Nicasio

Falling water means it’s easier to get around. But the question is which spots are worth getting to if falling water levels push the fish off the shallow cover.

I fished three of the last six days from the island; one day a 1 hour hike into the backside from the dam and one day from the island and from the back side near the school house. Every trip the water was lower and in total about 4-5 feet lower by the end of the third trip. Some spots still had good wood cover and grass, and I found a lot of 2-3 lb fish on these spots using a Jig Monster prototype white/chartreuse ½ oz spinnerbait, a ½ oz chatterbait in green pumpkin with 2/3 of a green pumpkin senko for a trailer, a ¼ ounce speed trap in red craw, a wacky rigged Baby Bass 5” senko and my two best fish (4/48 & 6.11) both hit a ½ oz Jig Monster Mayhem series flipping jig in Bludgeon & Lava Craw.

I took a quick hour out there today and found that some of the spots that are high and dry had break lines or rock piles within 20 feet of shore and I think a lot of the fish holding on lay downs have pulled out to these nearby breaks and ledges because in three similar spots I had multiple bites on the speedtrap in red craw and the Jig Monster Chaos football jig in ¾ oz Bludgeon and Brazen Bluegill. My best fish was about 4 pounds (left my scale in the car) or so but this was all in one hour so I can’t wait to get back out and revisit all my good wood that’s high and dry to see if there are breaks and rocks close by. It’s like pre-spawn but backwards.

Clearlake

Off shore weed beds on the north end are kicking out fish in the 3-5 pound range with bonus fish in the 5-8 pound range being not uncommon. Best baits are big soft plastics like 10” worms, magnum lizards, and super flukes on a Carolina rig, or 5-7” senkos rigged on weighted wacky jigheads. Top water fishing is hit or miss, but walking baits, poppers, and floater swimbaits like the JSJ Snack Size Trout, MS Slammer, and BBZ-1 have taken fish up to 9 pounds in the last 4 or 5 days.

As for the south end, 1 oz Jig Monster football head jigs in Bludgeon, Green Pumpkin Chartreuse, Brazen Bluegill and Sexy Shad are taking fish in the 4-8 pound range off some of the deeper docks and rock piles, with brass and glass rigged beavers, sharks, and paddletails or 5-6” senkos on a weighted wacky head producing good fish as well. I’m starting to hear reports of a deep diving crankbait bite but the fish are still in transition and that bite has not peaked yet.

As for night fishing I’m told that 1 oz spinnerbaits and 10” worms on brass and glass are producing well for guys fishing rocky areas around shag rock.

First, I know we’ve been neglecting our blog, but it’s for the greater good. We finally got our Mayhem Flipping Jigs up and available on Jigmonster.com in 20 colors as well as expanding the color options on the Chaos Football Jigs. They turned out even better than I thought they would - you definitely should check them out: http://www.jig-monster.com/

Went for a hike with Emily on a Monday evening recently (about a week and a half ago). We started at 6 pm and got back around 9 pm. Right off the bat I could see that the water was down almost 4′ and it was alot clearer then normal. No luck throwing jigs, cranks, spinnerbaits, and swimbaits. So we hiked back to the car while we still had some day light left and made one stop on one of the few pieces wood cover still under water. I made 4 casts with a jigmonster prototype spinner bait, right over the wood cover, bumping each limb as I went and stuck 4 good fish. One over 5lbs and three just under 5lbs. I could have caught more but I promised Emily that we would be back to the car by dark.

On another note I discovered that the worst smell in the world is coyote crap from a coyote that eats rotting carp and catfish and washes it down with porto pottie slury from a porto pottie that the owners forgot about along time ago and has been overflowing with the mess of thousands of diseased fish killing meat fishermen.

Well, we’ve got some awesome posts planned and I hope to have something meatier to add in the next day or two - a how-to, product review - I’m not sure yet. And I’ll definitely have some info about our new jigs up for you soon as well.

It wasn’t that long ago when I would have to toss (if the fish didn’t toss it for me) $20-$30 worth of Senkos and Beavers on almost every trip to the lakes or Delta. In fact, for a very long time the only solutions for the short life span of soft plastics was either melting baits back together with an open flame – a task that even veteran bass guys found dangerous, flawed, and only partially workable – or gluing them back together with superglue, and like the melting trick using super glue was not only messy and dangerous but also caused permanent changes to the bait such as severe hardening which is kind of the opposite of the entire idea behind using soft baits….they’re soft!

Tackle manufacturers also took a swing at this problem about 8-9 years ago by creating soft plastic baits out of elastomeric plastics that made the baits amazingly sturdy and amazingly stretchy without losing the softness. In fact these types of soft baits were softer than regular plastics. So, what’s the problem? They are a nightmare to fish. They literally fight you every step of the way to be un-rigable. They even, in the case of worms, suck the energy load of your cast from the rod by stretching at the exact moment of energy transfer from the rod to the bait at the release of the cast.

So it looked like we needed to just shut up and eat the cost of constantly burning through soft plastic lures at 50-60 cents each. However, with the explosion of West coast style swimbait fishing and the revolutionary new soft swimbaits like the Huddleston, Mission fish, Osprey, Basstrix, Mat lures, Baitsmith, and Maverick lures a whole new generation revived the quest for a glue that would repair baits and for good reason.

We are no longer talking about power worms and lizards for 3.99, and crankbaits for 4.99, but instead anywhere from $8-$12 for Basstrix all the way up to $39 for Huds.

The glue breakthrough happened about 1 ½ years ago when Tom Leogrande started Mend-it. Here Tom can tell you what Mend-it is in his own words:

CLICK HERE to watch the video w/ Tom Leogrande.

This stuff is incredible. I have tried dozens of glues and bonding agents and Mend-it has the best ease of use and capability. As far as I can tell the only material that even works the same way is Baitfix, a new glue from Baitsmith. They are similar products, but Mend-it has the ability to bond baits with a lot of PVC in them and has a short set up time. Because Mend-it has been on the market for quite some time they have solved a lot of issues with the applicator and the bottle for optimum storage with minimum evaporation over time. The Mend-it applicator seems to maintain flow from the tip without needing to be cleaned out every few days.

We do have Mend-it available on JigMonster.com – click here.

On a slightly different topic, many of the high finishers at record breaking Lake Falcon’s BASS stop this year were reported to have been gluing baits together in order to create a bigger worm. For example Ben Matsubo bonded a bunch of 5” Senkos together for his best fish so here’s a look at one I made in about 8 minutes with Mend-it.

Below there are two Gambler Ugly Otters; one was cut into three pieces and repaired….can you tell which one? Me neither.

So, give these new glues a try and get creative!