 It's what marked a lot of fish out here. My gosh, look at them. Look at them doozies in there, what? Welcome back to the channel everybody. I'm up here at Guggen HQ right now. Picking up the boat, there was some severe weather going on in recent history. Decided to bring the boat up here in case it hailed. I figured while I'm up here today I'm gonna go tackle a nearby lake and just see what's going on with it. This week is gonna be stormy, it's gonna be nasty. There's not many delectable chances to get out there so I'm just gonna have to go do it. I can't be a pansy in this nasty weather anyway so I'm about to head to New Zealand and really get my butt whipped by some nasty conditions. So I might as well just live in it, roll around in it. I'm not scared. At least not right now, when the boat's doing like this might get a little sketchy. And something else I wanna do today is try out this month's mystery tackle box because every month I do so, they're great partners and today's video, we'll go ahead and say it, is sponsored by Mystery Tackle Box. If you've been around the channel you guys know what MTB does. They are a subscription based service. They provide you with tackle straight to your door every month if you choose and they make it super easy for you. They choose the baits depending on the time of year, the patterns, the things that are going on so that the lures that are in these boxes are general high percentage hookup baits. So if you wanna get hooked up with one of these boxes I'm gonna make it super simple for you. Link is down in the description. Go and click it. You can get your first box for as low as $5. All you gotta do is use one of my favorite words in the Bass Fish and Dictionary and that is Mondo. Use code Mondo right there and get some boxes sent right to your door and get to dangling. I can tell you this, it's gonna be windy and I'm going to a lake where I've had a lot of trouble in the past but I like those challenges. Bring them on. Let's go see if we can figure out the secrets of the waters. And if not, we're still gonna have a good time. Let's go. The water. It is not as windy as I was thinking it's gonna be. Good kick up. But I think we got ourselves a little blessing here with the wind not being so terrible. I'm at the boat ramp right now. This lake is called Ray Roberts. Also known as one of my least favorite lakes in the area. This lake used to be known as really one of the best big bass fisheries in the state. Back before largemouth Bass Virus got infected into the lake and killed a lot of the big bass. They were, the park's wildlife was really trying to up this lake to the next Lake Fork type of deal and it just hasn't really recovered. There's still a big fish being popped out here just about every year, you know, up in the teens. The teenagers do roam around in here but I have, to be honest, I've never caught a fish over five pounds out of here. A challenging endeavor for me. It's a big lake, lots of creeks, tons of wood, more wood than Lake Fork probably. So you'd want to watch out with the old Yamaha running around on this bend. Old fishing freak just rolled up here though to the boat ramp, old Teddy. Teddy works at the marina and Teddy was telling me he caught 36 pounds recently up shallow on a chatter bait and that was back before we had a bunch of rain and storms and things like that but that gives me some hope that an old boy like myself could take me a move and lure and just get around them shallows and possibly dangle up a couple of mondos. Look at them bushes up shallow. I'm gonna start off with a moving bait in some flooded brush halfway in a creek. You know, maybe the fish are more at the mouth of the creek, maybe they're farther back but I'm starting in the middle and just kind of working my way through and I'm just using a bait that I know I can get through there really quick. I'm just using a spinner bait. The water's really dirty. There's a ton of water though so I just don't know what is dead. It's always the hardest part coming to a lake that you've never been to or hadn't been to in a long time. It's like, what, what are these fish gonna be doing, where are they at? Like, where's the general location? You know. Okay, so just ain't happening in here. Too muddy, too flat, not enough juicy juice for my taste. Mount up on the silver bullet and roll up. Got some good depth on this brush. Come on, baby. Sometimes you gotta sink to them. Other times they don't want to be saying to. I just, I don't know. I don't know about this big pond here. It is a doozy of water, buddy, for me. I've hit a variety of brush depths in the first five, 10 minutes of fishing. In the middle of the creek, I'm gonna go to the back, check that, and then I'm gonna start just bouncing around. This creek seems kind of flat. I might need to find some steeper banks. This creek's just kind of flat. Not much going on, you know? Just kind of like a bland person, you know? The Bandit 200. This is a crankbait that's in the box. I hope everyone is familiar with it. It's really, surely one of the greats, you know? Look back in bass fishing history. It's definitely been around, especially for the