fishing smaller water

[thinkingredneck]

I usually fish a reservoir but may hit some "farm ponds."  I have used my regular gear.  Do you normally down size for smaller water?

[NYWayfarer]

It depends on what you think is in the pond and what you are going for.

 

My local ponds have everything from Trout, sunfish, perch, carp, bass and bullhead. I go for trout and bass when I am there. I down size from my kayak gear when fishing for Bass out of the pond as the biggest I have seen come out of there was less than 3lbs.

[fishballer06]

I prepare myself for what I know is in each pond (when I pond fish). I fish a few ponds that I've never caught anything over 12-14" and my average fish is 8-11". So in those bodies of water, I'm obviously going to downsize my baits or otherwise I'm not going to get bit.

 

However if there are bigger fish in the 15-20" range, it's game on for my entire tackle box.

[Gundog]

I usually start small when fishing ponds and experiment with larger baits as I go on. If they hit bigger baits then that is what I use. 

[buzzbaiter83]

Agree with everyone else. Depends on what size fish are in the pond.  But if you're throwing soft plastics, I'd just use my regular gear. I've caught a lot of dinks on regular sized baits. 

[Koz]

3 hours ago, thinkingredneck said:

Do you normally down size for smaller water?

 

NO!

 

Seriously, though. t really depends upon your area. We have thousands of small, stormwater wet retention ponds here and the average sized bass we pull out of these is two pounds. Four and five pounders are frequent, and while my best here is 6+ pounds I've seen the photos of the 7-12 pounders caught in these same lagoons.

 

When I first started fishing these areas I made the wrong assumption that 2-4 pounders would be all I would get out of these small bodies of water. Most of what I caught was in the *** pound range. But as soon as I started targeting bigger bass that's what I was catching. A lot of the time that mean throwing bigger baits.

 

Whenever I hit a new lagoon I target those 4+ pound bass with bigger spinnerbaits, topwaters, chatterbaits, and if the bottom isn't a soupy algae mess bigger jigs. If I get no takers I move on to my standard plastics and lipless crankbaits. If that fails I just move to the next lagoon, although I really should take some more time and throw a ned rig for a while as well.

 

The point I;m getting at is that you have nothing to lose - other than time - by going through your tackle bag over the course of a day or a few visits to that body of water. Can you imagine how you'd feel targeting small bass and then some guy comes along and throws a big ol' jig and lands a lunker?

 

Go for it!

[Armtx77]

1 hour ago, buzzbaiter83 said:

Agree with everyone else. Depends on what size fish are in the pond.  But if you're throwing soft plastics, I'd just use my regular gear. I've caught a lot of dinks on regular sized baits. 

I used to fish strip mines back in Central Illinois when I was in my teens through late 20's. I used the same gear in those mines, as I was using on the MS River for large mouth.

The only difference, no boat. So, I was limited to how much I could carry.