Slab crappies are meat eaters—sure enough minnow munchers. They take artificials well at times, especially jigs—but big crappie will turn their noses at even the best of the best crappie lures.

I’ve talked to you all before about the effectiveness of using live bait when you are fishing. Please realize that the key word in this subject is “live.” Keeping your bait alive and lively is ...

LIVE BAIT is cheating. If I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it 10,000 times. The level of cheating, of course, varies by species and age. Any child under 15 can use live bait for whatever he or she wants.

Years ago friends and I zipped away from a boat ramp at a North Florida lake during a cool, sunny and windy spring dawn that left little doubt we were in for a tough day of bass fishing. We were in ...

Fathead minnows, leeches and worms are mainstays in bait-shop refrigerators across the country. These old standards have pro­duced stringers of game fish for decades, and they’ll continue to produce ...

A blue marlin weighing 899.6 pounds on Cotton Patch won the 2015 Emerald Coast Blue Marlin Classic. A year later, an 806.8-pound blue on You Never Know won the 2016 Blue Marlin Grand Championship. In ...

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