springtime, falltime basses. Doesn't go very deep. It's about a four to six foot runner. It's a shad color. I've got some rock here, you know? It's good, it's a good little combo. Okay, that's a giant rock is what that is right there. It's what you don't want to hit. Well, it's a very good thing. I hit that with my trolling motor first. Gonna go ahead and raise that up. It's a good feeling rocks in here. If this is my old friend, the white dead gum. I swear, you guys, never leave me alone. That was in the brush, the brushy tops. Oh, I wonder if there's crappie in here. I bet there is. Wow, that is a tiny guy there. A little spot on his back. That came on the old Ocho on the shaky head. Since it's so tough, I'm just up here in the marina. The four inch Ocho, little shaky head on some spinning line, spinning combo. Just kind of slowly working it through here. That's my first bite though. Second fish of the day, and it is a spotted boss on the old bandit. Notice some shad flicking around here. Decided to throw that little bandit 200 out there on some rocks. This lake, I'll take anything really. If I could catch a bass over five pounds on this lake, it might as well be a Sharonlinker. That's where I'm at with this one. I'll just go down the bank guys. There's no fancy way to say it. I can see a little pocket of shad over here too. Come on, bass. I want, oh gosh. That's called a white bass. That's called a small white bass right there. It's a good indicator of shad though. You and my friend are about the size of a shad. Here in a couple months, they start schooling up. This bait is perfect for when they're not quite biting the top water, and they just, they go subsurface and you crash them with it. Okay, I literally see a bass. Just gonna wacky rig this sucker right in the middle. A bass sitting right on the edge of this limb. I'm just gonna very subtly, it's easing off. Got into a very back of a pocket over there and I noticed that there were some bass that were up shallow like I sawed them. And they were just spooky though. They creeped away from my bait. I always throw in eight pound tests, weightless throwing that ocho up there. They just kind of creeped off, which tells me they've probably been mess with, dangled on up there in the shallows, and it's flooded, they're trying to figure it all out. I'm running out of daylight here. Well, we're just coming into the boat ramp right here and the white bass have decided to make themselves present. Why do you need a boat? Come into the boat ramp and the fish just start busting right here. Oh, right there by my boat. Spotted bass. Literally I just caught it under my boat. Not exactly what I normally catch. I can almost fit you up one nostril, dude. Geez. There's definitely a little evening situation happening here though, right by the ramp. Oh, there he is. Got him. Ooh, hold on already, buddy. Big old white bass pulling in hard. God. That is a fish that is done with the spawn, heading out to the main lake. Gosh, I remember when I first came to this lake, really one of the first times I remember like actually getting on the crazy amount of fish. I would walk out, there's a state park here. I'd walk out, wade out in the water when it was warm. And literally you could just throw your lure around you and fish would come up and grab it. It was insane. There was that many white bass. That was my first experience really, really getting after them. Oh man, they're running right there. They are busting them. They are busting them. Woo-hoo-hoo. We might have to get back in the boat. Oh man, they're gonna go crazy right here for y'all. Oh my gosh, they're gonna do it. They're gonna do it right at sundown. Like busting shad out of the water. Oh, got one there. Get back in the boat for just a second. Okay, let's see if we can back them up on this little 200 here for a second. Oh, golly, that's gotta be a bass. Oh, he come off. Oh. He just stopped it. That's a white bass there. That first one was a largemouth. He just said boom, and it didn't move. That had to be a good bass. Almost had me a good one here at the buzzer. Come on, get off of my shirt, there you go man. Gotcha boy. Y'all, this ain't nothing. This ain't nothing what this lake can do. I'm talking everywhere you wanna cast all around you when they get off the spawn. Some of them are still spawning. It's gonna be insane. I've gotta come back here and do a catching cook on these guys just for old time's sake. Oh yeah. This lake is healthy with them. These guys need to eat. They're, these are the males that don't look so good. They've been spawning. They're all beat up. They spawn a little bit before the largemouth. You can see they're just skinny. They have some lesions and stuff on them. For some reason, they like, there's like one little spot right here that they are gravitating to. There's another one there. I mean, just right by the ramp, right by the ramp. Hoping there's a big largemouth that's sitting here too, feeding on these shad. Yeah, you guys are just keepers. That Bandit 200 is crushing their faces right now. Bandit 100 and a Bandit 200. Some of the best small shad imitating cranks have been for a long