ww2farmer

I K.I.S.S. with the C-rig.....my go-to baits are a 6" straight tailed worm (Berkley Havoc Bottom Hopper) and/or a 7" Berkley Power Worm. Sometimes if I am feeling a little saucy I'll use a 5" Yum dinger.

I use the swimming dinger. It's a fine swim jig, and chatterbait trailer.

I use the smaller (3") Havoc Pit boss, or the 3" Chigger craw.

I predict my first bass of 2016 will be a smallmouth, and it will be caught on a 1/2oz. Silver buddy style blade bait. My first largemouth will be caught on a Red eye shad lipless crank bait, or SK KVD suspending jerkbait. It will depend on conditions..............if it's a light wind, or calm I will be using the jerkbait, if we have enough wind to put some chop on the surface, I will be using the lipless crank.

Nope..............my boat is still in it's winter slumber. My lake (silver) is still locked up with ice.....and I suspect it will be till at least march. Wasn't warm enough for long enough to change.............except that the ice that was borderline safe to begin with is now, IMHO, unsafe for the time being.

None of them, famous bass fishermen don't impress me too much. I'd rather fish with guys from here, or my buddies. My dream day of bass fishing is when my kids get old enough/interested enough to want to spend the entire day fishing with their old man. At ages 6 and 11, I have learned to not push it much past the first few "daddy can we go now" , I don't want them to hate it.

Same....in fact the heads I had/used to use to make my own didn't even have a keeper barb for the trailers, and they stayed put just fine. The new heads I use now have a keeper, but it was never an issue for me, and I didn't switch heads because of the keeper.

Head to the back of dark bottom bays. The crappies show up first...........like the day or two after the ice melts, or after the pike leave. The pike move in and spawn before the ice is even off the lake. Then the come the bullheads a short time later, then the bluegills with the bass not far behind. Now early spring cold fronts and such can pump the breaks on these movements. The first few weeks, until things are fairly stable, they will all come and go, and come and go. You will know when things are stable, and the fish are going to be there for an extended period of time when the carp finally show up.

Gas at the local pumps here in WNY is under $2/gallon for the first time since I think I was in high school 20+ years ago. I hope it get's A LOT more expensive before jet ski/wake board season on the lake.

I leave it up to the boater................if it's my boat, and were going fishing for "fun" ..................IE NOT a tournament, I expect nothing. I am going fishing anyways, and (most of the time) don't mind having a buddy tag along. In tournament situations, I expect my partner to pay his 1/2 of the entry fee and that's it. I am already there, I am fishing the tournament with or without a partner, and the lake is like 10 mins. from my house, so gas is not an issue. Any winnings get split 50/50...........more than once my partner has offered up a small % of his winnings for boat gas/etc...I never mandate it,or expect it, but I don't turn it down either. When I fish off of someone else's boat, for fun fishing I offer a few $$'s for gas if we travel beyond the home lake. 99% of the time my buddies tell me to "get the heck out of here". When I tournament fish out of someone else's boat I offer this...........I'll either pay the entire team entry fee, or my 1/2 plus give you what you need/want for gas, etc....

3/8's is my go to size for most of my drop shotting. I will bump up to 1/2 for power shotting, or if I am in water over 20' deep, and I'll go down to 1/4 in shallow water.

Buy it................or don't.................I really don't care. How's that?

Maybe I would do poorly in this tournament your fishing, but in 50 degree water, with wind, during the pre-spawn period...............the last thing I would be doing is trying to eeek out bites on finesse presentations in deep water.

I have had too many "best day ever's" to remember. But there's a few that stick out, not because they were/are better than other days I have , but because they have caught me off guard, and happened out of the blue.............or more like, I was in the "right place at the right time" for this to happen, and I have rarely been able to duplicate it since. #1..........Late April, a few years ago..........pre-spawn largemouth fishing was already good that day, I was hitting my usual spots, and pretty much calling my shots, when without warning one of the strongest south winds I have ever been in kicks up out of nowhere without so much as a light breeze before hand as a warning. I was at the extreme north end of the lake, the boat launch is at the south end, and this wind turned my little 3 mile long lake into the Atlantic ocean. I tuck in behind a tree line, to "wait it out" and while I am there figure...........what the heck, might as well make a few casts. Well for the next hour or so, I catch a bass on dang near ever cast in an area no bigger than my living room on a lipless crankbait. And they were all 2.5-4.5 lbers, then the clouds broke, the wind let up, and it was over just like that. #2.............Also late April, probably a year or two before incident #1...........I was struggling bad one evening after work. Nothing was working, and I was about to go home possibly skunked. Just as the sun was setting I pulled up on a main lake point, whipped a football jig out to the bank, and slowly started to drag it back. As soon as that jig "fell" off the point into deep water a decent bass just about ripped the rod out of my hand............cool, at least I am not skunked.........next cast, same thing, and then this went on every cast, for the next 1/2 hour to 45mins until the sun had finally set and was dark. Once that sun was gone, so was the bite. #3................Late June/Early July a few years ago, I just launched the boat and a splash under a tree in the shade at the boat launch got my attention. I put the trolling motor down went over by the tree just in time to see another splash. A bird, landed on a grass mat just outside the shade line and a bass blew up on it, I picked my frog rod up, started whipping it around on the mats in the area and in the next 20 mins had 2 20lb five fish limits without ever starting the outboard. And about as soon as it started, it was over. Now, I have caught plenty of fish, and had good days on all these spots before and since, so this was not new to me, but these were just some of those "lightning in bottle" moments that have happened over the years.

