Been a little dry spell of just catching little guys but this evening I got to go fish for a couple hours and was fortunate enough to get a few big enough that I felt they were worth boarding and submitting to the tournament.

I threw a crankbait, a buzz bait, and spinner bait, etc and couldn't buy a bite until right at dusk I started throwing a Megabass X80 Jr jerkbait and that's what I caught every fish on that I caught today.

I tried jerking the bait pretty hard, light twitches, very small feather like twitches but similar to what Fred James said in the live a couple days ago - in the end they just wanted a straight retrieve pretty much.

I would cast it out and let it sit until ripples dissipated. If I didn't have a fish by then, then I would twitch it a couple times and then just steadily retrieve it back to the boat. I caught multiple ones before I even started the retrieve - they would hit it while it was just sitting there while waiting on the ripples to dissipate.

Hey Brian Latimer - thanks for the instructions on how to land a big fish. I had just watched the video Tuesday night where you were telling your tips for how to land a big fish and Wednesday morning I tried your method for opening the bail and thumbing my spool to work the fish in. This was the first time I had ever tried it. How'd I do? I did land the fish and he only had a single hook in him so I was pretty pleased with using your method for the first time.

I fought him for over 2 minutes - of course I had to trim this video way down.

I fished this rip rap bank for a little while using this little jerk bait. I varied how I was fishing multiple times trying to figure out what they wanted. I fished it using light twitches and I tried fishing it with sharp heavy jerks and some retrieves I would mix it up light and heavy jerks in the same retrieve and also periods of just straight medium speed retrieve without any jerks or twitches. Oddly enough - the straight reel retrieve was what got this smallmouth to hit. I did start the retrieve with a few little twitches - so maybe that got his attention and he decided to go for it on the straight retrieve. I don't know 🤷🏽‍♂️ What do y'all think?