I'm looking forward to giving them all a good shot. Those sexy shads supposedly do pretty well, I know KVD uses that color scheme, or variants of, almost exclusively.

I'm hoping that some crappie find that white rooster tail as well. I haven't had a good crappie dinner in a while, and I know this lake I fish has them because I have seen other fishermen pull them out.

Its finally starting to cool down a little over here, we are staying in the low 90's instead of upper 90's, and the water is noticably cooler. I am starting to catch a few larger bass closer to the bank than I was a month ago, and I can see a few stray shad jumping here and there, so I know the bass are starting to key in on them, just not real heavily yet. When they do though, I plan on throwing that crank along the inside weed lines and hope to catch a few nice ones lying in the weeds in ambush. Its nice that the shallow bite is slowly starting to pick up again, it just makes it that much easier to convince myself to get out and fish, haha.

for a first bass, your wife sure picked out a dandy. it would ruin me if my first bass was that big. :-D