 Welcome back to another adventure, danglers. We are gonna head out to a new body of water today that's a little crazy, and we'll continue our East Texas camping adventures. But before we get rolling today, I gotta tell you about something big. So, Guggen Squad is hosting a tournament starting this month, and we're giving out $30,000 in cash and prizes. We wanna give back to you guys, and we wanna support our retailers that have been stocking Guggen products for years. So, here's what you need to do. Simply go to your local retailer, whether it's Walmart, Academy, Shields, whatever it is. Go in there and buy any Guggen product. I mean anything. You can buy a pack of Bandito bugs, any plastic, any hard bait, anything that is Guggen Squad. Get your receipt and email it to this address right here. And when you do that, you're gonna get a secret password that's gonna allow you to enter our fishing tournament hosted by Fishing Chaos. Then you need to go back to fishing and submit your best five catches for the month. Winners of each region are gonna get $2,500 cash, and it's gonna be based on total inches. Even if you don't win the inches game, we're still giving out prizes and bundles to danglers that submit their catches. So, lip them, grip them, sniff them, and submit them. Get to your local retailer, get some baits, tell them the Guggen sent you, and get signed up for the Derb. Now, let's get back to camp and the dangle. Good morning from the Tailgate Fish and Freaks and here on Big Sam Rayburn. There's a Toyota series actually launching right now. They just finished all the boats, just finished going to their spots. And I am taking it a little easier this morning because we've been going hard the last couple of days on our little road trip. So just to catch you up, first day we fished a lake that we've never been to before, did pretty good, got on a little pattern there, continued that pattern into the next day, went to two more lakes, fished a really muddy lake, fished a clear lake, but you're not going out on Big Sam. Even though the water looked kinda calm over here, it would be very inadvisable to go out on a 20 mile an hour one day in this boat. So what we are going to do is we're gonna go below the dam, this is a huge dam, tons of water. I went over yesterday, I'm not even sure how fast this current is going to be. This could be kinda buck wild. We're gonna cook up some eggs, and I gotta have some coffee, some fresh coffee, some eggs from the treehouse, get fueled up, and then we're gonna hit the lake. Y'all are wondering, how does he sleep in his truck? How is that even comfortable? Aren't you worried at night? And there's a couple of reasons I sleep pretty good. And number one is I try to find a good area, scope it out, look on satellite maps, look at campsites, see if they're close to meth labs or anything like that. I found that the Texas State Parks are really nice, and they also have showers and bathrooms. So after a few days' dangle, clean up a little bit. The other reason I sleep good is because of this huge pad that I keep in the truck. Truck camping, it is the deal. I mean, I even use a tent camping sometimes, but it's my canvas cutter. It's a four inch pad with a canvas around it. So keeps the moisture off the pad. Last night it was hot. I'm talking 65 degrees most of the night. I had to sleep outside of my sleeping bag, and I just kept a little blanket inside of there as well. I roll everything up in there with a temperpetic pillow, which is a game changer. And then I can sleep good. I've got these little windows that I can open on the truck cap, let some breeze through. So it's like right on the edge of getting to where it's gonna be a little hot for truck camping. But that just tells me, I'm in tune with nature. Windy up there, shallow grass, get that spinner bait bite, going sun. Four eggs from the Rackley Roost. Got our little fruit basket. I've carried this thing on so many trips, guys. It's just kind of nice to have a little fruit, a little basket. These are coming out. You got a nice crisp to them. Look at that, baby. This is all in a pan that I found in a creek. Vintage pan. Touch of butter. Bob Ross of bass fishing, that's me. Welcome to the show. Oh yeah. Maybe pop a few more chives in here. Oh my gosh. Little pop of color. Just look how non-stick this is. Wah-bam. Oh yeah. Flip that over. We got a little cheesy cheese omelette. Cheesy cheese omelette with chives. All right, that's gonna go right over our potatoes. Throw a little chalula in there. Wah-bam. Now all we gotta do is make our espresso, guys. We're gonna be super charged to go yank on them. The sound and the smell of that with this backdrop. Yeah, baby. That is living right in the great outdoors. I love coffee so much. I've missed it the last couple of days. I am fasting from Ferlint nicotine. Extremely hard to do. It's been a week now, today. And I am just jonesin' for something. So I gotta have coffee. I gotta have something. My favorite thing to do on the water is find a new spot that looks good. Like I just know I'm gonna catch them in there. Everything looks right. It's like matching a pattern. Just feels good. And then throw in a char or a zen or something. And just catch them. That just, oh, it's so nice to me. But it's not a good habit and I need to stop. I need to quit. I'm trying, boys. But I ain't quitting both at the same time. Gotta have my caffeine, gotta have my coffee. All right, y'all, after much driving, we have finally