Any fish caught on their spawning beds should be released immediately.
I‘m always talking about the four things to take into account whenever you’re making your game plan for a day of fishing. I say it so often that my daughter Sherri could recite it in her sleep by the time she was five (just kidding – but certainly by the time she was seven!).
First, there’s the time of year. Fish behavior revolves around the seasons, whether it’s spawning in the spring, trying to keep cool during the summer, or feeding up during the fall in preparation for winter.
Second is the type of water. By that I mean whether you’re fishing a lake, a river, a stream, a pond, or another body of water.
Third is water conditions. Is the water temperature rising or falling? Is the level rising or falling? Is the water clear or stained or murky? What’s its pH level?
Fourth is the matter of weather. Fish react to air temperature, wind, cloudy or clear sky, and especially to rising or falling barometric pressure. If I had to pick the one factor that most people consider over all the others, I’d choose weather.
You’re going to hear a great deal about these four factors throughout this section. They’re so important that when I lecture at fishing seminars around the country, I tell the audience to write them on the top of their tackle boxes. You should do that too. That way, you’ll have the list in front of you as a visual aid, so if your original game plan isn’t working out, you won’t waste time wracking your brain about what you need to know for making revisions.
The key thing about game plans is they can always be refined or reworked. Fishing is kind of like shooting at a moving target, and conditions change all the time. When conditions change, so should your strategy.
For example, suppose it’s a real clear morning when you start out. You use a light-colored plastic worm and you’re catching lots of big ’uns, but then a cloud cover rolls in and the fish stop biting. That’s a signal to change your game plan. The first three factors – season, type of water, and water conditions – haven’t changed, but the weather has. The arrival of those big ol’ clouds may call for a switch to a topwater bait, and when you do change over, you start catching fish again.
That’s called refinement.
Remember Jimmy Houston’s #1 Rule? (Okay, repeat after me, class – “If it’s important to a bass, I make it important to me.”) Well, bass reproduce only once a year, so you can bet that spawning is mighty important to them.
Most fishermen divide the spawning season into three parts: prespawn, spawn, and postspawn. However, I see it as four.
There’s also a pre-prespawn period, when bass first move toward the water where they’ll lay their eggs. Generally speaking, these are points of coves and pockets. I consider the pre-prespawn area covers as the first 50 percent of the coves and pockets, about halfway in from the main point or body of water. North banks are best because the surface water warms up quicker, thanks to getting more sunshine than south banks do. Spinner baits, topwater baits, and jigs seem to work best, while deep-diving crawdads, and colored crankbaits on light line are often a productive alternative.
Any fish caught on their spawning beds should be released immediately.
The prespawn stage marks when bass arrive into the spawning area (the magic water temperature that marks when they come with spawning on their mind is fifty-eight degrees). The smaller males move onto the banks, while the females stay in four to seven feet of water. Because the ladies have major appetites before they spawn, you’ll want to attract them with maximumize baits like a magnum spinnerbait with a long trailer or a crankbait.
Once the bass are on their spawning beds along the banks, try a “Gitzit” or a lizard or minnow type of bait. No matter what you use, however, any fish caught on their spawning bed should always be released. If you don’t, pretty soon that lake of yours won’t have any fish to catch at any time.
Of all four periods, the postspawn period is the hardest to catch fish. After bass spawn, they move to where they suspend between five and ten feet over deeper water. They often do their suspending amid standing timber, and that’s the first place I look. Edges of creek channels are other likely places, and so are the pre-prespawn points of coves and pockets, the same points where you caught them ten or twelve weeks earlier.
Forget about coves and pockets during summertime, and concentrate on the main body of a lake especially those points that are close to main channels and creek channels.
Still, if you want to work a spinnerbait or plastic worm shallow, avoid inlets and covers where the water temperature and the pH are likely to be higher than on the main part of the lake.
Fall is when bass are feeding up big-time before winter sets in. They follow the schools of shad and other baitfish. So should you.
You’ll find bass in the pockets and coves where they were during the spring, generally in the prespawn areas. As the temperature drops, bass will move to the tail ends of the pockets (again, the magic water temperature is fifty-eight degrees).
Wintertime’s cold water and low pH means that fish become inactive. A study at the University of Oklahoma’s biology lab revealed that big bass didn’t eat but every eight or ten days during winter. Take that to its logical conclusion you have a one-in-eight or one-in-ten chance of being out on the lake the day that Mr. Bass decides to head to the dinner table (but also remember that, at any given time, some bass are eating).
Because fish don’t eat much during winter, you’ll need to fish slowly and work your spots thoroughly. Stick to main river and creek channels, especially around structures that include steep drops.
It’s real easy to use circumstances as excuses, isn’t it?
Sometimes the prettiest day is the worst day for fishing. And sometimes the worst days for fishing are the best days for catching.
Bass react strongly to changes in barometric pressure. A rapid drop in pressure invariably causes them to bite. That’s because of an increase in the size of the strike zone, a term I coined a few years ago to describe the area that a bait must be in before a fish will strike.
A strike zone can be small (like it seems to be whenever I go fishing!) or it can be big. And when a strike zone is really big, a bass will move eight or even a dozen feet to get to your bait.
A storm front coming in brings with it a rapid drop from high to low pressure. That’s when strike zones are at their largest, when fish move out from cover.
After a front goes through, the barometric pressure starts climbing and the strike zone shrinks. It’s that rising stable pressure that causes bass to retreat. They go back into the deepest, most inaccessible part of the structure, and you’re faced with a really small strike zone and very difficult conditions.
Lots of folks think that bass move to deeper water and suspend there when the barometer is rising. Not so – bass simply hide deeper wherever they are.
Bright days are the hardest to fish because, just like with humans, sunlight hurts a bass’s eyes. Lighter colored lures work best for me, especially clear topwater bait that has a little bit of blue. All the fish see are the silvery hooks, which look to them like itty-bitty shad.
Bright days may also mean fishing deeper. Look for heavy structures and drop-off places, shallow or deep, where the wind blows into a bank. The wind breaks up the water surface, and the bass feel safer in the low-light conditions (the wind also blows baitfish into the area). It’s also an area where oxygen and pH are mixing up (you’ll learn about the role of pH later in the book). Remember that fishing deeper means fishing slower, and you’ll want to switch to lighter line that sinks deeper and faster than thick heavy line does.
On the other hand, dark cloudy days are the best days for fishing. Fish are active, and they don’t stay tight to cover like they do on sunshiny days.
My number one choice under these conditions is a spinnerbait with a single highly visible gold or copper blade. Fish it shallow. In fact, you can’t work it too shallow, even if you’re throwing it into just inches of water.
Polaroid sunglasses are essential. They filter out rays that interfere with making out fish and other underwater objects on dark days. As a matter of fact, I wear Polaroid glasses whenever I fish, whether it’s sunny or cloudy.
We measure water clarity as muddy, stained, or clear. In muddy water, a white probe disappears from sight within two feet from the surface. According to studies, bass can distinguish colors in muddy water up to six or eight feet.
In stained water, the probe disappears at a depth of two to four feet. The same studies show that bass can recognize colors at thirty feet.
Clear water means the probe can be seen deeper than four feet. As for a bass’s vision under those conditions, a fish tank at the University of Oklahoma’s biology lab is thirty feet long, and tests prove that bass are able to distinguish colors from one end to the other, or at least thirty feet.
Throwing a bait works better if the line comes off a baitcasting reel horizontally instead of vertically, so right-handed people should cast a bait reel with the crank handles up (handles down for you lefties).
Always keep your thumb on the spool. That’s where it belongs throughout the cast, resting light enough so that the spool can roll, but with enough pressure to avoid overspinning into a backlash. How much pressure is “enough”? That’s for you to determine. Just make sure your thumb keeps constant contact with the spool.
Good baitcasting reels have adjustable magnetic drag systems or balanced weights that let the spool spin faster or slower. Too fast leads to backlashes, so adjust the system kind of tight until you get the hang of how the reel casts.
Throwing a baitcasting lure comes from the wrist, not from the forearm like in fly-fishing or the shoulder like in surf-casting. Keep your elbow in close to your body, not straight out like you’re signaling for a left turn.
The quickest way to throw your bait a grand total of five feet smack into the water (and end up with the granddaddy of all backlashes too) is by casting it out in a straight line ahead of you. Instead, throw it up and out at about a forty-five-degree angle. And don’t try and heave it as far as you can. If you’ve got to cast seventy-five feet to reach your target, you’re better off moving your boat closer … or finding a closer target.
Most people who fish with spinning tackle use either an overhand or a sidearm cast. But before you throw, you’ve got to release the pickup bail. You can do it either manually or with the reel’s trigger if it has one, and then catch the line with your index finger.
Here’s an important deal to know about rewinding a spinning reel. The pickup bail automatically engages when you crank the handle, but it also automatically puts a one-quarter twist in the line. Although that may not seem like much, over the course of a day’s fishing when you make hundreds and hundreds of casts, the twisting ends up bad enough to really cause you some major problems. The simple remedy is to flip the bail yourself by hand. Believe me, you’re going to love me for this tip.
When it comes to casting, I’m underhanded. No, I’m not sneaky (although some people might disagree!), I cast with a snap-of-the-wrist underhand motion. That’s because of my belief that the longer you keep your bait in the strike zone, the more fish you’ll catch.
Sidearm and overhand casting require a lot of effort from your arm and shoulder muscles. When those muscles get tired, you can’t keep up your casting speed. That means your bait isn’t in the water as much of the time it could be. The result: fewer chances to catch fish.
Nor can you cast with consistent accuracy when your arm and shoulder muscles are complaining. And there are other benefits to underhanded casting too. A cast that’s low to the water gets to fish that are under low branches and other overhead obstructions. I can throw into the wind more effectively. My bait lands softly, and I spook fewer fish.
And I end up in an ideal hook-setting position. The rod tip is low when the bait hits the water, and my hands are low and tight to my chest, ready to set the hook.
Getting back to the matter of time, an underhand snap shoots the bait straight forward, low to the water. That’s more efficient than an overhand or a sidearm throw, where the bait sails through the air in a wide arc. Since I prefer bass to flying fish, I’m not big on wasting precious time that my bait could be in the water.
And a lot of precious time too. An overhand cast takes four to six seconds before the bait hits the water. I figure my underhand snap takes about two or three seconds less. That’s a savings of between 33 percent and 50 percent. So if you cast the conventional way, you and I can be out on the lake for the same amount of time, but I’ll fish almost twice as long as you do.
So you might say that underhand gives me the upper hand.
Of all the baits I use, spinnerbaits are my favorite. And they’re my favorite because I catch more fish on them than on anything else. Maybe 55 percent to 60 percent, which is a pretty good percentage.
That’s kind of funny because nothing in nature looks like a metal arm with a spinner blade on one side and a rubber or plastic skirt on the other. Maybe when bass see a spinnerbait, they think to themselves, “Golly, if those things get started in this lake, they’ll ruin the neighborhood – we’d better get rid of them fast.”
Vibration is the name of the spinnerbait game, vibration that you can feel through your rod tip. That’s why I never fish a spinnerbait the way it comes out of the package. Instead, I bend the wire arm to open the angle between the arm and the hook. The greater the angle, the more vibration.
Gold or copper blades are easier for a fish to see than silver or nickel, which work best only in the clear water.
One blade or two? A single blade, which will catch more fish in the sheer numbers, gives off greater vibration than tandem blades do, plus single blades cast more accurately. However, two blades produce greater flash, which is important in low-light conditions, so the choice boils down to whether you want more audible or more visual appeal.
A willowleaf-shape blade, long and slender, gives off lots of flash but not much vibration. That shape moves most easily through thick grass and other heavy cover.
On the other hand, magnumsized heavyweight blades produce lots of vibration. I like using them in muddy water and when fishing for big fish. I’ll attach a worm as a trailer to create a big ugly bait that little eight- or ten-inch fish won’t bother with. (Bother with them? Those little ’uns will jump up on the bank and run away!) But when it comes to big grown-up bass looking for a big grown-up meal, especially in the spring or the fall of the year, this is the ticket. I’ll chunk it out and slow-roll it back five to eight feet deep.
Talk about being loaded for bear: A big magnum tandem willowleaf on a five-eighths-ounce magnum head looks like a school of shad coming through the water. These things give off so much vibration that after twenty-five hours or so, the vibration breaks the arm off the spinnerbait. But after twenty-five hours of fishing it, your arm breaks off too, so it doesn’t matter!
It’s a smart idea to match your spinnerbait to the size of the baitfish in the area. If you haven’t a clue, a smallish – maybe one with quarterounce blades – is a good size to start with. That’s especially true in tournaments, where you first want to catch your limit. Then when you do, you can always change to a larger blade size to attract bigger bass.
