Fishing Tips

If you choose the right lure styles for the situation and go at the right times, summer topwater fishing can be outstanding. Here’s what you need to know.

Late summer can be a tumultuous time to fish due to ultra-hot temps and uncooperative fish, which seem to turn their nose up to every presentation possible. The one saving grace is the topwater action you can find early in the morning or late in the evening, when bass have their short feeding periods. These periods give way to some intense action, if the right lures are chosen for the given situation. Detailed below are my top picks, by action, for late summer topwater bassin’!

Beyond helping you beat the heat and the crowds, summer night crappie fishing provides dependable action. Here’s what you need to know.

Seeing a few minnows in a pier light, you know it won’t be long. Soon more plentiful minnows will become part of the scene, and the dark shadows of crappie will start showing up. If all goes according to plan, the crappie catching action will soon kick into gear.

Night fishing for crappie has definite advantages through mid-summer. Two obvious advantages are an escape from the heat of the day and the chance to avoid crowds of pleasure boaters and other anglers. Fishing is about trying to catch fish, though, and the most important advantages of summer night crappie fishing are that fish tend to be congregated and cooperative, and the patterns are predictable.

Crappie are active at night, moving shallower than at other times and actively seeking food. They feed opportunistically on concentrations of forage, which is central why summer night fishing tends to be predictable.

Wisconsin smallmouth specialist Bill Schultz shares countless hours of learning about the lure that has produced more than 6,000 smallies for him.

In 1992 I bought my first Rebel Teeny Wee-Crawfish to fish bluegills and largemouth bass in a pond. I still remember my first cast with this little fish-catching magnet. I caught two bluegills, and I knew I had a winner. 

It wasn’t until August 4, 1994 that I gave it a try for stream smallmouth bass, and since that day it has been one of my “go to” lures for river smallies. It’s possible that I have fished this lure for smallies as much as anyone in the country. Since catching my first smallmouth bass in May of 1994, I’ve caught and released 24,700, with more than 13,000 coming from my river outings. Conservatively, I’ve caught more than 6,000 smallmouth bass on the Rebel Teeny Wee-Crawfish!

A jigging spoon fills a critical niche in any angler’s tackle selection. Learn how to best use these highly versatile lures.

Simple and Versatile: those two words describe Cotton Cordell’s CC Spoon to a T.

This venerable lure consists of nothing more than a piece of hammered metal with a rustproof treble hook at one end and a metal loop at the other end. It comes in just two colors—silver and gold—and four sizes—1 1/2, 2, 2 1/8 or 3 inches. Despite having only basic options when selecting a CC Spoon, the angler who drops one of these often-overlooked lures into the strike zone might hook up with anything from panfish such as white bass or crappie to high-jumping black bass or trout to pole-bending saltwater species that could range from sheepshead and redfish to sharks and tuna.

The War Eagle Jigging Spoon offers similar functionality. However, different shaping alters the profile and wobble. It comes in two sizes – 1/2 and 7/8 ounce – and seven colors and comes equipped with a swivel.

Learn the best baits and presentations for calling bass from different types of vegetation.

Green vegetation in bass waters creates habitat-rich environments, which creates a common problem for bass fishermen: It all looks fishy. Rather than being overwhelmed by all the visible possibilities, anglers do well to learn to identify those areas with the highest probability of producing bass. Part of the solution is learning to accurately cast the appropriate lures to the vegetation that is most apt to produce a strike.

There are four major types of aquatic vegetation: floating, submerged, emergent and algae.  Let’s look at several specific varieties and examine how to go about fishing them.

Learn the benefits of Fish Handling Gloves for conservation and safety and how to maximize those benefits.

“Net?” I asked, as my 15-year-old son Nathaniel gained control of a good trout and worked it close.

“I’ll use the glove,” he said, as he held the line tight with his rod and used his other hand to pull a Lindy Fish Handling Glove from his back pocket.

Well-rehearsed from many previous fish, Nathaniel slid his hand into the glove, maneuvered the fish to good angle and then stabbed like a heron nabbing a baitfish to grab the trout by the base of the tail. He then set down his rod, slid his rod hand under the trout’s belly, showed the fish to me, removed a barbless single hook and let the trout go, having never taken it out of the water.

The “brown bass”, formally known as the smallmouth bass is one of the greatest natural resources, we have swimming in the waters across our country. Even more special is the fact that this hard-fighting species roams abundantly in the smallest creeks and streams offering excellent wade fishing adventures for anyone who seeks! Finding and catching them though can be a task worth researching though, because smallmouth aren’t everywhere in creeks and won’t bite just any particular lure. A sense of stealth needs to be implied and some fishing skill must be put forth.  I’m going to give you a three-part system in this blog to hopefully provide enough information for you to be successful and have some lasting fun this summer wading creeks for smallmouth bass.

Waking the surface with crankbaits and minnow lures is a highly effective tactic for everything from bluegills to saltwater predators like redfish and striped bass. Here’s what you need to know about this fun fishing technique.

You wouldn’t think a 1 ½-inch Rebel Crickhopper and a 7-inch Cotton Cordell Red Fin would have anything in common. One is grasshopper shaped, weighs only 3/32 ounce and is best fished on ultralight tackle. The other is shaped like a big baitfish, weighs a full ounce and is best suited for fairly heavy spinning or baitcasting tackle.

However, these two baits (along with many others that fall in-between in size) lend themselves to fishing the same way. Both work wonderfully as wake baits, and while the scale of everything, the setting and the fish species targeted differ substantially, the actual technique and the explosiveness of the results are the same.

Here’s what you need to know about an easy and dependable way to catch fish during spring from ponds, lakes and streams throughout the country.

Whether you are beginning to learn how to fish with a float for bluegills and other panfish or a seasoned angler who has the technique dialed to a science, you simply cannot beat the feelings of anticipation and relaxation of fishing with a Thill float and live bait.

Float fishing with live bait has been a choice of anglers dating back to the 1800s. It is one of the earliest direct line-to-pole techniques thought of, and has withstood the test of time while remaining a popular choice among many anglers of various skill levels around the world.