figured out where the ramp is and the water looks good. It's flowing out of the dam. We're gonna jump in here and I'm seeing water flowing around the tree, bases of trees, maybe there's some cypress, flipping, spinnerbait, meat and potatoes. It is ripping. I've run up here a few miles. I'm gonna put the motor in idle right now. Just idling really slow. I'm not even moving anywhere. Sitting still. I'm gonna put on a half ounce spinnerbait and we're just gonna drift a couple miles. There's a few backwaters that I noticed that I wanna stop into and I'm just gonna go. Just gonna use the troll motor to kind of direct me and just go. So let's shut this off and now we're really gonna drift quick. Here we go. Here goes the roller coaster bass ride, baby. Let's get him. This water is still pretty cold because it's coming out from below a dam. So we're low 50s. It's just gotta set him up on this stuff. That's why I wanted to fish here today because it's, yeah, it's difficult with the wind and current, but positioning the fish is way easier. They typically will eat. They're just in position. You don't really have to guess what depth they're in because I can't sit out here 10, 15 foot. They gotta be up here in less than five out of the current. Just gotta figure out if they want a little cricket. You know, give them a little Texas rig, or spinner bait, square bill. Square bill is kind of a nightmare drifting this fast. Trying to hit all these targets, but I've got full confidence in my zinger here. I absolutely love this rod that I'm using for doing this type stuff because of the action on it. I can just roll the tip on it. I just roll the tip and load it and shoot it in there using a stiffer rod. It's really difficult to do that. I could pitch it. You know, if I had a stiffer rod, I could pitch it like this. That works okay. But I can really just load that little tip and shoot that spinner bait in there and no problem. You know, it's a little soft for maybe trying to get fish out of deeper stuff. I got 20 pound line on here. I'm ready to rumble with them. Really test the limits, but I think it's more important to get the bait in the exact spot to get the bite over having a little stiffer rod thinking that's what you need to get the fish out of there. A bunch of bait fish right here. Bunch of bait fish in this little cut. This ought to be juice money. Oh yeah. I see small shed just all up in here. Where are the bass on that? Come on though. Oh gosh. Big log coming. We're about to have impact. This is not good. Oh no. Oh, it's about to flip my damn boat. Oh, I'm gonna take a few scratches on the old mercury. Not real life. That's good. Okay. I hope to self don't do that again. Okay. A little bit of near death experience. I had to wake you up. I thought my boat was gonna flip over. That log was so sturdy. It just, current just got me. Surprise. I didn't have a bite in there. It just looks so fresh, like freshly flooded, but I don't know. I feel like it's, the water's been up for at least a few days. I'm gonna run down a little bit. This wind is just kind of crazy on the stretch that I'm at. So I'm gonna run down the river and see if there's a spot that's a little calmer, you know? Just a little wild, a little wild right now. We'll keep grinding though. Wild river to fish. Well, I found myself another little backwater area. See a few bobbers and some trees. That tells me there's some history here. Somebody's been back here. I'm literally just in a forest. I'm gonna pine, I'm in the Angelina National Forest. I don't think bass particularly like pine straw for their bedding. I mean, I would. I don't think they do. The water's 55, it's not quite warm enough. I'm gonna get out of here. Look at this. Giant, giant pines. Insane. I can smell it. I can see it. It's a turd, it's a turd burger. I don't need to taste it. The water's just so high. It's so difficult to fish. People's docks are under the water. I'm not getting the good vibes. It looks amazing. It would have been perfect if the water flow was not as strong as it was and high and flooded as it was. Just way too much water, way too difficult. So I'm gonna go ahead and just go to my next hole. And it's about an hour and a half away. And we got another little camp spot. We're gonna try to camp out tonight and continue the dangle. But out here, that's gonna be do-do. So let's head to another lake. Keep the dangle going. You know, I've been going through just walls of grass. We can see how this stuff is starting to sparse out. That's probably because the lake was down. The farther I go towards the bank, the less grass that there is. But there's little pad stems up there, okay? You see those little brown twiglets? Don't count them out. I mean, like, oh, it's not green. It's not, it doesn't look good. And this is kind of what they look like under the water. You can actually see some of the pads, the, you know, pancake-looking deals and they're flopped over. Some of these are dead. And this is what we're gonna fish. I am really feeling a swim jig today. Two of my favorite trailers are our Rattle and Chunk, which I'm probably gonna switch to here in a minute. And just the Junior Kraken Kraw. So I've got an Okeechobee Junior Kraken. This is a three-eighths ounce. I love three-eighths. I sometimes switch to that half ounce with the Rattle and Chunk, because it just pulls a lot more water. But with these water temps just being right around 60, I just wanna keep it kinda slow. What I noticed the other