I haven’t said much about spinnerbait skirts because they’re less important than blades. As far as their colors go, I like chartreuse-and-white or chartreuse-and-blue.
Spinnerbaits work best in the spring of the year, during the prespawning and the spawning periods when fish are in shallow water. But they also work great in summer, fall, and winter. Like I once told someone, the only time not to use a spinnerbait is if you have a weak heart – you’re liable to ruin your fishing partner’s day (as in “stop the boat, step over Harry!”).
Bass fishermen talk an awful lot about “structure.” It’s a key concept, but it’s also one that many fishermen misunderstand.
“Structure” means nothing more than something found under the water that fish like to hang around. It might be a weed bed or a dock or pier piling or even a single log in the water, but to a fish it’s home. And like a den or rec room at home where there are bowls of chips and dip next to a comfortable easy chair and a good football game on the T V, there’s no place on earth a critter would rather be.
Weed beds are one of the most prevalent – and one of the best – structures for holding bass. Sure, we’ve all dragged in tons of grass, but fishing weeds is more than worth any inconvenience. There’s always a little space between the bottom of the weed bed and the lake bottom. That’s where bass like to hold, and if you can get a lure down under the grass, you stand a good chance of catching a big ’un.
One way to penetrate this thick cover is with a Texas-rigged worm and a heavy – half- or three-quarter-ounce – slip-sinker. Flippin’ the worm will get it where you want it. Otherwise, heavy jigs down under or weedless spoons over the top are other good methods.
Rocks are always prime structure. The way to analyze big boulders at a water’s edge is to check out the part that’s out of the water. Cracks and crevices on top usually continue down into the lake, so if you work the water below where they enter the water, the breaks in the rock are likely to lead you right to fish.
I always equate rocks with crawdads. When you see rocks, start thinking about crawdad-colored crankbait.
Fishing around rocks really increases the chance that your line will become nicked and frayed. Check your line frequently, even the “superbraid” type, and retie your bait if you spot any weakness. It can mean the difference between landing that big lunker and just talking about it.
Logs are an example of what I call “junction areas.” That’s where any two different objects meet; for example, where two logs run together or a limb comes off a log or where one log meets a boulder or the end of the log meets the water. In such a case, the junction is the spot to work your bait – don’t even bother anywhere else along the log.
“Junction” also applies to where two different substances meet, like where sand and gravel come together on the bottom of a lake (swimming beaches are prime examples). If you come across one with another structure like logs or a weed bed, you’ve actually got yourself a dynamite structure.
When it comes to stumps, the root system is the most important part. Work slowly and systematically around the roots. Spinnerbaits work especially well, and when you throw one, aim so it bumps the stump during your throw.
When you find stumps and logs together, the deal is to fish the least populous structure. That’s where bass try to avoid the competition of other feeding fish. If there are, say, twenty logs and ten stumps, bass will tend to hold around the stumps. On the other hand, ten logs and twenty stumps means focusing your attention on the logs. Why? Because bass just seem to hang around on the most isolated cover. Kind of like having your house in a big old field instead of in a neighborhood.
Pier and dock pilings ft in the “stumps” category. Each piling qualifies as a separate structure, so fish all of them and not just the one or two closest to you. Then when you catch a fish, pay attention to whether you caught it deep or shallow. That way, when you move on to the next pier, you’ll know the right depth right off and you can eliminate the rest.
One of the best places to fish on a lake is around boat docks, especially those that have rod holders or boats with fishing rigs or any other clue that the owner is a fisherman. Those docks are more likely to hold fish than other docks will, and usually within one cast length away from the dock.
You see, if the fisherman who owns the place is smart, he’s set out good brush piles no further than one cast away so he won’t have to work very hard. He probably sinks the family Christmas tree there every January, or tosses out tree branches and limbs – anything that will hold fish.
That’s why I always keep an eye out for old ratty docks that look like a redneck’s fishing hole. They’re much more promising places than beautifully painted docks with their waterski platforms or swimming ladders (that’s not to say, though, that ladders around boat docks aren’t worth trying too). You might be a redneck if your boat dock looks like the community fishing hole. Lights on the dock almost guarantee fish – I’ll fish that ol’ boy’s dock anytime!
Another type of structure you’ll find on man-made lakes and reservoirs is what I call a deepwater structure. It’s usually a roadbed that got submerged when the land was fooded to make the lake. Using your boat’s depth locator, mark the path of the road with buoys. Then go back to the start and work your way down that road, looking for breaks, brush piles, or a creek along the way.
I call crankbaits “idiot baits” because they’re the easiest lures to catch fish on. Just throw them out and reel them in, and if that sounds like too much work, you can troll them behind your boat around the lake.
One of the ways to choose your crankbait is by color. Red-pink or brown crawdad works best early in the season, and shad color is most effective during summer and fall months.
If you’re planning on working a crawdad color, walk down the lake shoreline and turn over rocks until you come across a crawdad. Then match your bait color to the color of the critter.
If you’re fishing a shad-colored bait, match it to the size of the baitfish the bass are feeding on. Count the bill on the front of the lure as part of the length only if it’s colored. Clear bills don’t count because the fish can’t see them.
The longer its bill, the deeper a crankbait will dive. You can also control depth by the line you’re using. The lighter and thinner the line, the deeper a bait will run. And speaking of line, make sure what’s on your reel is appropriate. A tiny crankbait towed around on a big thick line won’t catch many fish. It sure won’t run very deep, and the action will be “dead.”
A “pull bait” like a Hot Spot or a Rattle Spot can’t be fished too fast, no matter how hard you try. Use a stiff rod, one with heavy action. It’s harder to cast, but you sure won’t lose many fish.
Crankbait can become more effective with an attractor tail. A strip of dry rind fluttering behind is like a combo sandwich to a bass.
No matter what color or size crankbait you use or whatever modifications you make, work the bait with a stop-and-go action, never a steady rewind. Vary your rewind between “slow-and-stop, slow-and-stop …” with “burn and stop, burn and stop …” Mix up the patterns, because variety produces more fish.
If you think you feel your crankbait hit a log or stump but the bump doesn’t feel like a strike, pause for a few beats before continuing your rewind. A fish may be studying your lure before he decides to hop on.
Some people who are put off by all the hooks on crankbaits avoid using them in heavy cover. Boy, is that wrong! The possibility of snagging is nothing compared to the chance to hook into some big ’uns lurking in tall grass or tall timber. In the heavy stuff, you might want to remove the front hook – the modified bait will still catch fish, but it’ll hang up less.
Crankbaits should be one of every bass fisherman’s primary lures. In fact, they’re so effective maybe they should be called “idiot baits” only by those idiots who don’t use ’em.
Lots of people ask me, “Jimmy, what’s the one single biggest mistake that recreational fishermen make.” My answer is the same every time: You don’t set the hook hard or fast enough.
Now, I’m not saying that each and every time you think there’s a fish near your bait, you’ve got to pull hard enough to rip his lips off. And as I point out else-where in this book, there are times to wait till you’re sure the fish really does have the hook in his mouth.
But when you are sure, or you’re even halfway sure, then set the hook. Don’t stop and think, or freeze like somebody’s ol’ bird dog on point. Set the hook fast and hard, and set it once. Here’s how to do it:
A good hookset comes from rod speed, which has absolutely nothing to do with strength. My wife, Chris, isn’t a big strong woman, yet she sets a hook as well as anybody. So do lots of other women, and youngsters too. The trick is to move the rod tip quickly, so fast that it’s a blur. If you move it quickly, the rod speed will drive the hook. That’s why you want to keep your hands and your reel close to your body, in a position to work your wrists and elbows as fast as you can.
Setting a hook is easier when your hook has a razor-sharp point to it. A sharp point makes a nice clean hole that will hold a fish better than a ragged hole will.
I’m not a big fan of multiple hooksets. If you’re fishing with a sharp hook, one good tug is all you need. More than one tug creates a break in the line tension and it’s a steady tension that prevents a fish from spitting out or shaking off a hook.
Five or six isn’t too young to start a kid fishing.
Work on your hookset technique at every opportunity until it becomes second nature. Even if you think you’ve lost a fish, set the hook anyway. You’ve nothing to lose. Besides, the fish may still have the hook in his mouth or is striking again just as you pull. There’s no excuse for losing a fish because of a poor hookset or, even worse, no set at all. As a friend of mine puts it, every hookset involves a jerk. If you remember to set the hook, the jerk is at the hook end of the line. And if you forget to, the jerk is at the other end – holding the rod.
Taking a youngster fishing is a wonderful experience at any time, one of the greatest gifts that is in your power to give.
The best age for a child’s first lesson depends on his or her attention span and coordination skills. Five or six isn’t too early for most kids to hold a short pole or drop a line and pay attention to the bobber at the end of the line. Baiting the hook and casting the line, however, is better left to an adult.
When youngsters are able to handle a rod and reel and cast their lures on their own, they should be encouraged to do as much for themselves as they can safely manage. Putting worms, leeches, or other live bait on the hook is also a neat way for kids to get over any reluctance to handle “yucky” creatures. Backlashes and snagged hooks are all part of the game (and at any age, I might add). To the extent your young fishing buddies are able, encourage them to try their best at fixing the problem before going to you for help.
If you and I get antsy and cranky when the fish aren’t biting, imagine how a youngster will feel. The name of the game is catching fish, so work the part of the pond or creek or lake where you know perch, bluegills, or other easy-to-attract species can be caught. Use surefire panfish bait like worms, doughballs, or crickets. The size of the fish or the fight it puts up doesn’t matter. What’s important is the number of times the bobber jiggles and goes under.
How long to stay out should be based on your young ’un’s attention span. Call it a day at the first sign of restlessness, before real boredom sets in, even if going home early means passing up that big bass you’ve been close to hooking into. Some kids may want to stop fishing for a while and do some other fun thing – like exploring an anthill or going to the john – before going back to their rods and reels. They’ll want room to walk around, which is why a dock or a shore is often a better idea than a confining space like a boat. But, like I say, it all depends on the individual, and you’re the best judge of that.
The first time a child goes fishing sets a pattern. As the adult role model, it’s not only what you say, but it’s what you demonstrate by example. The qualities that you’d like to see your young ’un grow up with – patience, courtesy, safety, respect for nature and the rules and laws – are learned by watching and by copying how grown-ups act.
I’ll never forget the first times I took Sherri and Jamie fishing, and when I took my grandboys too. Sure, I had to untangle lots of backlashes and dodge lots of flying baits. But I number those images – like the glow of wonderment and pride in Sherri’s eyes when she caught her first really big bass all by herself – among my most cherished memories.
You hear a lot of talk about patterns. Folks make it sound as complicated as doing your income tax, but like most other things in fishing, it really isn’t. A pattern is nothing more than a method of catching fish the same way more than once. Put even more simply, it’s how and when you caught the bass that you caught.
Every time you catch a fish, try and figure out where and how it happened. Was it in five feet of water? On a point? Was a cold front coming in? Did the critter jump on a spinnerbait after you switched from a topwater bait? Whatever the combination of factors involved, the bottom line is it makes up a pattern. And if that pattern worked once, chances are real good it’ll work again.
Since patterns are based on repetition, whenever you go fishing, and especially when you’re done for the day, make notes on what worked and what didn’t. Write them down, factoring in the four basic considerations of time of year, weather, type of water, and water conditions. You’ll want that information for the next time you fish so you can start figuring out patterns even before you put your boat in the water.
We pros do it all the time, except we call it doing our homework.
If spinnerbaits and buzzbaits look like nothing that’s found in nature, topwater baits are the exact opposite. They’re made to resemble minnows or shad or other baitfish, and they’re primarily warm-weatherbaits, most effective whenever the water temperature is eighty degrees or above.
Topwaters come in four basic types. I’d guess the most popular are the “cigar” shapes, like the Zara Spook. These baits really do look like baitfish, so if I had to pick one color as my favorite, it would be silver shad. You work them by making them “walk” across the surface, fluttering along like a panicky or injured baitfish. Keep your rod tip low and coordinate your wrist movement with cranking the reel to twitch the bait along, zigzagging maybe six or eight inches at a time. You can start feeling proud when you’re able to work a topwater around a stump or log.
Although Zara Spooks can be used on both calm and windy days, they’re really excellent when there’s some chop on the water. It’s a big bait that creates a lot of commotion, especially when you fish it fast. The calmer the water is, however, the slower you need to fish a Spook.
