Crappie don’t get the hype that bass do, but ask anyone who’s worked a brush pile on a spring morning and they’ll tell you: pound for pound, these slab-sided panfish are some of the most satisfying fish in freshwater. Add in their reputation as some of the best-eating fish that swim, and it’s no wonder…
The most neglected but most important fishing kit element is fishing line. A snapped line can lose the fight and the fish, steal some valuable hooks and rigging, and even ruin a terminal rig you spent a long time tying. This is so preventable, yet it happens to so many people. There’s no reason to…
Oklahoma is a reservoir state, plain and simple. Decades of Army Corps dam building across the state’s river systems created a network of massive lakes that collectively give Oklahoma some of the most varied freshwater fishing in the entire region. Lake Texoma alone makes the case. That 88,000-acre border lake with Texas produces striped bass…
Pennsylvania is one of those states where the fishing runs deeper than most people realize, and that says a lot for a place with over 83,000 miles of streams and rivers. The Keystone State holds everything from wild brook trout in mountain headwaters to trophy muskellunge in major river systems, and the range of species…
Few freshwater fish announce themselves quite like a northern pike. One second your lure is moving innocently along a weed edge, the next a torpedo-shaped predator has it in a mouth full of teeth and is heading the other direction at full speed. That explosiveness, combined with a range that spans most of the Northern…
Kentucky sits at the crossroads of several distinct fishing regions, and that geography is exactly what makes it interesting. The western end holds Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley, two of the largest man-made lakes in the eastern United States, connected by a canal and separated by the Land Between the Lakes. Together they form a…