Bass

I don’t know any angler who doesn’t like to fish spinnerbaits. This fun technique is even better when you do it fast—and when big smallies crush the lure right under the surface. I learned this method a few years ago in the North Woods and put it to use in this video on New York’s St. Lawrence River...

If you know anything about me or my style of fishing, you probably don’t associate either with dropshot rigs. I built my reputation around giant swimbaits and super heavy tackle—but I knew that wasn’t going to cut it with 224 pro anglers all around me on the James River in Virginia. Every piece of...

Bass have a way of catching lockjaw when they see the same presentation a bunch of times, especially when there’s 224 anglers doing the same thing. That’s how it was at the recent Bassmaster Open on the James River, and we all saw catch rates wane with traditional techniques. In my last video I...

Flipping and pitching is full-contact bass fishing. It’s what you do when the fish are up in heavy cover like lily pads, grass edges, cypress roots, or dock pilings and you have to get your rig in there with them. With a Texas-rigged plastic and a bullet weight, it’s a quintessential technique, one...

A South Carolina community mourns the loss of 18-year-old Jack Hunt today. Hunt was a freshman at Erskine College where he competed on the intercollegiate bass fishing team. According to local reports, Hunt was killed when his boat struck a piece of debris, which then struck Hunt. Hunt was traveling...

Selecting the best bass fishing lures for largemouth and smallmouth can be as complicated or as simple as you want it to be. Though there may be hundreds of thousands of bass baits on the market, you can get on your way to catching fish with just a few tried-and-true classics. The best bass lures...

Okeechobee: The Heart of Florida The center of Florida’s circulatory system sits right in the middle of the state. Lake Okeechobee spreads across 700 square miles of freshwater and grass. Oh yeah, and bass. Lots of largemouth bass, some of the largest and most notorious bass in the country, prowl...

This place is a frog’s nightmare. Bank-eroded trees complicate the shoreline in various stages of decay, providing perfect ambush spots for finned predators. Farther out in this slow-moving river, lily pads bejeweled with yellow flowers contrast deepwater pockets the color of tea. Milfoil and other...

Kellen Ellis had just weighed in the heaviest limit of the field on the first day of his second-ever bass fishing tournament, one of the biggest in San Diego County. The then-18-year-old was flying high. His day got even better when the rock star of California big bass fishing walked over to say...

Campsite a quarter-mile ahead, dusk descending as my paddling partner and I head toward “home.” A lazy current near the lake’s outlet allows us to drift in the waning daylight, with only the occasional stroke to stay on course. Greedy to milk every minute from a non-resident fishing license, I troll...

Largemouth bass aren’t good to eat. Pale-flesh salmon and trout are inferior. Catfish from muddy waters taste like mud. Bony fish are useless. Just as with terrestrial critters, myths and misconceptions regarding fish flesh abound. Though often outright wrong, sometimes they contain kernels of truth...