“Chugger” baits have concave faces that scoop through water to make their distinctive chugging action. Raise your rod tip while retrieving in a sideways motion that emphasizes the “spit” and varies the bait’s sound. If you don’t think the one you’re using is creating enough spit, take a file, sandpaper, or sharp knife and scoop away more of the face.
Long thin stickbaits look like minnows. They work best under quiet, calm conditions, especially when you retrieve them slowly.
Propbaits have little metal propellers on their front or their back ends and sometimes on both. Like spinnerbaits and buzzbaits, they’re designed to make lots of noise. The deal is to retrieve them in steady, smooth cadences, cranking in “one-two-pause, then repeat” or “one-two-three-pause, then repeat” patterns.
Any of these topwaters can be modified by attaching one or more strips of Mylar or another shiny material to the rear hooks. The extra bit of flash often attracts fish when plain baits don’t.
The rule about topwaters is, after you’ve thrown one, to let it sit on the surface until all the splash and ripples disappear. Then wait a few seconds longer before starting to work the bait. Sure, waiting isn’t easy, especially for hard-charging (some might say impatient) guys like me. But that’s the right way to catch fish on topwaters.
Actually, you might not have to work the bait at all. I’ve thrown a topwater when I knew a big bass was lurking and let it sit long after the ripples died away. That bass stared at the bait, and stared some more, wondering what it was that fell out of the sky and if it’s dead. The longer I did nothing, the more tension built up in the bass until when I finally did twitch the topwater or even take up slack line … wham! That’s known as the stare syndrome. Scientists still haven’t explained why bass do it, but waiting on a largemouth that way is a proven tactic.
Here’s something else that requires patience: Don’t set the hook on a topwater until you’re sure you feel the fish. A bass may hit or bump these lures two or three times before settling it. Setting the hook prematurely at the “boil” or the “blowup” usually jerks the bait right out of the fish’s mouth.
If you retrieve a topwater until it gets back to two or three feet from your boat without a hit, quit cranking and let it float for a few seconds more before you lift it out of the water. That way, any bass that has been following has a chance to hit before the topwater gets out of reach.
Even with all the patience in the world, you’re going to miss fish on topwaters. When that happens, don’t cast the bait right back. Instead, reach for your other rod and throw a plastic worm. You see, usually that ol’ bass is wondering what in the world just happened – dinner was there and then it wasn’t. He wants to eat – you know that, and throwing the same bait back just might catch him, but he also might be real leery about striking it again. A worm or jig that’s presented gently won’t spook him.
Some folks call stickbaits “jerkbaits” because of the action they’re worked with. I stick to “stickbaits,” because I’ve heard folks use the word “jerkbaits” to refer to the jerks at the reel end of the line.
Nothing is more intimidating to more fishermen than an unfamiliar lake. You show up at the lake, take a long look, and get all weak-kneed. There’s so much water, maybe a few thousand or more acres, but even if it’s just a little bitty lake, you take a deep breath and ask yourself, “What do I do first?”
You’re not alone. That’s a question we tournament guys ask ourselves all the time. And over the years I’ve come up with a few answers that seem to work.
First of all, as I’ve said, you should put the idea of fishing deep out of your mind. There are two reasons not to. First, most of the bass are in shallow water along the lake’s edges. Second, by ruling out anything deeper than seven feet, you’ve eliminated most of the water. That makes the prospect of fishing a big lake suddenly much more psychologically manageable.
The only times Chris and I fish deep – more than seven feet – is when we’re on a lake we know extremely well. Like our home lake, Lake Tenkiller, or another place that we’re certain has lots of fish, such as Lake Guntersville in Alabama. Otherwise, we fish shallow.
The next step is to look for points, places where pieces of land jut out into the water. They needn’t be long thin strips of land to qualifly as points. Any projection of land will do.
Starting at the shallowest water of the point, throw a crankbait, crawdad-colored in spring and shad in summer and fall. Work your way around the point, and chances are pretty good you’ll find fish.
Using that technique, move from point to point until you work your way around the lake. If you’re catching ’em on the crankbait, fine, but you might need to switch to a spinnerbait or a plastic worm.
Another technique involves your electronic fish finder. From the time you set out from the boat dock, look for schools of shad and other baitfish. They’re probably down six or seven feet or wherever the pH breakline is for that part of the lake. Once you’ve sighted in on the baitfish, look for the heaviest brush piles, the steepest drop-offs, or any other important structure or cover at that depth.
Bass become especially active right after sundown.
It’s hard to believe the first time you look at a monster lake, but with experience, a strange lake or river becomes less of a horror show waiting to happen than a neat challenge to be figured out and defeated. All it takes is experience fishing with game plans to turn anxiety and doubt into ancient history.
Bass become especially active after sundown, starting to move about an hour after the sun sets and continuing to feed for a couple of hours afterwards and sometimes all night. Like the predators they are, they like to prowl under cover of darkness the way muggers prefer dark streets. Also, they’re not as spooky at night.
Night fishing is a good teacher. You can’t see your line so you have to depend on your other senses, like feeling the line with your fingertips and listening for the sound of bass, baitfish and other critters.
The best nights to fish are when the moon is full. Bass become hyperactive hunters then, the way that a full moon seems to bring about the worst behavior in all critters. (It’s a fact: police records show the greatest amount of domestic violence and speeding accidents happen during full moons.)
If there is a moon overhead, chances are the bass will be feeding.
Solunar tables tell if major and minor feeding is predicted for a particular night. If you don’t happen to have a table handy, a food rule of thumb is that a moon overhead usually indicates a high-volume feeding period. If no moon is visible, you’ll have to rely on your eyesight. Watch the water surface: As a feeding period approaches, the calm surface is broken by little circles, then bigger ones, and finally the great sight and sound of a big ’un crashing after a frog or a mouthful of shad – or hopefully your black Jitterbug.
The unique feature of night fishing comes from bass being forced to rely on their sense of sound. They pick up vibrations through the sound-sensitive lateral lines along their bodies, “zoning” into the source of the sound just like sonar detectors on boats. That’s why you’ll want to use baits that attract a bass’s attention more through sound than sight: big poppers, crank-baits, buzzbaits, spinnerbaits, rattles in jigs and worms – all the noisier the better.
Erratic retrieves that work so well during daylight aren’t the best way to work a bait at night. Because bass can’t always “lock” onto the bait’s location during those one-two-stop, one-two-three-four-stop retrieves, you’re better off using a steady rhythm so the fish can figure out exactly where the lure is.
Moonlight coming from above makes the water surface appear kind of silvery from below. Black, dark purple, or dark red are the most effective bait colors because they stand out as a good silhouette target.
Often at night, a big female largemouth will slap a lure with her tail in an attempt to stun or kill it. When that happens, you know you’re working your bait right because Big Mama has been fooled into thinking it’s alive. When that happens, stop your retrieve and wait for her to come back for her “stunned” dinner. However, if she doesn’t return, grab another rod and throw a spinnerbait or plastic worm well past the slapped bait and then work it to where that bait is sitting. You’ll get a bite, I can almost guarantee you, since Big Mama will think another bass is coming to get what’s rightly hers.
Bass seem to splash louder, hit harder, and pull stronger under cover of darkness. Every strike feels like a giant grabbed your bait, and that’s what brings me out when the sun goes down.
If the thrill that comes from a sudden explosive strike of a largemouth isn’t enough during daylight hours, try night fishing with a buzzbait at the end of your line.
When buzzbaits came into the picture a little more than twenty years ago, old-timers called them gimmicks and said they’d never last. Well, the old-timers were wrong. Buzzbaits continue to be the hot-ticket items because when they’re used correctly, they produce big bass. Now we even have buzzbaits with clackers that really make noise.
My favorite conditions for night buzzing is on a lake with huge weed beds, especially weed beds along a creek or in deeper water. Another ideal situation is shallows with weeds about three feet under the surface. That’s where big bass settle down into the tops of the weeds and wait for their supper to swim by.
Like spinnerbaits, loud and fast-moving buzzbaits resemble nothing found in the natural food supply. That’s when a bass’s Refilexes take over. And do they ever! When I run a buzzbait over the top of a grass bed and the bait blows up right at the side of my Ranger boat, and right under the buzzbait is the huge yawning mouth of an eight-pounder, and the bass crashes back into the water under the buzzbait that’s falling on top of the foaming water, and the rod tip dives down, and I set the hook and hang on for all I’m worth while the reel is stripped of line … let me tell you, folks, that’s why my tackle box always has a bushel of buzzbaits!!
Changes in water temperature can lead you into making tactical mistakes. As I pointed out earlier, fifty-eight degrees seems to be something of a “magic” number. When the water temperature in the spring hits fifty-eight degrees, fish move into prespawning staging areas, pockets that range in depth from about four to seven feet, before they spawn in more shallow water.
Let’s suppose it’s the spring of the year and you’re in a tournament. The afternoon of the day before the tournament starts, you’re out practicing, and you come upon a bunch of bass in one of these staging areas. They’re good ’uns, so you make a note to race back first thing the next morning. You fish that pocket for an hour or so, but you can’t believe you haven’t gotten even a bite.
What happened was that the water temperature, which was fifty-eight degrees the previous afternoon, fell three, four or five degrees during the night, which is not an unusual change during spring conditions. When you get around to checking the thermometer on your fish-finder, you see that’s where it is, at fifty-three or fifty-five degrees.
That means you’ve wasted an hour or so of fishing time, and you know how critical time is during a tournament. So you and your partner, who’s gotten grumpy over not catching anything, move to another spot. Later you learn that some ol’ boy who moved into where you had been started catching lots of big ’uns. How come? Because by the time he got to that pocket, the water temperature had risen back up to fifty eight and the fish moved back.
Don’t feel so bad when this happens to you – it’s happened to me lots of times (well, at least once or twice).
Jigs are a real basic bait, consisting of nothing more than a lead head and something hanging off it. That can be a rubber or plastic skirt or a trailer like a dry rind or a Salt Craw.
Because jigs are so simple, people have come up with all kinds of variations. There’s the “Gitzit,” where the jig head goes all the way inside the bait, with only the hook sticking out. Another, a jig and plastic worm combination of a little one-eighth-ounce head and four-inch worm, often produces fish where larger baits don’t. A “creepy crawler” has a jig head inserted into a two-piece twister tail with a weed guard. This bait is excellent around rocks.
Jig skirts that are made of stiff fiberguards scrunch up inside the package they come in. The trick is to fare the skirts open after you put them on the jig head. It not only allows better hooking, but it makes them easier to work through weeds.
When you remove a jig head from its package, adjust the hook with your pliers so that instead of pointing straight ahead, it angles out a couple of degrees. The result will be better hooksets.
The best way to throw jigs is using a fippin’ technique. Bass often jump on a jig as soon as it goes below the surface, and fippin’ puts you in a position to immediately set the hook. The right way to hookset here is by using both hands in a pivot motion. As soon as you’ve flipped the jig using your right hand (assuming you’re a rightie), your left hand should grab the rod up close to the reel. Then to set the hook, push down with your right hand at the butt end of the rod as you jerk up toward your chest with your left hand. That’s the pivot, and that’s the hookset.
No matter where a pond or lake is or whether it’s natural or man-made, it takes time and effort to turn it into a first-class fishing environment.
(As a matter of definition, the line between “pond” and “lake” varies from place to place, and probably from person to person. To my mind, anything over thirty acres qualifies as a lake. Although the suggestions here apply to ponds – or “tanks,” as they’re called in Texas – too, I’ll refer to lakes just to keep things simple.)
Most nonbiologist types can handle a lake that’s anywhere under 150 acres without too much risk of failure. Anything larger, and the effectiveness of your efforts would be greatly reduced. Besides, you want to spend most of your time catching fish, not nursemaiding them.
First, you’ll want fish to catch. You need to select a strain of largemouth bass that will survive and reproduce in whatever part of the country you live in. The Florida strain, great big tough fighting fish that I introduced into my Otter Creek lake, can’t handle locations that are too far north. However, a decent lake maintenance program will let native largemouths found throughout the South grow into as good a trophy-class fish as the Florida variety, and they’ll tolerate some colder climates too. If you have any questions in that regard, get in touch with your state’s fish and game commission or county extension agent for the name of an expert you can consult with.
Two competitive species, such as largemouth and striped, Kentucky, or white bass, in the same lake isn’t a good idea; they’ll spend more time competing against each other than jumping on your spinnerbait. As you might imagine by now, my advice is stick to large-mouths – they’re the most fun.
To grow into big ’uns, fish need to eat well and eat regularly. The steak and taters of their menu should be bluegill and bream. You’ll want lots, so these baitfish should be stocked and managed to produce an annual spawn that guarantees a plentiful population. Our Otter Creek property has eight brood ponds, and we transfer the new bluegill and bream into the lake on a regular basis.
