Cecil - Yes as I mentioned earlier live bait especially fished finesse is very hard to beat for producing fish. I use it exclusively when I have to produce fish.
I suspect that in many of these other ponds where bass are difficult to catch the pond receives a significiently greater amount of fishing pressure than we "do" on our ponds. Very, enthusiastic, first time pondowners can easily get carried away with overfishing the pond, both in frequency and duration of time spent fishing time. They literally "hammer" the bass with lures. This behavior quickly conditions the fish to be lure shy. We don't see this as much in our ponds because we understand the consequences of over fishing and we continually harvest some of the lure shy fish which opens more "room" for newbees or naive replacements.