I like them better than Crappie. They are as good as any bluegill. When mixed in with bluegill fillets I cannot for the life of me pick out the Rock Bass. The only down side to them, is they are all head and bone............a bluegill of similar size has more meat. They are a fun little fish to catch, when I take my kids out during the prespawn period, I leave the largemouth and smallmouth alone on those days and have them aimlessly chuck and wind small crank baits, and 3" curly tailed grubs on ball head jigs at the bank. They catch them one after another and always come home with a smile on their face. I even, as a "warm up" to bass tournament season here, hold a rock bass tournament on my home lake. It's great fun, and we donate all the rock bass caught to a group that comes down from Rochester for a big fish fry for their church.

They are on my list of "new to me" things to try in the 2016 season. I'll probably buy a handful, but it will take some kind of doing to unseat the KVD and Arashi squarebills as my "go-to's"

I also had ZERO success with the larger one as a flipping/pitching and punching bait. The smaller worked well for me on a swinging Biffle type head, but I ran out of those one day, put a small Pit Boss on in it's place and kept catching fish, so I deemed the Devil Spear as expendable and haven't used them since.

On any body of water I have ever been to, there have always been largemouth on the bank or in shallow water, year round, as long as there is food. Bass are not "sensitive" fish, they are at home in just about any depth, and are quite adaptable. They will go where the food goes. In lakes with lots of shad, I imagine they would go deeper in the summer, because that's where the food goes. In a grassy natural lake, you'll find them everywhere. It's not uncommon for me, in the same day to catch a bass in the middle of the hottest part of the summer in 6 inches of water and then in 20+ feet of water.....................because food is in both places.

Pit Boss (the 3" and 4" size), and Chigger Craws (also 3" and 4" size)

On my lake, I target smallmouth early..........like the first couple weeks after ice out, then switch to largemouth for a while until the smallmouth hit the beds. I will bed fish for them a few times to get it out of my system, but I go back to largemouth once I get bored with it. Then just after the smallmouth pull off the beds, but before they go into there summer time stuff, I target them again.................Then it's largemouth all summer, with occasional smallies mixed in. In the fall I will fish for both, often in the same day, but in different places. In 2015 my top 5 smallmouth baits were: #1 Yum Warning shot nose hooked on a dropshot #2 3" Havoc Pit boss on a 3/4 oz. biffle type wobble head #3 4" wacky rigged yum dinger on a 1/16th oz. wacky jig head #4 Chatterbait #5 Silver buddy..........this was the first year I bothered to learn/use this style of bait, and it was eye opening.

Same.................I am not paid by either one of them, no need to keep it exclusive. I do tend to favor the Flambeau boxes with the "z-rust" dividers for my hard baits, and terminal tackle, while the Plano's tend to get used for soft plastic, or other non-rust gathering items. I prefer the 3700 size. I have 8 of them in my boat, that can be transfered and all fit in a tackle bag I have for when I jump on someone else's boat. 1- Yum Dingers 1- Chigger Craws and Pit Boss's 1- Jigs 1- Shallow cranks, frogs 1- terminal tackle 1- mid depth cranks/jerkbait/lipless cranks 1- drop shot plastics 1- worms and grubs

I make my own. 3/8's is my go to size. I K.I.S.S. I make two different ones: Black Nickle blade, green pumpkin head, bluegill colored skirt, with a green pumpkin single tailed grub trailer for sunny days Silver blade, black head, black and blue skirt and black/blue pit boss trailer on cloudy days A chatterbait for me is a stained water to dirty water deal, I will use a swim jig in clear water. I plan on going wild and spicing it up next by trying a gold blade LOL.

Mann's baby 1-...................if you hold your rod tip high and reel slow and steady it will "wake", point the tip down and it get's a foot under the surface. I started super shallow cranking almost 20 years ago with the baby 1-, have since tried every other bait similar to it, and am back to the baby 1-. The only other bait similar to it that I have in my rotation is the Storm Arashi Waking bait...it's a true "wake' bait, and is a little bigger than the 1-

That's what I do too. I like to have a line that if I get low enough on braid and am casting the backing line out, at least will hold up until I get a chance to spool up some fresh braid. 2 re-ties into the day on a reel that's getting low, and...poof....your down to having some backing line out on a long cast would make the day ruined if the backing line was just some ol' junk..............The cheap zebco line is not much more than junk, but it's usuable in a pinch.

On my home lake there is no shad, yet shad colored lures work just fine..................go figure.