Check your thermometer before you start fishing. It will tell you where fish are likely to be.
A fish biologist or another expert who’s familiar with your area can recommend other forage.
(The owner of any Fiederal Soil Conservation lake needs to check with the appropriate state agency, since forage is often covered in the lake construction agreement.) Shad, tilapia, and crawfish are all excellent, and they’re readily available from commercial sources.
Hauling shad over long distances can be kind of tricky. They’re a fragile species, and peculiar too: You need round containers because they like to swim in circles, plus you’ll need to add a chemical to keep them alive.
Tilapia need to be replenished on an annual basis, because they don’t survive when the water temperature drops below fifty-eight degrees. But since they reproduce in large hatches about every thirty days, they’ll provide a tremendous amount of food.
As to vegetation, cattails and bulrushes along the banks provides excellent cover for the bass and their forage to spawn (as well as making a natural protective barrier against poachers). The trick is to keep it under control. That’s especially important with coontail, hydrilla, and other surface plants. Lily pads, in particular, are beautiful and provide great cover, but they can literally take over a lake if they’re overplanted or left unchecked.
That leads to something I hear all the time. “Help, Jimmy,” folks say, “the vegetation is taking over my lake!”
There are two solutions. One is to stock your lake with grass carp. The species thrives on plants of all kinds, routinely growing up to thirty or forty pounds. Once grass carp get all the vegetation out of a lake, they’re supposed to starve to death and die. Trouble is, they don’t. They’ll switch to a diet of baitfish, insects, and anything else they can find, and then they get to be nuisances. They muddy the shallow water, and they’re real hard to catch and remove.
A chemical alternative is copper sulfate added to the water. By removing the oxygen, it prevents vegetation from growing (but without strangling fish in the process). Because copper sulfate can be tricky, in the sense that it can be easily misused, either apply it in small areas or else hire a lake management company to do the job correctly.
Another common complaint is muddy water. The answer is another chemical, lime, which is both inexpensive and effective. When we built dikes and little islands that signifcantly increased Otter Creek’s shoreline by creating lots of bays, covers, and points, the bulldozers really churned up the water into a muddy mess. Lime cleared up the problem – literally – and did it pronto.
Nothing turns a lake into a prime fishing hole better than lots of varied cover. Brush piles, old Christmas trees and other timber, logs, boulders, and pilings … use your ingenuity to recycle natural objects that will attract and hold bass.
Although your bass fishing should be limited to catch-and-release (and with barbless hooks too, please remember), you’ll need to cull your baitfish population to keep them under control. Eating-sized crappies and bluegills can be removed regularly, and, on a more limited basis because they don’t reproduce as quickly, catfish. Funny thing, but no matter how hard you try to keep carp, drum, and other rough fish out of your pond, like uninvited drop-in guests, they’ll find a way there, so you can be aggressive about removing them whenever you have the chance.
Stay in touch with the state or county fish biologist or extension agent. At least once a year, the expert should inspect your lake in terms of fish population, health (including the presence of any parasites), forage consumption, and pH control. The expert will then submit a list of recommendations that, if you follow them, will make the fishing even better.
Actually, your lake may be so good all the time that your biggest problem will be unwanted visitors of the human variety, including poachers. If you don’t live on the lake and you can’t afford fulltime maintenance, and if fencing and locked gates aren’t practical or possible, consider inviting a family to move their house or mobile home onto the property. Their presence all year long will go a long way to keeping the lake off-limits to anyone you’d rather not have fish there.
I’m a strong supporter of “catch-and-release” fishing.
Until about twenty years ago, tournaments or not, people used to keep almost every fish they caught. There were always lots more in the lake, and even if you didn’t plan to eat your catch or give it away, waving a big stringer full of bass was the macho way to end a day. So was hanging a stuffed and mounted hawg on your office or den wall – after all, that’s where the expression “trophy bass” came from.
After a while, spectators at tournament weigh-ins couldn’t help noticing how many pounds of fish were taken out of the same lakes they fished. They complained to tournament officials, which didn’t exactly make for positive public relations for the tournament or its sponsors.
In response to the complaints, Ray Scott passed a rule in 1972 that all competitors in B.A.S.S. tournaments had to use boats that had livewells. To make sure the livewells were used, any fisherman whose string included a dead fish had pounds deducted from his score. Finally, after all the fish were weighed, they were released back into the lake or river.
The idea caught on, big-time. When weekend fishermen saw what us pros were doing, they bought boats with livewells and started releasing their fish too.
Catch-and-release makes good sense from a purely practical standpoint. If tournament fishermen cut into lake’s bass population on one day, we’re not going to do real well the rest of the week. Or at the next year’s tournament there either.
But there’s deeper reasons too. Ruining other folks’ fishing breaks the Golden Rule, just the way needlessly slaughtering fish shows no respect for the Good Lord’s bounty. Unless we protect and preserve our natural resources, there won’t be any fish around for the next generation to catch. And their kids too.
I really like the slogan: “Catch-and-release: Try it – it’ll grow on you.” It means we’re giving the fish we caught a chance to grow bigger. And we all want big ’uns to catch again and again.
Catch and release: Try it—it’ll grow on you.
This good-sized largemouth was taken on a spinnerbait retrieved across the surface.
“The great professional anglers are great because they find bass. Almost anyone can catch them if he or she knows where they’re hiding. Finding them is the trick, not catching them.”
—”Charley Hartley’s Bass
Wars,” Feb. 9, 2009, on the BASS site at www.sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/index
“When I’m casting toward the shoreline, I know 90 percent of the bass in the lake are behind me.”
—Remark attributed to Bill Dance, legendary angler and luremaker
“Just go about experimenting in a systematic manner, and be aware of what you’re trying at all times. When you catch a fish … you’ll know the reasons … Then, most importantly, you can duplicate the technique and catch another.”
—Grits Gresham, Complete Book of Bass Fishing, Outdoor Life/Harper & Row, 1966
It took a lot of casts, and a lot of years, and a lot of wasted time before I finally grasped the most important lesson in largemouth bass fishing: You must fish weedless lures and baits. You will occasionally catch bass alongside cover with lures using exposed hooks, but the majority of your strikes will come when you fish your lure right among the stumps, limbs, lily pads, and weedy holes. Sure, openwater fishing is more visual and less work, but do you want to catch bass or do you just want to mess around?
You’re probably familiar with the surface lure tactic of letting your lure lie motionless on the water after it splashes down—at least until the ripples spread out and die away. There’s another method—requiring infinitely more patience—that sometimes pays big dividends: Let your lure lie still for about three minutes, then jiggle it every so slightly. Then jiggle it some more, and eventually start it moving very, very slowly. You might be surprised by what happens.
People who tell you that bass don’t school don’t know what they’re talking about, as Grits Gresham points out in his Complete Book of Bass Fishing (1966): “The truth is bass do school. It follows then that there must be a great part of every lake which is virtually devoid of bass.”
The areas along bass migration routes where the fish break away from their schools and begin fanning out individually along the shoreline are called scatter points. Think of them as exits off the turnpikes. Grits Gresham points out in his Complete Book of Bass Fishing (1966): “Big bass school in tighter groups than do the yearlings, and they are especially reluctant to move past the scatter point. They seldom do so, in fact, in any numbers.” That’s exactly why you seldom find the real lunkers along the shoreline, and why big catches can be made if the school can be located in deeper water.
As pointed out elsewhere in this book, when a stretch of shoreline that has been producing good fishing suddenly goes cold, the usual angling lament is, “They’ve stopped biting.” Other stretches of shoreline are deemed to be poor because they seldom or never produce fish. The key thing to remember about the “good” stretches of shoreline is that when the fish “aren’t biting,” they probably have moved out along their migration routes to deeper water. Turning your back on the shoreline and exploring outside water, using charts, electronics, and local knowledge (if it is available), should lead to better catches when they’re “not biting” along your favorite, dependable shorelines.
The pros have a great way of describing a honey hole that suddenly goes dry. They lament, “I lost my fish!”
Points are favorite bass holding spots. Here’s how the noted angler and luremaker, Tom Mann Jr., fished them, as related in the book Structure Basics: A Complete Guide to Bass Hideouts, B.A.S.S. Publications, (1999), by Wade L. Bourne: “Mann positions his boat off the end of a promising point. ‘I think the jig works better coming downhill, and the important thing is to work it slow and keep bottom contact. Don’t swim it.’ Mann often makes multiple casts to a point to interest or tease sluggish fish.”
When you hook a deep-water bass, by trolling or casting, keep working the area and the same depths— hard!
“The only way deep-water bass can effectively feed is in a pack, slashing into schools of baitfish together, so where there is one, there are usually more nearby.”
—Rick Clunn’s World Championship Bass Fishing, Cordovan (1978) by Steve Price and Rick Clunn
It happened in the 1950s and ’60s. Two great events came along that changed bass fishing forever. (“Ruined it!” some disenchanted stalwarts proclaim.) First, Carl Lowrance’s “fish finder” underwater tracking device was invented, and then Buck Perry began preaching the gospel of bass following migration routes from shoreline shallows into deeper water away from the banks at varying distances.
Bass migrate, just like ducks and geese, leaving for the winter. THERE ARE SELDOM ANY BASS ALONG THE BANKS WHERE YOU’VE BEEN FISHING. That was the amazing sermon preached by revolutionary luremaker Buck Perry back in the 1950s and ’60s. “ … might just as well have been fishing in your bathtub,” Perry is reported as saying in Grits Gresham’s classic Complete Book of Bass Fishing (1966). Perry believed (and was probably right) that bass were along the shorelines only during brief periods every day, mostly early and late. Anglers who thought the bass weren’t hitting were mistaken, Perry believed. They weren’t hitting because, in Perry’s words, “they weren’t there.”
Fish finders, GPS units, and other devices, coupled with sophisticated boats and motors and a new knowledge of fishing honey holes in the vast waters of lakes and reservoirs, has lead not only to tournaments and halcyon days for cashing in on exploding tackle demands, but to the notion that would have made our grandfathers faint: “Turn your back on the shore … get out in the lake … that’s where the fish are.”
A North Carolinian (1915–2006) and World War II veteran, Buck Perry is regarded as the father of structure fishing and a pioneer in pointing out bass migration routes and deep-water holding spots away from shorelines. He invented the Spoonplug, which is still sold today, as well as the first diving and deep-running lures to exploit structure fishing. The Spoonplug burst into national headlines in 1957 when Tom McNally, writing in the Chicago Tribune, told of Perry catching enormous strings of bass in heavily fished local lakes. Perry published Spoonplugging: Your Guide to Lunker Fishing in 1973. For more information go to www.BuckPerry.com.
Like it or not, the big reservoir and lake dilemma of bass moving away from the shoreline at various times of the day is very real. Buck Perry was perhaps the first—or certainly one of the first—anglers to focus on catching these wandering fish, but others soon followed. Grits Gresham, destined to become a television personality as well as top writer, discussed migrating bass in his Complete Book of Bass Fishing (1966), one of the first major books published on bass fishing in the modern era. Grits, a good friend, pointed out the discoveries of Buck Perry and went on to add, “Bass spend most of their time in deep water, in schools, and in a very restricted area—their sanctuary. That sanctuary is most often found in the deepest water of a lake or immediately adjacent to it.”
In his Complete Book of Bass Fishing (1966), Grits Gresham said he looks for bass sanctuaries on bars, ridges, or reefs, or even clean spots in the lake bottom, and that bass would be moving along a regular underwater highway toward those spots twice a day. Expect to find the migration route along a ridge, with the sanctuary occurring at a break in the ridge—a fairly level spot somewhere along the ridge, “below 20 feet if the water is that deep.”
An incredible experiment on bass striking habits was reported by Grits Gresham in his Complete Book of Bass Fishing (1966). It seems that Missouri fisheries biologists placed tagged bass from heavily fished waters into a pond. They also placed tagged bass that came from waters that had never been fished into the same pond. They fished this pond with artificial lures in the spring and fall, and caught twice as many bass that had come from the unfished waters.
Check out pro Richie White on the Insider BASSlog Blog at the B.A.S.S. site www.sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/index. White has done some amazing work on studies of the moon phases. The site also has many good articles on best lures and tactics.
A bass caught in Texas or Georgia has virtually the same habits as one caught in Ohio or Pennsylvania. Their individual traits and preferences don’t make a dime’s bit of difference in terms of their needs in differing parts of the country. They all need food, cover, oxygen, and bottom cover they can relate to while feeding, moving, or hiding. The timing of their various activities may differ from place to place, but the way they go about their lives is virtually the same.
