Let's talk about fishing! I got turned on to fishing when I was a kid. My dad would take me up to the local lake most every weekend. My first fishing pole was an Ugly Stick with a Mitchell reel. The reel broke after a couple of years, and I slapped on a second Mitchell reel, and to this day my favorite poles are Ugly Sticks and my favorite reels are Mitchells.
For lures, I still like the lures I can find at the local KMart. I know a lot of people like Mepps and other brands, but I like Strike King, Rappala, and Zoom. I just can't bring myself to purchase a pricey lure to do any job a Carolina Rig or jig can do. In my mind, I'm guaranteed to lose about a dozen lures a year from tangle ups, snags, misplacement, etc. This gets worse if I bring inexperienced fisherman along, and in my cheapness I know that I'm saving money.
I like to fish for large mouth bass. Spin lures are my go to lures for this, especially in open water with few obstructions. If I'm in an area with brush, I will try to fish along the edges with a worm or jig to try at anything hiding underneath.
Occasionally I'll go cat fishing. I like to throw down a splitter with stink bait, which I classify as anything smelly. This could be chicken livers to off the rack catfish bait. A great thing about my area of North Carolina is that there's a lot of old road beds under the area lakes, because the lakes were built in the 70s and 80s, and they had to eminent domain a lot of land. I've found a lot of success by using underwater sonar on my dad's boat coordinated with locate maps to find them.
All in all, there's a lot of good fishing around Central North Carolina. If you like fishing, there's a local fishing show called the Carolina Outdoor Journal. They cover a lot of fishing information about the state. It's one of my main go-tos if I'm looking for good places to fish and need to know about what to expect.
