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.
Learn about Chris Jones’ long-time secret weapon, its doubly important Bassmaster Classic role, and its virtues for pulling bass from shallow cover.
The only bad part about a “secret weapon” lure is that eventually the secret gets out. Ask Oklahoma bass pro Chris Jones. He watched that happen with his favorite lure – a swim jig now known as the Mobster and soon available from BOOYAH Bait Company – when he used it to win a 2020 Bassmaster Central Open on the Arkansas River in Oklahoma and then rode it to a third-place finish in the 2021 Bassmaster Classic last week on Lake Ray Roberts in Texas.
The Open win, which qualified Jones for this year’s Classic, coupled with Jones’ Classic success, brought national attention to jig that Jones has been winning tournaments with for the better part of two decades.
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.
What you need to know about the Texas impoundment that will host the 2021 Bassmaster Classic.
When March 11-13 sees the 51st Bassmaster Classic unfolding on Lake Ray Roberts, the fishing world will get its first major look at a lesser-known East Texas fishery. That is no slight to this timber-strewn reservoir that is located just north of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. After all, the lake record of 15.18 pounds screams quality. We simply haven’t had much opportunity to get to know the fishery.
Classic qualifier Stetson Blaylock said the Classic practice would be his first look at Ray Roberts. The Arkansas pro arrived with a reasonable level of background knowledge, based on internet and map study, but Blaylock said he’ll be learning this one as he goes.
“This time of year, the challenge is figuring out if you can win on the bank or do you almost have to be out where the majority of fish are going to be living,” Blaylock said. “From what I understand, this lake doesn’t have a lot of shallow structure. To me, that means you have a Texas lake without a lot of vegetation, so those fish are going to be on something — more than likely offshore.”
Learn the Secrets to a highly productive and often-overlooked crappie fishing technique.
The current obsession of sniping crappie by using LiveScope has opened the door for anglers without live sonar technology to the technique of dock shooting. Truth is, you would be hard pressed to find any tournament crappie angler shooting docks on most lakes.
That’s a mistake, according to Weiss Lake crappie fishing guide Lee Pitts. “Seems like tournament anglers have forgotten that lots of crappie, along with big crappie, live under docks,” Pitts said.
Unlike video game fishing, dock shooting requires eye-hand coordination to skip or shoot a lightweight lure in and around boat docks, boat lifts and in stalls. Let’s look at this unique, ultra-productive technique for catching crappie.
Going long can produce a quick score for football teams, and crappie anglers can also score quickly by going long with their baits.
When Brad Chappell started fishing Magnolia Crappie Club tournaments, he quickly discovered he needed to go long for crappie to succeed in the club. Chappell became convinced he needed to change tactics when the team of Earl Brinks and Kenny Browning kept winning the club tournaments by long lining for crappie.
“Honestly, they were putting a beat down on us, so I just decided I wanted to do it,” Chappell said.
Chappell learned his lessons so well that he is now considered one of the best anywhere at long lining, a method of trolling lures on long lines from the sides and back of a slow-moving boat. The Mississippi guide believes long lining is so effective because it allows him to cover water quickly with a wide span of lures running through a specific, controllable depth.
Long lining produces for Chappell through most of the year. “I do it as long as the water is over 45 degrees,” Chappell said. “Anything below that is a little bit too cold.”
We’ll explore the most important factors to consider for stocking your walleye box and picking the lures to pull any given day.
“When the weather is sunny, use silver lures, and when the weather is cloudy, use gold lures. If that doesn’t work, do the opposite.” Old Angling Myth
Ah, to have such a simple choice: Silver or gold? The characters who coined the myth clearly didn’t have the wide gamut of options we have nowadays. In addition to color, add in shapes, sounds, sizes, actions, running depths and more, and the number of possible meals on the menu is almost mind-boggling. Still, we all have our ways to decide what to snap on the end of our lines.
The Heddon Spook is probably a familiar name in your household if you are much of a topwater angler. This is because the original Heddon Zara Spook was the first walking topwater lure of all time and has risen to produce many off shoots that are increasingly popular among todays fishermen no matter the species!
In todays blog we are going to outline the entire line of Spooks in today’s portfolio at Heddon and break down where each one is the most productive.
The striper bite has heated up along the Atlantic coast. Learn the best techniques for getting in on this exciting fishing action.
Ask any Northeast angler: No other saltwater species attracts more fervor, with a cult-like following, than the striped bass, also knows as rockfish, linesider, striper, or even the affectionate old-school term of “ol’ Pajamas.”
Although striped bass are found in many areas, including Northern California and freshwater impoundments from the South to parts of the West, the coastal striper’s epicenter spans the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic coast from Maine to North Carolina. With average size classes ranging from 5 to 50 pounds on any given day, the species can be hooked on a variety of methods, all certain to raise your adrenaline level.
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.
Hard baits, including minnow imitators and specialized crankbaits like Rebel Crawfish and Crickhoppers provide major advantages for stream trout and produce great results.
“This is all they’ve been hitting,” the guy behind the fly shop counter advised my son, Nathaniel, showing him a midge so tiny it was barely visible on the tip of his finger. “With it being all catch-and-release, those fish get very fussy.”
Nathaniel wasn’t planning to fly-fish, so the suggested pattern didn’t matter, but he listened politely and nodded, maybe wondering slightly if a small jig might work best when we got to the stream the next morning. Shortened version: The trout were highly aggressive, and Nathaniel caught most of his fish on Rebel Wee-Crawfish and his best fish on a 3 ½-inch jerkbait that he had equipped with a 1/O single hook. Other young anglers we saw that day were having minimal success.
The bass jig – the manliest form of bass fishing out there. It seems after every tournament when anglers gather round to share their near misses that anyone who threw a jig sticks their chest out as they describe the harrowing details, even if they didn’t land in check range! But why is this? I attribute the testosterone boost of throwing a jig to the mental toughness it takes to fish slowly and the destructive hook sets you get to lay to a bass. Add in the ability to land above average bass and its quite easy to see why so many anglers are drawn to the legendary lure known as the jig.
But what is a jig? I mean, there are so many options out there that say bass jig on the package so where do you even begin?
Well for starters a bass jig is any lead head lure with a hook and a plastic keeper. Typically, they sport a fine silicone skirt in various colors and a weed guard protruding from the head to keep the lure from snagging cover. The jig can have several different head designs, but I like to classify them all in a few categories like football, casting, flipping, finesse, and swimming.
Basically, all a jig needs to do is slip through the desired cover you are fishing efficiently and show off the plastic it is carrying. Jigs get bit the most when they are subtle and lifelike.
To be the most efficient we are going to break down the cover often fished and choose which heads to use in that type of cover.
