Interesting thread, and nice to hear perspectives from other big bass die hards like Matt.

Where to begin? Times are definitely tough for big bass fishing, particularly swimbait fishing. This is the first year for me since 2000 with no swimbait fish over 10 lbs. Same story for Rob. (Although, admittedly it would've been easier without my team partner sending me text messages to stop fishing our swimbait water while I'm prefishing :)) Even before this year I've been catching far more big bass "regular" fishing with jigs, plastics, chatterbaits and what not than with swimbaits.

The odd thing that seems to be happening is that the tougher swimbait fishing gets, the less an angler's skill seems to matter. It sounds counter-intuitive, I know. In previous years if you were good at targeting big fish, it wasn't difficult to go to unfamiliar lakes and start catching big fish right away. It wasn't uncommon to be catching double digits from 4-5 different lakes each year. All you needed to know was which lake turned on at which time of the year.

Nowadays the only way to really be successful is to fish HARD, everyone already knows how to throw a swimbait. In the last couple years the people who are catching a lot of big swimbait fish are those that have one or two lakes they fish 50 days a year. That didn't happen for Rob or I this year. Same thing going on in SoCal it seems. Butch Brown is the man, but he also fishes a lot.

The HBC experiment is a sad victim of the decline of big bass fishing. Five years ago if you put 50 people on a big bass lake, the people in the know would have caught fish, everyone else would have caught nothing. This year, skill didn't matter; everyone caught nothing.

This being said, there's still fun fishing out there. Even without the swimbait giants, I had an enjoyable year, and am looking forward to the coming winter and spring. The yearly updating of the gallery is coming soon, and there are still a few months left to add a swimbait fish :)