time. Off the water and back at the Guggen HQ. What I wanted to do is kind of give a post-dangle report if you will and go over the things in the box. I didn't have time today. I was really running around and trying to figure out the lake and break down the lake as quick as I could because they only had a few hours to fish and it's supposed to be stormy and it got a little darker earlier. The conditions where the water range from 64 up to 68 degrees in the backs of some of those pockets, they were muddy. There was a lot of rain that we had recently and a ton of rain where the lake was. And so most of those areas were just kind of washed out. And I think there was a lot of fish that had moved up to spawn because it was a full moon and now we're coming just off a full moon. So those fish wanted to be paired but then they got a bunch of water dumped on top of them so it made things tough. I knew that was gonna be tough but I gotta tell you, the lake is super healthy and I definitely wanna make a trip back there because it's just close to the HQ. I fished there a long time ago. The White Pass are phenomenal. The White Pass are ridiculous out there. The first bait that I used most of the time out there was the Bandit 200. Bandit 200, that's something I've had in my talking box for a really long time. It's just a great overall crankbait. It was kind of like pre-squarebill for the squarebill, got real popular. Smaller profile, smaller body. We got the Strike King Ocho. That's a small little Cinco-style bait. If you watch one of my previous videos, those style baits, the stick baits, they just, they do well this time of year. You need to have one. So good thing to have one of those in there. There was also a Lipton's crankbait. The water had been a little bit cooler and if I got in some of the areas which I knew they did have grass, I could have fished this. This is the Carl's Amazing Bakes, the Whacker. Also a squarebill, this would have got them too. This is the Lunker Hunt Jolt 2.5. And it looks like kind of a flat-sided crankbait. So usually it's good for a little bit colder water, real clear water. I actually saw a few fish up in the shallows, back behind the buck brush in the grasses. I could see their black tails kind of swimming around. They weren't gar, they saw a bunch of gar too. But the black bass, the black bass, that just sounds so weird. The largemouth were up there and I think they were on the spawn and now they're kind of boogered up. But if I would have slowed down a little bit, I could have flipped and this bait right here is the, it's some sort of worm, I can tell you that. It's a paddle tail worm, disco worm, disco. This thing actually changes colors depending on the water temperature. So it could turn, dago, purple, purple, for all I know. There's another plastic in here, Cabin Creek Salty Lizard. The lizards are kind of a classic bait. Not thrown as much nowadays in the springtime. That's like a really, a clear water bait right there. Just a smoke color. This is something I think is really cool. This is the donkey rig. This is like a double fluke style rig. You can put two of your favorite plastics on there, really, and it acts as like a, it looks like two shad. This is like pre Alabama rigs, like two shad. So there's a kit in here and it shows you the instructions on the back, how to rig that sucker. And then coming in strong, one of my favorite baits, the jig, hard to have baits. That's a three eighths ounce right there. Would have been good for crawling around rocks and everything like that. I wish I had more time. I felt like I got on a little something there at the end with being in the backs of the pockets and creaks and seeing those fish, but it was just getting dark, y'all. And I think I am yet to catch a bass over three or four pouts out of that place. But I'm committed to going back and figuring out that place. I've done a couple of videos and done pretty bad out there and it just hurts my ego, y'all. I also just realized that my jacket is inside out. I've been wearing it inside out this entire time. So fishing was a little funky today, but I will be back to conquer the waters. You wanna subscribe to the channel right now, y'all, because rain sleet are shine this week. I am going after, I'm going on bass ventures to places that I've never been before. Maybe do a little camping, kind of like a few weeks ago, but venturing a little farther out. Remember, y'all, this time of year, you could catch the biggest bass of your life. It may be really tough conditions, but there's those days, those magical days where the big bass you can turn on and you can really catch your PB. And one guy out there that just caught his PB, not just his PB, but the Lake Record, a junior Lake Record, I just wanna give a quick mention to Chase Walker with an 11-4 matching my PB right there at Alvarado State Park certified by Texas Parks and Wildlife. Caught it on a trench, y'all. So I think that is one of the biggest bass caught so far on a Guggenbait. So congratulations, Chase. That is a true Mondo. I'll leave you on that positive note, y'all. Until the next one, give it a good dangling and I'll see you then.