little more off and THEN tie on a new line and just use old stuff as backing? Wind the flouro off, put some crappy old braid on as a backer, and put the flouro back on and hope I don't reach the backing too often? Thanks for any input / advice. Just curious what other anglers do. With mono I'd probably just chop it off but these stupid $20 200 yard spools of flouro, I probably don't have enough to totally fill the reel again.

Interesting to hear that KVD thinks its most effective to go slow at the start. Was he talking about the big deep cranks like 5xd and 6xd? Since they float, it seems to make way more sense to me that torching them would cause them to reach maximum depth both quicker and while reeling less line, keeping you in the strike zone longer. I torch mine and feel like the bait usually gets to max depth while only moving horizontally maybe 3 feet.. and certainly seems to be I get way less bottom time if I don't torch it.

I was thinking about this question but from a different perspective - "freshness" of the plastic rather than rust. Strike King loves their coffee scent, keitechs are super smelly, googan has whatever their slaunch sauce is. How much of an effect do you guys think those scents actually have? I was about to rig a keitech onto a new swim jig and when that smell hit me I was like... huh... maybe I should wait until I'm about to toss it to rig it??? From a rust perspective, i've never had the plastic cause rust on my lures.

My color of the year right now is black/blue with some green pumpkin thrown in. Black blue jig w/ green pumpkin trailer, jig w/ both colors in the skirt, black jig head with green bait... doesn't matter. The bluegill in my waters are ridiculously dark. I can't find a picture on google that is even close to how dark these gills are, but they are basically black and purple with the very lightest bit of green on the belly. So I think thats a big part of why that color combo is working for me.

Haven't compared them, but that is basically the same question as any other Yamamoto soft plastic vs. the YUM or ZOOM equivalent. Yum & Zoom work pretty well, are tougher, and are dirt cheap. Yamamoto plastic has more action, are remarkably fragile compared to competing plastics, and are more expensive. I used to stick to Yamamoto plastics on the theory that i wanted to pay for the best and I'd rather catch that one extra fish every 25 casts or whatever it might be, but as time has moved on, I've realized I'd rather have a single bag of plastics last me a year or two instead of having to go buy a new $7.00 pack of senkos every two fishing trips. But I'd guess any feedback you'll get will be the same. You maybe catch more on the GY, but we'll never be sure because tis fishing and you can never directly compare really anything when your success or failure is defined by what got a particular living organism to bite a lime green piece of plastic.

Watching Wheeler fish was one of the main things that motivated me to want to go buy a bass boat. The dude is simply an amazing fisherman and an awesome entertainer. And no doubt that he is out there grinding his butt off every single day for every oen of those fish he catches.