Get a couple of Kayaks and open up your oppertunities on the water instead of restricting yourself to bank fishing only!
Learn the habits of your quarry and where it can likely be located through out the season. Here in Texas when the water warms to 58 degrees until it hits about 70 the Crappie will move uop from deeper waters of 12-20ft where they wintered to the shallows around brush and rocks and prepare to spawn in water 1-4ft deep. After the spawn they will usually migrate back to deeper waters where they will suspend or stack up on brush piles and rock piles where they will pretty much remain most of the year. They feed primarily on minnows and in tough times will hit small shad or Blue Gill fry. Baits that immitate minnows are brutal on thses fish. When jigging for them they will almost never chase a bait that drops below them so jig the lure just above them. The bite will almost always come as you lift the lure up on the jig. Around mid to late october as the summer waters cool they will be scattered with no real pattern from one day to the next as they forage for food just before winter sets in where they will go to deeper waters and wait out old man winter and the return of spring where the cycle starts all over again. The easiest time to locate them in in spring when they spawn. Once you locate the spawning area you can just about bet the bank that the nearest area of 12-20ft of water with some sort of structure will hold them a majority of the year. Learn the habits of your choosen target well and you can score just about all year long.
Dont fall for the "Trick of the week lures". These are designed to catch the fishermen more than the fish. Yes sometimes such lures can be brutally effective under the right conditions, but really a few tried and true basics will cover you better day in and day out. One of my personal favorites is the lowley Road Runner Jig with a plastic white curl tail grub threaded on the hook. You can fish it slow fish it fast fish it shallow fish it deep or you can just verticle jig it. Either way its a killer a large portion of the year on a large number of species in a variety of waters. Did I also mention its cheap too! One of my favoprite tactics with this lure is to cruise around in the kayak with the Fish Finder on and locate a school of Crappie over some brush or a rock pile. I will then drop a Road Runner jig as previously mentioned just above them and vertical jig until my limit is caught.
Got Catfish in your area? I like to use circle hooks when catfishing. I use a hook a size or two larger than I other wise would for the bait due to its design. With these hooks the fish doesnt usually swallow them like other hook styles. The hook sets in the fish as the fish swims away with the bait causing the hook to cam and hook the fish in the corner of the mouth making hook removal much easier. You also dont set these hooks on a fish bite, you let the fish pick up the bait and take off with it. If anything you might use a long gradual sweep of the rod tip to cam the hook to the corner of the fishes mouth as it swims away with the bait. I will typically fish for catfish using the typical tight line method with a hook on a 12 inch leader below a egg sinker of appropriate weight or drift fish using a Santee Copper rig. While catfish are often thought of as bottom feeders fishing the bottom only limits the fish you target. Try fishing all levels of the water depth. Channel Cats and Bull Heads will readily hit cut bait, dough bait and dip baits. Blues will prefer fresh or recently thawed frozen shad. Flatheads typically are caught using live bait such as a sunfish nose hooked and then dropped down into log jams or other likely structure.
For Large Mouth Bass, its tough to beat a soft plastic worm, lizard or creature bait Texas or Carolina rigged. I was really slow to take to this style of fishing for bass because it does take some skill and "feel" to effectively fish with but after getting schooled one day on the water I made it my mission in life to perfect this technique and its a killer one once you do. I use a Texas rigged bait with just enough weight to get the bait down in the water to the proper depth and to allow it to slither over under water weeds instead of dropping down in them and becoming burried. I typically will use a 1/8th or 1/16th ounce bullet weight with a 3/0 hook and a plastic six inch lizard. In the dawg days of the brutal Texas summers I will resort to a Carolina Rigged bait to fish deeper water structure for bass dodging the heat of summer. I will usually use a 1/2 to 3/4 ounce weight with a 24 inch leader and tie on a 5/0 hook and use either a 12 inch worm or a large creature bait resembling a crawfish. These arent the only ways to fish a plastic bait either just two of the more common bread and butter techniques that produce well under a variety of conditions. In the cooler water times on waters that have a good population of crawfish I will fish a Jig n Pig. Its a great bait for getting fish that are sluggish due to the cooler water but are hungry and still willing to bite. This is a great winter time bait here for me in Texas. This is also a brutal bait for Small Mouth Bass year round!
There is probably no more exciting way to go after a lunker bass than using a top water bait in the shallows in summer or on night time outtings. The blow ups on top water baits can be violently vicious and bone jarring explosions on the surface of the water. The key to successful hook ups here is not to try a hook set when the water explodes under your bait but to wait until you actually feel the fish on the line and then set the hook. There are a wide variety of top water baits to target bass with but I prefer and find the most success with those that are in constant motion such as a Jitterbug, Buzz Bait or a Zoom Frog retrieved across the water at a steady and constant speed. I find that bass will be far more accurate at striking a bait thats constantly moving as opposed to a Zarra Spook or chug type bait being intermitantly worked on the surface. This type of fishing is not for the faint of heart from an excitement stand point.
On Bass, if I need to cover a lot of water fast and the structure aint to thick, I will often resort to a slash bait such as Rapahla's X5 with is a small skinny minnow type crankbait thats about 5-9 grams in weight (1/8 to 1/4 ounces for you non metric bubbas out there). These run fairly shallow usually no deeper than 4 ft and are great for fishing submerged rocky points that feature a steep drop off on one side or the other. I prefer patterns in bait fish colors simular to what ever forage fish the bass in your area will typically be feeding on. Here in Texas thats usually shad, so black on Chrome, Blue on Chrome or Black on Gold typically work best. Where your at the main forage may be Bluegill or Rainbow Trout fingerlings. For success match the forage!
Unfortunately there are no Trout, Walleye, Pike, Muskies or other cooler water species here in Texas so I cant help you out there.
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