day, you know, caught some really nice fish, but a lot of them were like, when I was coming out of the grass or I was hung, the fish had an opportunity to really look at it for a second. The lipless bite was kind of weak. Like they really weren't pounding it, chasing it down really good. So I think with this swim jig, it just, it's getting those little ones that are just, they need it a little bit slower. They want it just a little bit slower. And I can even just kind of bump this thing on the bottom if I want to. I can drop it in little grass holes. It's just the jig you can do anything with. I love jigs. You're probably my favorite of all time. All right, I am going to, I'm gonna make a switch here. And I'm gonna make this recommendation to you guys. This is weird. This is a weird one, okay? But I'm telling you right now, this catches them. And it has caught big ones for me. Rattling chunk. This is gonna slow this bait down even more, which is kind of what I want right now. Rattling chunk. So this is a soft plastic that we put a rattle in comes ready to go for your jigs. And it's great for like traditional casting jigs and flipping jigs. But this is one of my absolute favorite trailers for throwing on to this little grass hero. And I know you're saying this looks dumb. Black and blue with a white trailer, that's dumb. But I'm a contrast guy. I like contrast on my jigs to plastics. Mixing it up and this right here in the water just looks like it's got that black and blue. But oh my gosh, look at this rattle and chunk on here folks. Can you see the rattle and chunk? It's got insane action even at low speeds. And it really helps me float that bait up. Like I can, instead of having to go down to like a quarter, I can fish this three eighths. And it will, it gives me a lot of weight where I cast it really far. And then it's got that water resistance where it just kind of keeps the bait up out of that veg where I need it. And right now, since they're not at full attack speed, I just want to slow the bait down a little bit and that white just adds a good color pop in the water. It's almost like a little surprise. It's like that, you know, you've got the black and blue up front, it's kind of incognito. And then the back's like boom, just white flappers going. There we go. There he is up shallow. Doesn't feel big, but there's a buck up there. He's up there. He's up there. And he wanted that contrasty chunk buck, fat, look at that in the, in the junk. That's why you got to have that braid, man. You just feel everything and it just cuts through, cuts through the doodoo. Let's just see what we got going on up here in the shallows, huh? Anybody up here, anybody home? I haven't seen a cruiser yet. That's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for a black tail, large mouth tail to just swim off. Okay, I'm going completely different direction here, but I just see all this rock and I had to, I had to get a crankbait out because it actually looks decent. I've seen a few fish in that eight to 12, just kind of hanging off this stuff. So I'll put a recon on and we're going to just make some long casts. I don't have the right line set up. I got 20 pound line. Oh, it just hooked up on a crankbait, baby. Made a decision. Oh gosh, it's a decent one. Oh, there he goes, man. I barely had him. He was down there in that deep grass. Oh, that's a new technique. We have not tried. I've only had one bite up shallow and I've already peaked. I haven't seen any cruisers up there. I just figured, well, I might as well just crank this out of the line a little bit. Fish on, fish on. We found a little bit of a hard bottom out here. Good, not quite as big. Little buck, showing that standard recon. Bright color for this dirty water. Seeing tons of activity in this spot that I'm at. I love it. I know I've caught a few fish here, but most of the activity is like right where it starts getting super windy and I just can't stay in it. I mean, I'm seeing balls of bait, bass in the bait. I even had one just rock it after my chatterbait. Like, it wasn't even close to it. It came out of nowhere. I was going to spank it. It just looks beautiful. Temper. There's also some big crappies hanging around on the tops of the timber. It's happening. Crispy is not made for this, so I got to get out of here, unfortunately. This is a silver bullet spot. I just watched that bass swimming out to get my bait and I just let it go under the boat and I got him. Hey, we got a fish. Swim jig bass. Water's warming up a little bit. Getting some bucks on the flat. So today was one of those days where they were just not active in the bedroom yet. This happens to me every year, but I think as soon as I see 65 degree water and full moons approaching, I'm like, well, I got to be on beds, right? There were males moving up, but a lot of those females, they were just not ready and they were still hanging back. But we hung in there in the crispy today, y'all. Nearly flipped the dang on both. And then we went to this other lake and did okay, catching some fish up shallow. And when the bass bite off and gets a little weird up shallow and they get that pre-spawned jitter's going on, they're not crunching. I like to grab my little pole and give her a dangle. So that is what we are gonna be going out and doing next. I can't wait to put some golden crisps in my mouth so you guys stay tuned for that. Happy fishing, everyone. And I'll see you back at the great outdoors for our next fishing adventure soon.