Pumpkin Lizard

Cool story (for me at least) from the weekend. Got a tip from my local tackle shop about a stretch of bank at a nearby Northwest Missouri lake. This lake gets hammered by boat and bank anglers. But one area gets neglected because by late spring nobody wants to beat the brush to get to one spot. Even the boats don't want to get into this spot. It poured early Sunday and I timed my arrival for the rain stopping. I managed to get into that spot on foot and found a couple hundred yards all to myself and the fish and the birds were going nuts on the shad. Within 30 minutes I had five 15 inch plus fish landed and then a solid 4 lb fish a bit later on. A bunch more after that. Making small talk on my out at the parking lot nobody really caught anything worth. Sometimes it's about finding the right place at the right time.

If your doctor says it's fine, then hell yeah. The benefits for your mental well being might be immeasurable. I really hope you can.

I knew some really good fly guides out west who basically used to joke that you could hire them if you passed the interview:) Seriously they were half kidding. They were always booked with repeat business. They could afford to get selective. When I started going out to Montana in the 2000s I was fishing with a guy who was exclusive with a small lodge. For five or six years I could book him but after a while he had no availability because I always plan my trips at the last minute. We became pretty good friends and used to drink beers after fishing. We know each other’s kid’s names and stuff. To make ends meet when he was younger during the winter he would go be a head guide in Chile for a lodge. Later on he would switch to Redfish in Louisiana. Fast forward many years and he still guides but also has an outfitters license and has multiple guides also working for him so he doesn’t need to leave his family all winter. It still can be stressful, sometimes the rivers you are guiding have bad year and you end up losing money burning gas to guide further and further away from home.

It does look good.

You can’t win in that situation. My brother does guide trips for trout, bass and pike in northeast. Those trips with inexperienced fly fishers who don’t listen are his biggest nightmare. It’s one thing when they can’t make a cast and another when your only hope of getting a strike is if you can make a cast and mend. Usually he can get them to toss an indicator rig with some nymphs and use the boat to mend the line.

This is the correct answer.

True but this is really nothing new. I remember in the '90s Zoom would come up with a hot new color and on the lakes I fished in Georgia every fish would see it in a matter of weeks or less and the color wouldn't be hot anymore. It for sure was happening before that too.

I've never hired a guide for bass fishing. But a guide fishing for any reason other that showing the client/sport what right looks like as a demonstration sounds incredibly unprofessional to me. Most of the guides I know are trying to catch fish through their clients. I hired guides for fly fishing for trout. Never once saw the guide fish. When I was a new to fly fishing 20+ years ago I had guides make casts to demonstrate a technique. It was the smartest money I ever spent because it accelerated the learning curve bigtime.

Awesome fishing to watch. The last day was fun. Shallow water and lots of different styles of fishing. I guess some guys didn't like getting into the locks with the big triple barges.

So Smith and Costa have figured out a way to alter the very nature of electro magnetic radiation? If so they should get out of sunglasses and get into defense contracting. A blue mirror reflects blue light. This is incredibly simple. The reflective blue definitely affect the bandwidth of light going through the lense. You can see the result by the reflective mirror. Certainly the lens color beneath the mirror also has an impact, but there is simply no way that the blue mirror is purely cosmetic. It’s basic science.

Bad luck to change.

It's nothing like your grassy lake in Maine, but I'm lucky to have it at least until they figure out that I am in the HOA next door.

Neighborhood pond action.

If you're catching 20 a session with 1-2 four and five pounders each time maybe you should tell us!:) Looks like a great spot. I grew up fishing ponds like that in New England. I fish the way you do, staying mobile, covering water, using searching patterns to locate fish. But when I want to take a closer look I start throwing a texas rig or a jig. I'd probably second the idea fishing later in the day versus early. But you never know unless you try. And that's how you learn.

Evenings lately have been fire. It's been warm/sunny for weeks here and cool at night. Fishing seems to get better as the sun gets lower and lower.

One thing I forgot to mention. Whether I am bass fishing with conventional tackle or fly fishing for bass or trout, in 99% of my experience when you are retrieving a lure or fly with no slack they are not leader shy. Where they are leader shy is when the lure or fly is still or being dead drifted. I've never dead drifted with braided but I would think it would drift great given how supple it is. That being said, I would always use a leader for the reasons I mentioned above.

I use a leader with braid. I like the longevity and casting performance of braided line as well as the the tight line sensitivity. But I also like fluorocarbon so I get the best of both worlds. -If I can't get out of a snag I have a couple break points. Most of the time it breaks at the lure. Breaking off with straight braided can suck, -Fluoro leader sinks faster than braid and on slack line Fluoro is more sensitive than braid. -The leader acts as a shock absorber and it might save you. Braided will weaken when it rubs up against stuff.

Hate to resurrect an old thread. When we moved into this subdivision it came with two small bass ponds so I bought Lew's "American Hero" Speed Stick Spin and Baitcast Combo for us to use which is very similar to the rod mention by the OP. I don't care for the spin rod. It works. It's a two piece which I hate and it needs some wax. The casting rod on the other hand is/was awesome. It was the 6 foot 6 medium heavy version. It was light as hell, felt great and I loved where the hook keeper was. I liked it better than my other "nice" Shimano Setup. So anyways I stepped on that rod the the other night so it's no longer with us lol. I was pretty broken up about it because it became my favorite over the years so I went to Wal Mart to look for a replacement and decided on the Lew's Hank Parker 7 foot medium heavy model. And I like it even better. It's lighter and cast fantastic. I've never cast a G. Loomis NRX or GLX. But this rod is great for 40 bucks. If they offer this in combo I would definitely try to avoid going that way and just buy a better reel seperately. But the rod is fantastic imo.

The color of the mirror is not cosmetic. The color of the mirror absolutely impacts the color you see through the lens beneath it. If the mirror is blue then it reflects blue light and the lens beneath it will make things look gray. Don't you remember the old cheesy "Blue Blockers" sun glass commercial? Blue mirror - shifts colors towards yellow Red Mirror - shifts colors towards blue/purple Green mirror - shifts colors towards rose/pink Gold mirror - shifts colors towards green Yellow mirror - shifts colors towards blue/green Teal mirror - shifts colors towards magenta Silver mirror - tends to darken without much shift in color

This is the answer.

Best way to catch big bass is to fish where there are big bass. I fish lots of ponds too and some ponds just don't have many of them. So don't beat yourself up. The odds might be against you. Also fishing from the bank, I get too focused on fishing shallower water. I think big bass are efficient. They go somewhere after spawning and they don't move until it's time to eat or the season changes. I seem to run into my big fish outside of spring when I find sweet spot in deeper water or in the evening when they move from deeper water to shallower water to smash bluegills.

It's God's Country. Maybe the most underrated and region in America. The Driftless area of MN/WI/IA and even Illinois looks like the shire. The bass fishing in the river is amazing and it has wild trout fishing in an uncountable number of spring fed creeks that is only rivaled by the Rockies/Big Sky Country.

Lacrosse is interesting, I used to live there. It's a huge fishery with nearly endless opportunities. Of course back then I was purely trout fishing in the Driftless so I didn't fish it that much.

To answer your question more directly: Glass/Plastic-Price can be a difference. Also If you don’t wear glasses some people have said that the extra weight of glass gives them a headache by the end of the day. I never had that problem. I also posted something about color. I do lots of wading in fast powerful streams with slippery bowling ball sized rocks. It’s important for me to see the bottom and what I am about to step on. I don’t like getting wet or cracking my head open. I’ve lost so many pairs that I tend to go for mid priced models made by Smith. I used to have a Pro deal with them.