Anglers invariably call fish “he,” but in the world of bass, the females are the biggest fish. When an angler says, “He got away!” he probably should have said, “She got away!”
(And “Bassmaster” Wannabes)
Operated by the ESPN sports channel, the Internet’s most intense and rewarding site for bass anglers is the B.A.S.S. organization site: www.sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/index. Here you can join B.A.S.S. and the B.A.S.S. INSIDER groups, for which you receive the Bassmaster magazine and all sorts of benefits. tournament news and information, a vast array of how-to from the pros, blogs of the tournament pros, videos, the works—B.A.S.S. has it all. There are free trial memberships and introductory memberships.
When bass are holding, suspended at mid-water levels, with no baitfish near them, they sometimes can seem to be lockted in those positions all day. You see them on your depth finder, but they seem to have little interest in your deep-running lures. As a last-ditch effort, try jugging for them, straight down.
On the www.lurenet.com site, a tip from bass expert Bill Dance dealt with the suspended bass dilemma: “Suspended bass can be some of the most difficult fish to catch—simply because when they’re suspended they’re usually in an inactive mood and don’t want to chase a lure. But if you can keep something appealing in the strike zone long enough, they’re much more apt to bite. Two of the most effective lures I’ve found for this situation are the Smithwick 4 ½-inch Rogue and the Bomber Long A. [The Rogue indicated is the one that works below 4 feet.] The reasons these baits work so well is that they have the ability to deliver an enticing darting action and they suspend well in between twitches on or just above the bass’s depth level.”
The bass-fishing site www.bassfan.com is one of the best sites I’ve visited for tips, articles, news, and videos. It’s a keeper.
“An angler without the gadgets is fishing for bass, whereas one with all the modern equipment is hunting for bass. Indeed, some of the new breed of bassmen enjoy the hunt more than the catch. It’s a separate sport, really.”
—A.D. Livingston, Fishing for Bass: Modern Tactics and Tackle, Lippincott, 1974
“Bass stage sooner than many people realize as they typically can spawn in cooler water, often going through the spawn weeks before the big waves of smaller fish move up. It’s also surprising to many anglers how active these early fish can be.”
—Pro guide Troy Jens, Lake Guntersville, Alabama, in the article “A Great Spot for Spring,” on the Web site www.lurenet.com
In his column in Bassin’ magazine back in May/June 1992, veteran pro Hank Parker revealed a deadly system for finding bass after they’ve left shoreline cover once spring is over. Parker looks for points leading from shoreline areas where he usually finds and catches bass in the spring. In particular, he searches for “a long tapering fat that eventually plunges into a channel.” In summertime, he drops a buoy at the spot the point drops into the channel, then starts working along the point back toward the shore. He uses deep and shallow crankbaits and Carolina-rigged worms, and lizards. He also keeps a rod handy with a topwater plug.
One of the most prolific, informative, and entertaining writers in the “Bassmaster” lineup is Don Wirth. His columns and articles are packed with the kind of information that really counts when it comes to finding and catching bass. Check him out at the Bassmaster site www.sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/.
Pro Richie White, who fishes 200-plus days a year at Lake Fork in Texas, writes from his Insider BASSlog Blog at the B.A.S.S. site www.sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/index. White’s articles on moon phases and lures and tactics offer solid advice on a variety of subjects. On wintertime bass fishing, White says he catches more bass with lipless crankbaits than any others. “As a guide on perhaps the best big bass lake in the country [Lake Fork, Texas], I’ve caught giants on quite a variety of baits. But I get more on the lipless crankbait than all other baits combined in the winter.” White described how, in February, he caught a 10-pounder next to the ramp with the wind blowing about 30 mph. “She hit a ¾-ounce Xcalibur crankbait in the Rayburn red color.” Almost every crankbait White uses in winter has red or orange in it.
Pro Richie White’s complete rig for winter bass: “So be sure to have a lipless crankbait with some red or orange in it, a good casting reel, a long rod that has some flex, and the right line for long casts.” He uses a 7-foot Kistler Helium rod, medium for lighter lures and medium-heavy for ½- to ¾-ounce lures. His reels are Citica by Shimano and Revo by Ambassadeur. His line is 15-pound Berkley Big Game.
Veteran Florida outdoor writer Larry Larsen is an expert on many kinds of fishing, with books and magazine articles galore, but he is perhaps best known for his prowess on largemouth bass. In that regard—but with assorted side dishes of bluegills, redbreasts, and catfish—Larry serves up superb fishing guides to Florida bass-fishing lakes and streams in his books, Larry Larsen’s Guide to Florida Bass Waters, Larsen’s Outdoor Publishing, with separate books covering North Florida, Central Florida, and South Florida. Larry gives Florida rivers their full due, showing you where to put into and float classic black-water streams through swamps of cypress, mossdraped oaks, and tall pines on the hillsides. Available at www.amazon.com.
Florida has so many good bass lakes that it’s easy to overlook the great river fishing. Florida is blessed with twenty-seven spring creeks, with clear 72-degree water gushing up from the earth all day, all year—just like the famed spring creeks in Pennsylvania and out West, where trout thrive. Many of Florida’s spring creeks are famous, like Silver Springs and Rainbow Springs, but there are others tucked away that you may not have heard of. Consider Alexander Springs Run, in the Ocala National Forest, a 1½-hour drive from Ocala. It has campgrounds and canoe rentals, but, of course, you can launch your own. This is a great river-fishing float, with scenic natural beauty that somehow seems even better than your dreams of Tarzan Country.
“I actually like the wind! It does three things for me: 1) It moves the boat so I don’t have to stay on that trolling motor all day; 2) It allows us to cover a LOT of water; and 3) It puts chop on the water to greatly reduce light penetration. That means the fish will stay shallow rather than hiding down deep in the grass to get away from the bright light.”
—Jim Porter’s Guide to Bass Fishing, at www.stickmarsh.com
Impoundments with largemouth bass are mostly huge, and vast portions of the water on any impoundment hold no bass at all. Without a guide or insider information, how can we find the fish in all that water without spending weeks doing it? In his excellent book, Rick Clunn’s World Championship Bass Fishing (1978), written with Steve Price, veteran tournament pro Rick Clunn describes the process as a systematic approach that eliminates alternatives, one by one, until a pattern is found. Random casting won’t work. Going from spot to spot only eliminates spots, not water types. “At least when you eliminate types of water,” says Clunn, “you can consider yourself getting closer each time to where the bass will be found. This is one of the hardest lessons to learn in big impoundment bass fishing.”
In the same book, Rick Clunn’s World Championship Bass Fishing (1978), written with Steve Price, veteran tournament pro Rick Clunn describes a tournament at Tennessee’s Percy Priest Lake, with all insider information forbidden. Arriving at the lake in early spring, he was given a topo map and im-mediately started studying the potential spawning areas to fish—points, flats, coves. On the morning of practice day, he fished many types of water before locating most of the fish he caught at the mouths of coves. There were no fish inside the coves. As the sun rose over Percy’s clear water, the fish seemed to prefer brush piles, planted by crappie fishermen. Clunn spent the afternoon looking for brush piles at the mouths of coves. In the tournament he fished these with a buzzbait, backed up by a plastic worm. He won the tournament.
“The various depths bass will descend to are never determined by existing water temperatures at those levels. Instead, the depths bass will go to are determined by a combination of other conditions such as existing light penetration, water stratifcation (when in evidence), and water oxygen.”
—John Weiss, Advanced Bass Fishing, Stoeger Publishing, 1978
Early in 1974, when I was editing Sports Afield magazine, a young writer named John Weiss shook up the bass-fishing world with an article on the development of oxygen-monitoring equipment by Dr. Martin Venneman—the Sentry Oxygen Monitor. Dr. Venneman had discovered that an amazing 50 to 80 percent of the water in any lake does not contain enough oxygen to support fish life. Calling for the use of the Oxygen Monitor as just one more device to help find the fish, John Weiss pointed out that the monitors should always be kept in mind as the advanced angler commences his search for bass. “Oxygen monitoring equipment does not guarantee you will consistently be able to find or catch fish. It does guarantee you will not waste one minute of time fishing where no fish can possibly survive.” In his book, Advanced Bass Fishing (1976), Weiss goes on to say, “It should also be mentioned that bass found in rivers and streams are not likely to be influenced by changing oxygen levels…. The greatest applications of oxygen evaluation are on the larger lakes and reservoirs.” [Check out today’s modern oxygen monitors at Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s.]
“For the bass species, optimum oxygen levels are found in the range of 5 to 13 parts per million (PPM) though they highly prefer and will seek out the 9 to 12 PPM level.”
—John Weiss, Advanced Bass Strategies (1976)
In an excellent article I published as editor in the 1972 Sports Afield Fishing Annual, Charles W. Edghill reminded our readers that smallmouth fly fishers often overlook using their trout dry flies and nymphs for river smallmouths in high summer. You won’t catch the big bronzebacks, but you’ll get plenty of action from the fish in the 10- to 15-inch class.
This Susquehanna River smallmouth hit a small crankbait, fished below a riffle.
If you’re hankering for some great action with small smallmouths (a 14-incher is big up there), book a guided float on the Upper Delaware and be ready to use light spinning gear with jigs and soft-plastic grubs. You could easily get a fifty-fish day. If you insist on using your fly rod, you’ll catch fish, but far fewer than you can spinning. These floats should be made in summer, not in the early season trout and mayfly times.
Tired of getting skunked on your favorite trout waters during high summer? Then turn your fly and light spinning rods toward the smallmouth rivers. You’ll find plenty of action from battling fish that are as strong and jump as much as any trout you ever saw.
In the western United States, among the blue-ribbon trout waters that get the attention of most anglers, are bass lakes and reservoirs that deliver solid, consistent action and lots of fish. If you’re bored with the trout treadmill and live in the West, turn your attention to bass to put more fun back in your fishing.
The site www.westernbass.com is loaded with information, tips, and observations of anglers from all over the western states. The site covers California, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico.
“In some lakes the post-spawn bass do move off and suspend and an angler can’t catch many of them for two months or so. Those waters during the post-spawn months are notoriously tough fishing.”
—Larry Larsen, Bass Fishing Facts (1989)
“Streams are typically not as wide, have swifter current and are clearer, so more natural colored baits work best. Rivers are usually deeper, wider and have more color, meaning brighter baits work best, but this isn’t always true.”
—Elite Series pro Brian Snowden, in a www.Bassmaster.com archive article by David Hunter Jones. Snowden grew up fishing small waters and continues to wade and float small streams near his home in Reeds Spring, Missouri
In his blog for smallmouth bass lovers, Bassmaster smallmouth guru Stephen Headrick takes on critical, interesting subjects with no-nonsense advice, such as: “Heavy tackle is great when you can get away with it—like in dirty water or really heavy cover. But heavy tackle will adversely affect how you fish deep water for smallmouth bass. It takes longer for heavy lines to get pulled to the bottom. Heavy lines are more visible to the bass. Heavy lines dull the action of your lures. And by heavy I’m talking about anything over 10-pound test. I use a lot of 4-, 6-, and 8-pound line for my smallmouth fishing here at Dale Hollow Lake and elsewhere.” Check out Hedrick’s great articles at: www.sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/index.
Anglers waiting for hot weather to subside and fall action with smallmouths to kick in can miss the boat, literally, according to smallmouth Bassmaster guru Stephen Headrick, who writes a blog for the popular Bassmaster and Bass site, www.sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/index. Headrick says he starts checking on creeks in highland reservoirs before the heat breaks—just checking for lunkers, not spending the day there yet. “My favorite bait at this time is a 
-ounce shaky head jig with a 4-inch Go To Bait Co. worm in pumpkin pepper. I throw it on a spinning outfit and 8-pound line. It’s not a fast way of fishing, but it’ll catch bass of all sizes, and I have a lot of confidence in it. If I’m out at night (and you can catch smallmouths at night all year long), I like to fish a ¾-ounce black and blue Punisher spinnerbait with a big blue blade.”
All flooded timber looks inviting to the bass angler. All that cover, all those shadows for bass to hide in and wait for prey. But when you’re looking at hundreds—or thousands—of acres of flooded timber, you soon realize the fish aren’t scattered throughout. They are not lying in wait behind every tree. Instead, as in other lakes, they relate to bottom contours. The timber near the right bottom contours and channels will be the timber that holds the fish. Think bottom contours and conditions first. Timber, second.
Those shadowy docks and bridge pilings always look like great cover for fish. And they are! Bass, all kinds of panfish, pickerel, pike, even walleyes are probably lurking there. You’ll catch more fish at docks or pilings by getting your boat into position and making your first casts parallel to the target. Cast in toward the bank and run your lure alongside the dock—as close to the boards as you can get it—back to the boat. Next, if there’s room under the dock, try skipping sidearm casts to get your lure under the boards into the shadows.
