​Bass fishing in the spring can be either your best friend or your worst enemy. The bass are beginning to move up on their beds. Right now it's mostly males on the beds, and the females are out in deeper water. Within the next few weeks both the males and females will be sitting on their beds. Once the weather stays consistently warm, the pond bass will be steadily spawning. Bed fishing requires lots of patience and persistence. You have to be patient because it usually takes a long time to get a bedding fish to bite. You have to stay persistent and keep making pitches and casts at the bass. I do multiple things while bed fishing but it all starts with preparation. Making sure all of your tackle is new and line is not frayed is key. 

Secondly, let's talk about suspending baits which can be very effective this time of year. I like to fish three main suspending baits, namely: the Jerk bait, the Shu-Shu, and the Fluke (soft jerk bait). My favorite Jerk bait is the Rapala X-Rap. This bait dives 5' to 1ft and a half. If the weather is warm, I rip this bait very fast with very few pauses and when the weather is cold, I work it slower with more pauses. This bait is excellent- fished in schools of bait fish, and being ripped through grass or hydrilla. The Jerk bait excels in shad, craw, or bluegill patterns. The next bait on the list is the Shu-Shu. I like this bait because it's different than anything else on the market. It is very similar to a Fluke, but you can do much more with this bait. The Shu-Shu Slug can be fished Wacky, Texas Rigged, Weightless, Jiffy Rigged and on a Drop Shot. My two favorite ways to rig this bait during the fall are wacky and weightless. I fish both of these techniques right below the surface of the water. This soft plastic perfectly imitates a wounded shad or baitfish. Good areas to fish the Shu-Shu are as followed: grass edges, points, and wood structure. In my opinion, the best colors for the Shu-Shu are Victory Red and Junebug. The third bait on my fall suspending baits list is the Zoom Fluke. I fish this bait the least, but it can be very effective at times. I tend to fish this bait through balls of bait and through submerged vegetation. My favorite colors to fish this bait is white and brown. This is to represent the forage which is Shad and Bluegill. ​

Technology these days is a great thing.  Especially now for fisherman as we can go out and prove our catch instead of telling the old fish tale story.  I can just imagine back in my day as a young fisherman going out fishing in my johnboat and taking a huge tripod and set that big old VHS video recorder upon it and fish away.  Funny thinking about how far along things have changed as now you can record your whole entire fishing journey on a camera smaller than the palm of your hand.  I am very thankful for the progression of today’s technology that enables us to make great films and keep some awesome memories on video.  But for those that are into filming every adventure in life, we all know how it feels when we want to show someone that huge bass we caught and we slip in the video card that we are sure we captured it on, only to find that it is gone.  Yep, the look of disgust and the frustrations come out in different forms and maybe words, but we have all been there.  And so this happend with my last pond episode as I went to make the video only to realize I had kept all the talking parts but erased the whole entire videos of me actually fishing the pond.  So time was pushing because I knew an upcoming trip to Michigan was coming close that I had to leave for and I really wanted to film that same pond where I lost my footage.  So Labor Day was my only day to get up early and head to a place that is off 434 in Lacombe, LA where my friend had text me some pictures of some water that looked fishable.  Well I ran back there that morning in hopes to catch at least 1 bass because that is what I had caught the last time and I was just going to keep all my talking footage and use that same videos.  This body of water is really a run off ditch for a future subdivision that is going to be built in Lacombe and I was excited to throw and see if there was any bass in there.  You never know what you can catch out of those little bodies of water.  I pulled up to the very beginning of the ditch because there were 4 culverts so I figured bass would be in that area for sure waiting to ambush anything they could eat.  I took my faithful wacky rig out and started casting getting little nibbles here and there.  I usually don’t take phone calls when I am fishing but a call came in and it was important so I took it and wouldn’t you know while on the phone call I hook a good bass and my drag starts pulling.  I actually yelled to the person I was talking to that I am hooked on a fish and they started yelling for me to get it on the shore.  I got it close to shore and it came off and my adrenaline was pumping cause it was a nice bass. 

