this happened to me this year, I think. It was either conditioning or weather. I'm banking on weather but I won't really know until next year. This particular pond is stocked with trout in the winter and you'll never get a fishable spot on the bank unless you show up at stupid hours when the park is technically closed. If the game warden or the sheriff wanted to make some money, all they'd need to do is sit out there in plain clothes for an hour on the weekends - it's a neighborhood fishing pond managed by TPWD and I see people break the law every time. Either keeping undersized bass, using cast nets, having more than two rods, etc. My favorite thing that happened regularly this year was fishing this pond with one rod and just CRUSHING the bass, while these guys with like six rods aren't catching a thing.
Anyway - off my fishery soapbox - I used the same bait for like 22 of 30 days in October at this exact spot and had great catch rates. I mean I was going there and picking up 10 bass in under 2 hours, which is pretty great from the bank on such a pressured pond. Most of the people around me don't even realize there's bass in there until I pull one out. The skirtless chatterbait just slammed it...I theorize because it was different from what they had been seeing. The other piece of this is that I was casting at angles and directions nobody else was either...much closer to cover. Now, since a few weeks before trout started, I'm not catching a thing there. It's been freezing a few times at night, so I know the water is colder than it was, so I think they may just be deeper. Which is harder to fish with the techniques and lures I'm familiar with.
I was not particularly tight lipped about the specifics of what I was using...but the nearest shop with a chatterbait micro is a solid hour round trip. Most guys can find a catch elsewhere on what they already have...and aren't willing to drive for such an underwhelming yet highly specific bait. So I didn't have a problem with that. I did give a few away to some folks there who were obviously just starting out, but I'm guessing they didn't get much mileage.
Whether the slowdown is from water getting colder plus trout stocking...hard to say. But I became reasonably convinced in November that they had figured me out. Given my complete aversion to the insanity of stocked trout fishing, I'm hoping that a 4+ month break from that spot will make my preferred lure effective again. Until then, I'm at other places, and finally picking up some work on a feature film.