Cold-water early spring bass can be tough to catch, but one way to cut the odds, says pro Timmy Horton, is to fish rip-raps—those rocky barriers supporting roads across lakes and reservoirs and dams along ponds. The rocks heat up with the warming spring sun, and the fish move into the adjacent waters. They can be on the rocks or as far as 30 feet outside. Especially good are the breaks in the rip-rap where boats can slide through. Horton likes jerkbaits for this fishing, and goes deep with the longer-bill models. Vary your retrieve from sudden jerks, to smooth pulls, to slow twitches. You’ll catch bass, Horton says, on his “The Bass Pro” feature on the Versus Country Internet site.
In another section of this book, I touched on the strategy of fishing river and creek inlets at the heads of lakes and reservoirs. These waters warm up first in early spring. Here’s a tip on fishing them. It’s from Advanced Bass Strategies, The Hunting and Fishing Library (1995), by Dick Sternberg: “In early spring, before spawning begins, look for clean Vs (shoreline breaks) in the back ends of creek arms. The weedlines of these Vs holds fish through the day, but the action is fastest in late afternoon because of the warming water.” The Carolina rig is especially effective for fishing these spots.
Bass expert and luremaker Tom Mann, Jr., explained his favorite way to fish points in early spring: “If I’m fishing 15 to 25 feet of water, I use a 
-ounce lead-headed jig. If I’m fishing shallower than this, I use a -ounce jig. In clear water I like a brown jig with a black twin-tail grub. In stained water, I reverse the colors, going with a black jig and a brown grub.”
—Structure Basics: A Complete Guide to
Bass Hideouts, Wade L. Bourne, Publications, 1999
Ohio writer John Weiss was one of my regular contributors in the years I was editing Sports Afield. He was a reader favorite, and with good reason. His observations were backed up by real field experiences and research. In March 1973, John did a remarkable article on finding bass in big lakes. Called “Reading Substructure: The Pro Method of Fishing Big-Lake Bass,” the article likened finding bass to finding coveys of quail on a big farm. The quail aren’t every-where; they are bunched up in certain locations. So are the bass. John’s basic idea game plan calls for the following:
1. Fishing the midday hours, because that’s when the bass have moved from scattering along the shorelines back to their sanctuaries, which are always on substructure.
2. Find the depth in the lake where the ideal temperature of 72 degrees shows consistently. (Be aware that 72 degrees is used as the optimum in John’s Ohio area. Yours may be different. John uses the example of 72 degrees occurring mostly at 20 feet.)
3. Study your charts to find the areas where substructure is located in the 20-foot, 72-degree zone depths.
4. Eliminate poor habitat over muddy or murky bottoms. You want gravel, hard-packed sand, weeds, etc. In John’s words: “Simply locating structure is not the key to success. You must locate substructure. If a treeline is considered structure, a gap in that treeline is considered substructure. If a creek channel is structure at the 20-foot level, substructure may be a sharp bend in the channel or a patch of brush along the edge of the channel. Bass will use the entire structure as a migration route to other places in the lake, but it is the substructure that will draw and hold the school for long periods of time. Locate the substructure and you’ve located a bass sanctuary.”
Continuing with the expertise John Weiss shared with readers of Sports Afield when I was editor there, he presented another land-mark article in May 1973 called “The Best Bass Fishing Starts Where Light Stops.” In it, John cited several scientific studies suggesting that light penetration—even more than desired temperatures—is what sends bass deeper in the water. Bass will go to whatever depth is necessary to escape light penetration. So how deep are the fish? Well, the answer is whatever depth it takes to get out of the light. For more of John Weiss’ great bass-fishing tips, see his Bass Angler’s Almanac: More Than 650 Tips and Tactics, The Lyons Press (2002), at www.amazon.com, www.finefishing.com, and other outlets.
In what it called the “Ultimate Lure Survey,” published in March 2008, Field & Stream magazine asked 1,000 of its hard-core readers to name their favorite lures. The winners for the Largemouth Bass category were:
Soft-Plastic, 30%, Yamamoto Senko, with Zoom Finesse Worm second
Top Water, 16%, Arbogast Jitterbug, with Zara Spook second
In-Line Spinners, 16%, Mepps Aglia, with Worden’s Rooster Tail second
Spinnerbaits, 11%, Generic Double Colorado Blades, with Booyah Pond Magic second
Crankbaits, 11%, Bomber A with Rapala Shad Rap second
Minnow-Type Lures, 8%, Original Rapala, with Rebel second
Jigs, 6%, Jig with Mister Twister, Strike King Skirted Jig and Trailer second
Spoons, 1%, Little Cleo, with Dardevle second
In what it called the “Ultimate Lure Survey,” published in March, 2008, Field & Stream magazine asked 1,000 of its hard-core readers to name their favorite lures. The winners for the Smallmouth Bass category were:
In-Line Spinners, 27%, Mepps Aglia
Soft-Plastics, 23%, Yamamoto Senko, with Zoom Finesse Worm second
Crankbaits, 13%, Bomber A
Minnow-Type Lures, 12%, Original Rapala
Jigs, 10%, Jig with Mister Twister
Top Water, 8%, Heddon Tiny Torpedo
Spinnerbaits, 6%, Booyah Pond Magic
Spoons, 2%, Dardevle
© Jay Cassell
A deep-diving crankbait fooled this smallmouth.
If you seriously want to catch bass—and not simply enjoy a nice day on the water—then sooner or later you’re going to have to fish plastic worms or other soft-plastic baits. Yes, worm fishing makes some anglers yawn. Yes, it’s tough to get the hang of, requiring patience and the development of all-important feel and touch. But the tactic catches bass, lots of them, big ones and little ones. Sometimes it catches them on days when nothing else works.
Tournament bass pro Rick Clunn, writing with Steve Price in Rick Clunn’s World Championship Bass Fishing (1978), says, “Plastic worms are probably the most deadly lures … but for many anglers they are the most disliked. The usual complaints include, ‘It’s too slow,’ and ‘I can’t tell if I’ve got a bass or a stump.’ The plain truth about worm fishing is that it takes practice, practice, and more practice to become efficient.”
In Rick Clunn’s World Championship Bass Fishing (1978), pro Rick Clunn recommends fishing small ponds or slow-moving, clear creeks to get the hang of working plastic worms in the obvious holes and structure where bass are likely to be holding.
What pro Rick Clunn called the “most deadly” back in 1978 has not lost its appeal today. Plastic worms and soft-plastic baits are catching bass everywhere these fish swim, and if you want to snub the technique, you do so at the risk of having a lot of those slow, “nice days” on the water.
Today there are many, many methods and variations on fishing plastic worms and soft-plastic baits, but one stands alone as the mother of all plastic worm rigs. It’s the famous Texas rig; once you learn to fish it, you’ll catch more bass and bigger bass.
The rig starts with your favorite worm or soft-plastic bait, a worm hook, and a bullet-type sinker in a size to take you deep or shallow as you prefer for the location and conditions. First, pass the line through the slip sinker and tie on the hook. Second, push the point of the hook into the center of the end of the worm head and thread it about ½ inch into the center of the worm body. Next, bring the point of the hook out of the body. It should be about ½ inch back from the head. Now pull the eye and shank of the hook back through the worm body until the eye end of the hook disappears into the worm about ¼ inch. Lastly, push the point of the hook into the worm just past the barb. Now you have a straight worm that’s virtually weedless.
Some experts refine this rig by pushing the hook point all the way back through the body so that the point lies just beneath the surface of the bait. Eventually, your worm fishing will lead to many different and exciting ways to fish worms and soft-plastic baits. But the good old Texas Rig will still be one you can count on. Two of the best places to learn all about worm fishing are the Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s Web sites.
The ubiquitous Texas Rig is rivaled by the Carolina Rig for bass-catching effectiveness. Basically, the Carolina Rig differs by having the bullet sinker positioned up the line, instead of on the nose of the soft bait as in the Texas. This makes the soft-plastic lure or worm sink slower and float behind and above the bullet sinker. The lure or worm moves freely with an enticing action. The Carolina Rig is so effective that many top anglers never bother to use the Texas Rig at all. Many tournament anglers keep one rod loaded for action with a Carolina Rig all set up.
Here’s how to set up the Carolina Rig as related in the book Advanced Bass Fishing (1995), by Dick Sternberg: “Make a Carolina Rig by sliding a 1-ounce bullet sinker and a glass bead onto 20-pound mono or 30-pound Spectra, tying on a Size 10 barrel swivel, then adding a 3-foot, 12-pound mono leader. Attach a 3/0 HP hook for a lizard, 2/0 for a French fry (small worm) or crawworm. The glass bead keeps the sinker from damaging the knot, and makes a clicking sound. The lighter leader prevents losing the entire rig should the hook get snagged.” The preferred tackle for rigging the Carolina varies, and you can see a variety of ways to make the rig on Internet fishing sites. On Google, try “Carolina Worm Bass Rig.”
The title says it all: Advanced Bass Fishing: Tips and Techniques from the Country’s Best Guides and Tournament Anglers. But what makes Dick Stern-berg’s book so useful is that the pages deliver on the promise of the title. The techniques are so well presented in detailed photographs and drawings that you will be able to put the best “insider” bass fishing techniques to work next time you go fishing. Published by The Hunting and Fishing Library (1995), the book listed on Amazon for $21.50 at this writing and less, used, at other Internet sites. Search the Internet, find it, buy it, use it. You’ll start catching bass like never before.
At Strike King Lure Co. and on their Web site, No Tiger!, pro Kevin VanDam is held in the highest regard of professionalism. And with good reason: VanDam has won just about everything in tournaments and keeps on doing it. In an interview on his placing third in difficult conditions in the February 2007 tournament at Lay Lake near Montgomery, Alabama, VanDam said, “My primary bait was the new Strike King Red-Eye Shad, a lipless crankbait. I was fishing a crawdad color with gold and white on the edge of the grass at Lay Lake. When the water’s cold, as it was at Lay Lake, lipless baits like the Red-Eye Shad can really be effective … I fished the Red-Eye Shad because when you rip it out of the grass and it shimmies and shakes as it sinks, it actually swims down, instead of dropping like other lipless crankbaits do…. It’s a killer bait.” Available at www.strikeking.com/journal.
The YUM Money Minnows, from www.lurenet.com and tackle dealers, have been attracting a lot of attention from pro bassers. I now have them in my own tackle box and can report great success in using them, especially in the “Sight-Fishing” episodes covered elsewhere in the bass section of this book. I’ve been using the 3 ½-inch version in bluegill colors, but there are plenty of others to choose from. Rig it Texas style with an extra-wide-gap, offset worm hook or a shank-weighted swimbait hook—and make it weedless. The lure has a belly slot. I turn the hook up through it and out the top of the bait, then set the hook lightly into the back to make it weedless. Good instructions for using the weighted hook and getting the lure deeper are on the www.lurenet.com site. My personal use with this lure has me convinced that you’ll catch more bass by using it.
The Strike King Zulu has become one of my favorite lures for fishing weedless in all kinds of bigmouth cover. It’s soft plastic at its best, catching fish and holding up well after the tussles. I rig it with the hook coming out the top and turned to nestle just enough under the back to make it weedless. Buy it at www.basspro.com and many others.
There are times, particularly when flipping, when you want the sinker tight against the worm or soft-plastic lure you’re using, instead of having the sinker slide. You can do this by pegging a toothpick alongside the sinker to hold it against the lure. So many anglers are doing this now that bullet sinkers are available with locking devices to hold it to your plastic bait.
The YUM Dinger worm, from www.lurenet.com, is a hot bass lure everywhere, but pro Tim Horton of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, has come up with a new tactic for using it, according to a report in Field & Stream, May 2006. For flipping, getting the lure down through tangles and limbs, Horton rigs a 5-inch Dinger Texas-style with a 4/0 hook and no weight. He clips off the hook from a ¼- to 
-ounce ball-head jig with a keeper collar, and slips the jig’s collar into the Dinger’s tail. Now the Dinger is ready to dive tail-first down into the big-fish lairs.
It’s really frustrating when schooling bass are tearing the water apart, but they won’t hit your lures. Perhaps the fry they’re on is smaller than you’ve been accustomed to imitating. Drop down in lure size to see if they’ll start hitting.
Clear plastic lures can be effective for schooling bass because the fish don’t see them well enough to tell they’re bogus. Working them fast helps also.