If you ask anyone close to me they'll tell you that fishing is my first love. But another sport I try to do often is golfing. So it's no surprise that somewhere along the line these two sports intercede.  Over the years since I have played I have golfed some very nice courses and a very common thing that all courses have are “ponds.”  I have driven the golf cart past some huge ponds in my time and it never fails I see bass swimming around the banks.  It amazes me how fish get into ponds, wether they were stocked when they were put there or if it was mother nature herself.  It always amazes me to think that fish can get in the most unlikely places in water by all kinds of ways like past high flooding or a simple bird that picked up a fish with eggs in it and then dropped it in another water system.  The possibilities are limitless when it comes to how fish get in ponds but on this trip we found them for sure in some golf course ponds in Beau Chene in Mandeville, LA.  This trip I was contacted by a local Northshore teen bass angler who told me that he has fished this pond for many years and wanted to know if I would come and film a episode of us fishing this pond.  With the summer heat upon us we decided to hit this pond very early.  Bailey Madere has been fishing for quite some time and it showed when he decided to out fish me very quickly on the morning we made this trip.  Between the 16 or so fish we caught he had majority.  This is definitely something I am enjoying just as much in fishing is watching how others have learned the sport and seeing them put it into action.  Bailey has fished this pond for probably 5 years he says, as his dad dropped him off early that morning, and it showed.  I like to see parents that support a passion that their kids have whether it be in local school sports or in this case recreational sports.  This pond was not very big but it had plenty of bass for us to catch.  We simply put the GoPro’s up and just walked the bank and fished till it was just too hot to fish anymore.  My choice of baits was a white chatter bait and my favorite pond fishing rig, the wacky rig.  Bailey fished soft plastics but shared with me his secret for catching so many fish that day, but he shared it with me of course after the fact when he made sure he had the most catch of the day :)  My next trip again I have been contacted by another Northshore Bass angler who is going to take me to a pond where we can go out in a little pond boat and hit some deeper waters.  You can follow my journeys on Facebook or YouTube (Nick Church Fishing) or on Instagram at NBSANGLER.  Be on the lookout for my next episode of Pond Hopping with Nick Church Fishing.  

​Pond fishing has always been of interest to me but I never really got into it until recently. I fish a lot from my boat, video different things and then write about it, so I thought “why not do this with fishing ponds.” There are so many ponds down here in South Louisiana and so I wanted to find them, fish them, video what I was doing and then write about the adventure. I didn’t really know how to start it or what to record but after the first adventure out I’m hooked. (No pun intended) The sport of fishing has always been about learning and having fun. No matter if I am catching or not, I am always reviewing what I am doing and seeking ways to get better and become more confident in what I am doing. My first Pond Hopping adventure started out on a hot Saturday where the temps were nearing the 90-degree mark. I have always seen the ponds to the right off I-10 heading north between Old Spanish Trail and Fremeaux exit and I thought that would be the place to start. I pulled in the only access point I knew off behind the town homes and walked down the trail only to be welcomed by LOTS of vegetation mats. I threw a swim bait over the mats as far as I could but it was just too much. I walked around and made my way into the town home entrance and asked some people that lived there if they knew people that fished those ponds. No one really knew much but I asked if they minded me trying a few areas around the homes and they didn’t seem to mind. It is always a good idea to ask if you can before fishing a pond. I am already getting word from people about fishing certain ponds and so we will have a lot more articles and videos coming soon. That pond seems that it would be good for some kayak fishing, which I intend to get soon, and so I got back in the truck and headed almost directly across the road over to another pond I knew about at Behrman St. and Coast Blvd. off Old Spanish Trail. When coming upon a pond you can usually tell if it is fished or not by looking for where people fish from the bank. This one has a lot of open area to fish and you can tell that people fish this quit a bit. I pulled over on the street and the sun was high and it was hot and muggy. Usually on a boat during these conditions you are looking for structure and shade, as there is where Bass tend to hang out during these times. In ponds you don’t have current because it is land locked and so hoping to find bass feeding on bait fish gets tricky. I noticed a few openings that had some trees that hung over the water and also there was some rocky embankment that I could through to. I took out the wacky rig with a finesse trick worm, which is a must have bait for pond fishing, and threw it to the rocks. Sure enough first cast he smacked the bait and it was on. I didn’t fish that pond very long as it was really hot out and I had already spent most my time on the other pond but I ended up with 3 nice bass out of the second pond and learned a lot for my up coming posts.