Category: Articles
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Bottoms Up! Big Blue Catfish
By Andrew Ragas With Marc Cooper, and Matt Lynch Tricks of the catfish trade with southern hospitality, on the intricate art of baiting for big blue behemoths in southern fisheries.
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Aggressive Tactics for Prespawn Largemouth Bass
By Joseph Alfe As the water warms into the low 50 degree range across the upper Midwest, largemouth bass will shift into a more aggressive pre spawn stance. Gangs of bass will begin massing and patrolling just outside likely spawning areas, such as the mouths of smaller bays and along the shallow first breaks. Weather…
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Reciprocal Jerkbait Strategies
By Andrew Ragas Springing for smallmouths with jerkbaits hard and soft, and analyzing the situations that call for reciprocation.
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Musky Lures For The Neophyte
By Cory Allen All too often in guiding, or just being a magnanimous steward into musky angling, we face the difficulty of finding lures that allow those with minimal experience to have a maximum opportunity at witnessing the awe of a muskellunge doing what it does best: #%^^ing things up.
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The Northwoods Smallmouth Calendar
By Andrew Ragas As the new season approaches, anglers are planning their trips and getaways for the upcoming year. With the Northwoods of Wisconsin serving as my home waters, I have been asked to offer an annual fishing calendar: To help traveling and adventurous anglers plan their fishing trips and vacations efficiently and more effectively.
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Musky Tactics for Trophy Bass
By Joseph Alfe In part one of this series, we explored using bass lures and techniques to catch muskie. Here, we turn the tables and go where few dare to go and that is, to use muskie baits and tactics to catch bass. The thing is, using big baits can get you big bass. How…
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Breaking Barriers for Big Muskies
By Cory Allen It Might As Well Be Spring: I’m a restless as a willow in a windstorm; I’m as giddy as a baby in a swing. I swear that I have spring fever, as do most musky anglers this time of year. Here they sit, holed up in their dens, clinging rabidly to a…
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Uprooting Spring Crappies
By Andrew Ragas Spring time is crappie time, and for me the first prolonged warm spell in May signifies the arrival of the crappies in shallow water. Schools of spawning crappies will migrate from main lake areas, seeking the thickest, most luscious shallow water cover to lay eggs in protection. Wood cover, weed beds, and…
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Spider Rigging Comes North
By Jim Gronaw Ken Smith, of Sharon , Pennsylvania, had a roomy cooler with a bag of ice. He told me that we would have no problem putting slab crappies in there. ‘We just gotta’ find them’ he said. We were fishing 13,000 acre Pymatuning Lake, a flood control, flatland reservoir that bordered Ohio and…
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Pounding River Walleyes and Sauger
By Roy Vivian One of the biggest misconceptions in today’s walleye world is the encouragement to use the lightest jig possible. Walleyes are known to be finicky, and are short biters, thus the strategy is logical. Traditional thinking often says to use the lightest jig the current allows in order to maintain steady bottom contact.…