Floating plastic worms, made to stay on top or sink far slower than normal plastic worms, have arrived in bass fishing with a big-bucks bang, winning tournaments here and there and catching bass for anglers who like topwater fishing. Bass Pro Shops, www.basspro.com, carries them in their own brand, the Gambler brand, and two types of floating worms by Berkley Gulp. You should check other sites as well, remembering that not all plastic worms are true floaters. Rig them Texas-style, with a 3/0 light wire hook, a small swivel, and 12 to 15 inches of leader.
Do you know how to skip a floating worm? You should, it’s fun—just like skipping rocks on the water when you were a kid—and you catch lots of bass to boot. Picture a deep, dark lair back under some overhanging trees, or under a dock. The only way you can get a worm in there is to skip it over the water like a fat rock. It’s not hard to do with a floating worm. Practice it on open water until you get the touch. Then start skipping your floating worm back in there where the bass are waiting.
“He who finishes with the most toys wins,” goes the old adage. In modern bass fishing, the toys are endless, from underwater devices to counters on reels to tell you exactly how much line you’ve got out. Throw in some awesome motors and boats strong and fast enough to master both speed and distance over any body of water, and you’ve got a lot of toys to play with on any day’s fishing. Even if you don’t catch a fish, you can have fun with your dials, gauges, and flashing lights.
Be careful not to become the type of bass fisherman who seldom makes good catches because he can’t resist cranking the motor and heading for greener pastures—in other words, playing with his toys. After a few casts in any spot, he announces, “They’re not here. Let’s race on!” And he does.
When you see a fish following your lure as you retrieve, but not moving in for the strike, what do you do? Slow down your retrieve, speed it up? I once asked that question to popular TV fishing and sports personality Grits Gresham. Grits replied, “It doesn’t make a bit of difference. Whichever one you do will be wrong.” Well, there’s a lot of truth in what Grits said, but with heart pounding, and even hands shaking, in anticipation, we’ve just got to do something. Here’s my play: First try slowing down the retrieve. If that doesn’t work, try speeding it up. That’s about all you can do.
“One of the most frequently asked questions thrown my way during guiding is, ‘When do bass first become active in the spring?’ My standard answer for people in the northern states is that bass become active as soon as the water is soft enough for the bait to sink. In the South, it’s as soon as the water temperatures become consistent in the mid to upper 40s.”
—Pro guide Troy Jens, Lake Guntersville, Alabama,
in the article “A Great Spot for Spring,”
on the Web site www.lurenet.com.
“Dragging jigs and bottom draggers at a snail’s pace in deep water is not the answer to big cold-water spring bass. These bass are after shallow baitfish, and my favorite baitfish imitator for these springtime cold-water periods is the Cotton Cordell Super Spot.”
—Pro guide Troy Jens, Lake Guntersville, Alabama
in the article “A Great Spot for Spring,”
on the Web site www.lurenet.com
When bass are staging for the spawn on breaklines from 4 to 8 feet deep, close to deeper water, pro guide Troy Jens of Lake Guntersville, Alabama, likes to go after them with the Cotton Cordell Super Spot. He uses the ½-ounce Super Spot and works it just fast enough to stay above the bottom. One reason he likes the bait is because it can be fished from very slow to super fast. Writing for the Web site www.lurenet.com, Jens says he uses the Super Spot from ice-out through water temperatures in the 40s. “As the water warms into the 50s, I begin fishing the tops of the humps and ledges and I begin moving further back into the creeks.”
Not all plastic worms are real floaters. The genuine floaters are chemically designed and made to resist sinking. They do sink, but very, very slowly, and they ride above the sinker when pulled along the bottom—even when attached to a hook. Make sure you’re getting the real deal, real floating worms.
If the hook you use on a floating worm is too heavy, you’ll be defeating the reason you are using a floater. A 3/0 or 2/0 that’s thin and wire-like should be just right. Drive the hook through the worm, then back it up to make it weedless.
“The … technique for cold water is working a jerkbait over steeply sloping banks in very cold water and long points during a warming trend. Using a Smithwick Rogue or XCalibur Jerkbait or Twitch Bait, make long casts, crank the bait down, and begin a jerk-jerk-pause retrieve. Many pros say that it’s the pause, not the jerks or twitches, that is the key to this technique. Do not get in a hurry. Vary the duration of your pauses from just a second or two to excruciatingly long waits of up to a minute.”
—Lawrence Taylor, www.lurenet.com
Every March, in the first teasing springtime weather, when it was still too cold to catch bass in several places where I lived as a young man, one lure—a yellow Heddon Tadpolly—produced fish almost every afternoon I went out. Working very, very s-l-o-w-l-y in the shallows, the Tadpolly’s enticing wobble brought up springtime lunkers in a way no other lure has ever matched. An old saying goes, “When you find something you really like, buy several, because they’re sure to stop making it.” So true. Today, the Heddon Tadpolly is gone—except on eBay, where it is a popular collector’s item.
“… I am convinced that color is not as important as action.”
—A.D. Livingston, Fishing for Bass:
Modern Tactics and Tackle, Lippincott, 1974
“So far I haven’t been able to make rhyme or reason of why a bass will hit a certain color at a particular time. But that does sometimes seem to be the case. Yet, I wonder.”
—A.D. Livingston, Fishing for Bass:
Modern Tactics and Tackle, Lippincott, 1974
“There are exceptions, but I generally use black (or dark) lures in murky water and shiny lures in clear water. I also tend to use black early and late in the day … shiny when the sun is high and bright, black when fishing deep, and shiny when I am fishing shallow.”
—A.D. Livingston, Fishing for Bass:
Modern Tactics and Tackle, Lippincott, 1974
In his wonderful autobiography, My Life Was THIS BIG and Other True Fishing Tales, Skyhorse Publishing (2008), by Lefty Kreh with Chris Millard, Lefty not only points out the importance of fishing the rocks to catch river smallmouths, he puts a great deal of emphasis on the angle of the cast. Presenting the fly from the wrong side of the rock will not result in strikes because of the unnatural drift of the fly (much the same as in “drag” in presenting trout flies). For instance, a rock with current on both sides will fish better when the cast and the drifting fly are on the same side as the current. A fly cast across the rock to reach the current on the other side usually will not work.
Smallmouth bass have a tendency to sometimes follow a fish you’re playing. When this happens in clear water, you’ll see that you’re on a honey hole and know it’s the place to keep fishing.
When smallmouth bass make some passes at your lure, but don’t hit, drop down to a smaller size lure. You’ll probably get a strike.
When bass are on the feed, searching for food like predators on the prowl, they are, of course, striking out of hunger. But many strikes occur when the bass is just sitting there, finning easily, not feeding at all. A case in point might be a bass lying under a log, or in a stretch of lily pads. A crankbait or other lure that suddenly flashes past sometimes elicits a savage strike that comes out of pure instinct to attack available prey. It’s as if your lure woke up a sleeping bass. It doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, count yourself as fortunate.
Those deep bends, elbows, and sloughs just off the main flow of a river cry out to be fished hard. As Ray Bergman reminds us in Fresh-Water Bass, Knopf (1946): “ … these backwaters are inclined to be somewhat weedy and stumpy with fallen trees helping to foster the feeling of wildness. The situation is enticing … Alluring pockets, deep looking holes, and enchanting little caverns formed by stumps and logs … “
Everybody wants to catch fish on surface lures when they are hitting. The trick is to make those plugs look like fish swimming and feeding on the surface. Working these baits is all a matter of feel. Only the feedback, the muscle memory, of your hands and arms can tell you how it’s done. Here’s Ray Bergman on the subject, from Fresh-Water Bass (1946): “ … you can’t just throw it out, reel it in and expect it to do its stuff. [Chug, splash, bob, wiggle, like live fish.] To do this you jerk hard but use a short movement. One make of lure requires more jerk than another.”
Not all surface plugs are in the plunker and popper variety. Darter plugs, for example, have a deadly up-and-down motion. They should be in your tackle-box right alongside the plunkers. As Ray Bergman says in Fresh-Water Bass (1946): “When this lure is handled correctly with a twitch and pause it acts very much like a crippled or badly injured minnow. That is, it darts slightly under the surface speedily and quickly, and then just as suddenly gives up and comes to rest on the surface.”
Fishing in the big wind can be very tough, not necessarily because the fish aren’t biting, but because the waves and the wind slapping your line and lure make it very difficult to present the bait with the proper action and speed—not to mention getting it into the proper location to start with. Ray Bergman, in Fresh-Water Bass (1946), reminds us we can still catch fish: “I do believe that when you can handle your lure correctly in the wind the fish will take, other factors being equal, regardless of the direction of the wind.”
If you have a few years on you and love bass fishing, you may be familiar with the name Jason Lucas. He was angling editor of Sports Afield magazine from the late 1940s until right at the time when I came to Sports Afield in 1967 as an associate editor. Lucas was gone from the magazine before I had a chance to work with him or meet him, but I was very tuned in to his reputation and work. Ted Kesting, Sports Afield’s editor-in-chief in the mid-1940s, when the magazine was head-quartered in Minneapolis, became acquainted with a man who could catch bass consistently, in all seasons, even in hard-fished waters. And, most importantly, the man could write! Jason Lucas became Angling Editor soon after Kesting discovered him, and built an aura of bassing skill by fishing almost every day—in one case fishing for bass for an entire 365-day straight run. Lucas came along before bass boats and sophisticated electronics. He was a skilled angler, however, with the curiosity to experiment and learn everything about bass fishing he could. Today, the best of his words survive in the book Lucas on Bass Fishing, originally published in 1947 by Dodd, Mead, and Co., and available today at www.amazon.com and other sites in a paperback edition published in 2005. You can find copies of the used original hardcover on the Internet.
“Nearly all of the bottom-feeding fish which bass eat are of a dirty-brown color, with dirty-white or dirty-yellowish bellies. So, as might be expected, a dirty-brown plug often seems to get them down here when nothing else will.”
—Jason Lucas, Lucas on Bass Fishing,
Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1947, reprinted
since
“It is impossible to judge the merits of a lure from looking at it, or seeing its action in the water … There’s but one good way to find out how well they’ll take a certain lure—try it on them!”
—Jason Lucas, Lucas on Bass Fishing,
Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1947, reprinted
since
Among the many pleasures that came my way when I was editor of Sports Afield magazine in the 1970s, none were more intense than working and fishing with Homer Circle, my Angling Editor. “Uncle Homer,” as we all fondly called him, is a man of extraordinary talent and immense kindness. In his 90s as this is being written, Homer has been elected to several angling Halls of Fame. Some of his best articles—and glimpses into his vast knowledge of bass fishing—can be found in the book Bass Wisdom, available in a Lyons Press paperback version from www.amazon.com.
“I watched the large yellow butterfly as it ‘fitted’ along the canal bulkhead 18 inches or so off the surface. I just happened to glance its way as it neared an old dock that emerged from the cement-walled shoreline. The water’s surface erupted and a 3-pound largemouth shot toward the flapping morsel. The bass’ aim was off and it crashed back into its environment, no fuller for its experience. The happening, however, further reinforced my belief that largemouth bass have very good vision. The presence of the airborn butterfly was not detected through the bass’ sense of smell, sound (lateral line), or taste. It was seen … “
—Larry Larsen, Bass Fishing Facts (1989)
The DVD Bigmouth 35 is the thirty-five-year anniversary celebration of the amazing film by Glen Lau from the 1960s. Narrated by no other than Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame, the one-hour film takes you into the world of the bass as you have never seen it before—unless you’re a diver. Lau is also a great angler, and a close buddy of Homer Circle, and you can count on their combined expertise for ideas that will definitely help you catch more bass. Available at www.amazon.com.
As the great Yogi Berra once proclaimed, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” Truer words were never spoken when it comes to largemouth bass fishing. When the water is still and quiet—usually early in the morning or at dusk, especially in late spring or early fall—the sight and sound of minnows on the move mean bass are in attack mode. Those minnows aren’t just playing around. They’re about to be gulped into a bigmouth’s gullet, and they’re trying to leave Dodge. Sometimes you’ll even hear or see the bass slash into the school, or see big swirls. Your tackle should be ready for the next step.
Use a weedless lure when working the lily pads for largemouths.
Your electric motor has just ceased humming, or you’ve carefully laid down your canoe paddle. You’re drifting into the area where you saw or heard minnows on the run, or a bass swirl or strike. Your chosen lure (which we’ll cover in Step Three) is ready. Ahead of you are lily pads, half-sunken logs, or a brush-choked shoreline. Here, in this moment and position, is where most anglers fail. Either they move too aggressively and spook the fish, or they make casts that are too far out in the open water. They’re thinking the bass will come roaring out of the cover and strike. While it’s true that sometimes happens, don’t count on it. The cast must go as close to the cover, or even into it with a weedless bait, as possible. Right here is where casting ability shines. Putting that bait right into every nook and cranny is the key to getting a strike.
