Here we go, guys. We all know that spring is almost here. That’s a good thing, but it also presents us with problems — wild weather and extreme conditions. On Monday it might be a picture-perfect day, but on Tuesday it’ll be spitting ice and snow. When that happens I reach for the one bait I know they’ll eat — a hair jig. I’m talking about when all of the standard finesse baits and techniques don’t get you even one bite. The thing is, though, about hair jigs is that no lure made has more small, seemingly insignificant differences to […]
It’s getting late into the winter. Depending on where you live spring is right around the corner, or it’s still weeks away. Regardless of that, something has happened to everything that lives in the water. Their colors are getting dull, almost like they’ve been bleached. And that has a serious effect of how the bass relate to our lures. If we want to catch our share, or more than our share, we need to fish with dull colors. I have six favorites — three hard bait colors, three soft plastic colors — that have worked for me over the years. […]
The spine rig is a finesse rig that came from Japan and is popular on the West Coast. They’ve been pretty darn good at keeping it a secret, but I’m fixing that with this blog! Read on!
This time in our Top Secret Series we’re going to talk about the MJ rig, otherwise known as the spinner-jig. It’s super simple but it gives the fish something they haven’t seen before, something totally different. Basically, it’s a combination of flash and true tracking through the water. Let’s get started… You’ll need three things to build the MJ rig: We’ll start with a soft plastic stickbait. I use the Berkley Powerbait Maxscent The General Worm. The most important part of the stickbait is that it must have a big, fat blunt end on the back for the spinner to […]
Our next part of the Top Secret! series of new, fish catching, rigs is called the cat rig. I named it that because when you get done building this baitfish imitating lure it’ll move like a cat — subtle on the fall with just a little shimmy, and it stays perfectly horizontal in the water. Those of you who follow what I do know that’s super important to me. Anything that imitates a baitfish should always be horizontal in the water. It’s weedless, too. Ok, with all that out of the way let’s build one. We’ll start with a list […]
There must be a thousand fishing lures on the market. Choosing only six of them for this blog was no easy task. But sometimes we need to downsize so I did just that. I’ve listed the baits below in no particular order. The first three are power fishing lures. The last three are more in the finesse category. A crankbait This is a great bait because you can cover a lot of water with one and because they search out the bass. It’s almost like they’re calling the fish in to them. Although there are hundreds of them available, picking […]
This time we’re going to talk a little about tight lining an aspirin head jig. It’s a great way to use your electronics in cold weather to catch huge numbers of bass. Here’s how I do it: Cold water bass tend to suspend, and there’s no tougher bite than that. So what I do is move around likely spots watching my SONAR until I find a school of suspended bass. When I find them I drop a VMC Neon Moon Eye jig straight down off the bow of the boat. With quality electronics you can actually watch it drop down […]
Those of you who follow me know that I’m a big advocate for urban fishing. I’ve filmed countless TV shows and posted I don’t know how many videos and blogs about it over the years. The reason I do that is because it’s how I grew up in New Jersey and because there’s better fishing in our cities than many men and women think. It’s a truly untapped resource. And, nowhere is that more true than in Paris, France. My experience over there started with Abu Garcia. We’ve developed a new series of rods designed just for the European market. […]
Austin, Texas, is one of the truly neat places we visited doing the show. There’s no doubt that the fishing there is fantastic but the city itself is equally fantastic. The music is really cool, the art scene is one of the best I’ve ever been around and if you don’t gain weight eating the barbecue, it’s your own fault. We targeted three species this time — blue cats, Guadalupe bass and smallmouth buffalo. Here’s the story… Blue Cats Blue cats are big and they are bad. A giant can grow to five feet in length and can weigh upwards […]
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