There are about a zillion lures that will catch fish in this situation, but I have a couple of favorites, and it’s my book, so here we go: I’m positively in love with two soft-plastic baits in the swimbait or jerk bait category. (No, I do not get them for free. I buy them, like you.) The Mann Hardnose and the Strike King Zulu have been absolute killers for me and my buddies in sight-fishing situations. Actually, they’re good baits all the time. You can swim them and jerk them and expect savage strikes. We fish them with the Texas Rig, minus the sinker for the sight-fishing situations. With the hook embedded properly, they’re virtually weedless. As with other recommendations, check Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s.
Everybody wants to catch bass with topwater lures—and why not? When conditions are right, and bass are feeding on or near the surface, there’s nothing like the explosive strike of an aggressive bass. You can fish topwater lures many ways, including the famous “Walk the Dog” technique of slowly working it over the surface. You can pause it, twitch it, or just let it lie there, waiting. Then slowly move it a foot or so, then pause, wait, and twitch once again. When the strike comes, you will know it!
As stated elsewhere in this book, fishing top water is often a fruitless, fishless exercise in futility. When the bass just aren’t feeding on the surface, all you will get up there is casting practice.
When the time and conditions are right for top-water fishing, the seven lures featured here are the ones you can absolutely count on to get strikes. Yes, there are others, endless numbers of them, and if you’re willing to experiment, you’ll probably find a new favorite or two among them. But these are my topwater best bets. I have seen them in action and witnessed them being used by many expert anglers. There are many topwater lures out there that are far less expensive than these. Quite frankly, in my opinion, they are not as good. These are the best. Fish them and have fun!
An absolute killer bait from the famous maker of wooden lures. This was Rapala’s first-ever topwater lure, and it’s a great one. The plastic cupped lip produces a “spitting” action. An assortment of color finishes, 2 to 2 ¾ inches, at $7.99 from Cabela’s as this is written. The Skitter Pop will catch both largemouth and smallmouth bass wherever they swim. Available at www.cabelas.com.
Moving down in price to $4.99 from Bass Pro Shops is this popular plastic bait, aka “The Pop-R King.” Many good anglers who don’t want to fork over the extra buck for the wooden Rapala fish the Rebel Pop-R. In four color finishes, at 2 ½ inches, the Pop-R is a lure you can count on. Available at www.basspro.com.
A favorite for decades—because it works. When the Hula Popper doesn’t get strikes from surface feeders, you’re probably in for a very slow day of surface action. You can pop it, walk it, let it rest, and tremble it. It comes in a variety of finishes. Costs $4.99 at Cabela’s.
Created in 1920, the Lucky 13 has been catching bass ever since. Today’s versions, the Lucky 13 (3 ¾ inches) and Baby Lucky 13 (2 
inches), produce resonating sound and a weaving body action for a variety of gamefish, especially bass. Cabela’s lists both at $4.99. Fish the Baby version for smallmouths.
This lure has been a mainstay in the tackleboxes of bass addicts for decades. The back-and-forth, plodding, popping action represents live prey struggling, and bass on the feed gobble it with fury. It costs $4.69 to $4.99, and comes in 2- and 3-inch sizes, in a variety of colors. As with several other topwater baits, failure to get strikes with a Jitterbug does not bode well for your surface fishing that day.
Heddon’s Zara Spook was one of the first—if not the first—topwater, Walk the Dog lures. It’s still catching fish today, and costs $4.99 at Cabela’s. The Super Spook is an upgraded version of the Zara, and at $4.99 is a solid choice for a variety of fish. The Spook Jr. is also $4.99 and is the choice for smallmouths and picky largemouths.
Ready to spend $10 for a single lure? If you’re really hungry for topwater action, and nothing else seems to work, the Lucky Craft Sammy might save your day. At $9.99 (on sale) and $13.99 to $15.99 regularly priced (Cabela’s), the Lucky Craft Sammy has a lot of new technology going for it and consistently gets strikes. If you can afford it, and are not afraid of losing it to a big fish or submerged log, give it a try. Comes in a variety of colors, 2 ½ to 4 inches.
“Always match your hook size to the head diameter of the soft-plastic bait you’re using. Example: On an 8-inch plastic worm use either a size 4/0 or 5/0 hook; on a 4-inch worm, a size 1/0 to 2/0 hook.”
—Bill Dance, IGFA’s 101 Freshwater Fishing
Tips and Tricks, Skyhorse Publishing, 2007
In his book IGFA’s 101 Freshwater Fishing Tips and Tricks, Skyhorse (2007), bass guru Bill Dance described his favorite strategy for coping with windy days. He uses heavier jigs and lighter line. With the wind causing you to have poor control of your drifting boat, the faster your bait gets down, the better. “Seconds can make the difference in success or failure,” Dance says.
J.B. Kasper’s outdoor column in the Trenton Times (N.J.) is always excellent, but he hit a home run with readers in his piece on July 31, 2009. Kasper described his annual trip to New York’s legendary Thousand Island area. Arriving at Caiger’s Country Inn, in Rockport on the Canadian side, where he has always enjoyed great fishing, Kasper found high water and lower water temps (low 70s in shallow water) that made the fishing in shallow water very poor. “It became evident,” Kasper says, “after about two hours that the bass simply were not there. A switch to fishing jig-plastic bait combination of 20- to 30-foot drop-offs off rocky points put us into fish.” Kasper used jig-heads dressed with hellgrammites and Slugos. “Swimming plugs and crankbaits were ineffective, mainly because we could not get them down to where the fish were holding.”
In these pages, you hear so much about fishing soft-plastic lures directly in the cover that you may get tired of hearing about it. But it’s the truth: Soft-plastics, rigged weedless, plunked into and fished directly in the weeds, sticks, and pads, catch the bass. You can, however, still catch bass on the old standby surface baits like Smithwick’s Devil’s Horse, with props fore and aft, by working it on the edges of cover at dawn’s early light. Baitfish leave deep water to forage in the weeds and cover at night, returning to the deep after dawn. If you’re going to fish the edges, dawn is the time to do it. And the Devil’s Horse, or lures like it, should produce some action.
That’s what Field & Stream magazine in June 2008 called the tactic that won pro Scott Suggs the big prize in the 2007 Forrest Wood Cup at Lake Ouachita in Arkansas. As reported by Bill Heavey, Suggs yo-yoed spinnerbaits just above the thermocline. In summer, bass often drop down to the cooler layer of water just above the thermocline. The thermocline is where the water is much colder but lacks oxygen. Just above the thermocline, bass can suspend in water that’s cooler than the surface areas and still have plenty of oxygen. To find the thermocline, you need to get a high-tech depth finder, call a local dive shop (if there is one), or note carefully the depths where you’re finding fish. You won’t make a million bucks, but you’ll catch more bass.
Of all the excellent articles and blogs available on the B.A.S.S. site at www.sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/index, Charlie Hartley’s Bass Wars—found directly as this is written on www.sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/news/story?page=b_blog_Hartley_2009—has become one of my favorites. A successful businessman in Ohio with his Signcom, Inc., designing, manufacturing, and installing commercial signs, Hartley hits the tournament circuits hard and shares his experiences on the B.A.S.S. site. His articles are archived, so you can see them all, from 2008 on. He is sponsored by Venom Lures, www.venomlures.com. Hartley led the first day of the 2009 Bassmaster Classic and became something of an instant celebrity in bass fishing. Hartley knows bass, and he knows bass fishing tournament competition, and he shares what he knows brilliantly. You will not only enjoy reading Hartley, whether you are interested in tournaments or not, you will end up catching more and bigger bass.
In his excellent blog www.richlindgren.com, tournament angler Rich Lindgren shares both his skills and accounts of the competitions. He is an observant, serious angler with lots to say. In a report on the on-going trend toward using “bleeding” baits and red hooks, he said, “Granted some of these bleeding baits are a little overdone, but the adding of red coloring and bleeding spots is a trend that is not going away soon. In general I am a big fan of sprucing up my baits with touches of red…. I think the red hook gives the fish a target, so if you have a red hook on the front, you hook more fish on the front hook.”
Sharing his further thoughts on red hooks, veteran tournament angler Rich Lindgren, in his blog, www.richlindgren.com, says he feels adding red hooks and touches of red on lures triggers strikes from bass that are only following and then turning away at the last instant. He adds red to not only crankbaits and topwater lures, but to spinnerbaits, buzzbaits, and jigs as well. You can add red hooks and colors to your favorite existing baits. “All in all,” says Lindgren, “the color red is not going to make you an instant pro, but it can turn a good day into a great day and get you those extra bites … “
One of my favorite titles from old issues of Sports Afield was “Fake Frogs Are Fine.” Like many other bass anglers, I have always been fascinated by frog imitations, spinning, bait-casting, and fly fishing. They look so real! How can any bass resist them? Well, in my own case, they resisted them with no problem. Most frog imitations just haven’t paid off for me. I keep trying, though, and now, surfing the Web, I find that Bass Pro Shops—www.basspro.com—has a new entry in the race for the world’s most realistic frog imitation. It’s the Tru-Tungsten Mad Maxx Frog, so real it looks like it’s about to jump through my computer screen. It costs a hefty $8.49 a pop. Will it catch bass? Well, if looks could kill …
Wading wet, doing without waders, makes a lot of sense in high summer on smallmouth rivers and creeks (and even some trout rivers). At first you might be a little cold, but you’ll quickly adjust to the conditions and find a certain freedom of motion you lack with waders. You’ll need good wading shoes, of course.
A cast that lands more than a foot away from bass cover is a wasted cast.
When fishing rivers for bass, especially big rivers, the periods after heavy rains when the water is falling ultrafast will often cause the bass to move out into the depths and suspend. They’ll stay there until the flow stabilizes.
“Oxygen content is far more important than water temperature in locating fish during August and early September. Bass are willing to endure water temperatures in the high 80s providing there is ample oxygen.”
—Mark Sosin, “How to Read Bass Water You’ve
Never Fished,” Sports Afield, April 1975
“Certain banks will have ample oxygen, while others won’t hold enough to support life. You can work down a bank and read three parts per million on an oxygen meter. Then, only a quarter mile away, the meter will show eight or ten parts per million on the same bank. That’s where the fish will be and it may only last for 100 yards or so. Once you run out of oxygen, you must locate the next zone.”
—Mark Sosin, “How to Read Bass Water You’ve
Never Fished,” Sports Afield, April 1975
Deep-jigging for smallmouths is always a reliable tactic, but don’t forget to take the trouble to add a second jig to your line. Fish a heavier jig on the end of your line, with a lighter jig of another color attached to a dropper about 18 inches up the line. A Perfection Loop Knot will work nicely for the dropper, or some other type if you have a favorite. Don’t be surprised to find yourself battling a pair of smallmouths at times. Sometimes a hooked bass creates a frenzy among its mates in a school.
The Ohio company Venom Lures (www.venomlures.com) offers an excellent array of largemouth and smallmouth lures and accessories. They also sponsor B.A.S.S. professional Charley Hartley, whose blog on the B.A.S.S. site at www.sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/index is one of the best around. I especially like Venom’s Drop Shot Minnows. The 4-inch model is my favorite.
In a revealing article in Sports Afield in December 1971, Angling Editor Homer Circle went to great lengths to show readers that bass actually do not strike a lure, they suck it in, even when they’re taking topwater baits. Armed with this knowledge, you should have better feel and touch fishing plastic worms.
Homer Circle continues on how bass strike: “ … when a bass decides to take an object into its mouth, it does not have to seize it like a dog. Instead, it only has to get close to the object, open its mouth, and simultaneously fare its gill flaps in a pumping action. Instantly, water rushes into the bass’s mouth and out the gill vents, literally sucking the object into the bass’s mouth.”
In his article on how bass strike, in the December 1971 issue of Sports Afield, Homer Circle went on to explain how the fact that bass suck in their prey should affect your action on setting the hook on a plastic worm: “When a bass takes such a free-sinking worm, it nearly always sucks it all in. Therefore, you can stop all this guesswork about how long to let a bass run. He’s got worm, hook, and part of the line in his mouth. All you have to do is reel the slack out of your line so you can bust him. And do it now, later can be too late!”
What’s going on when you feel a bass has picked up your worm, yet you set the hook on nothing but water? Chances are the bass simply grabbed the tail end of the worm to keep it from moving away, then dropped it as you tightened the line. The fish never sucked the worm into its mouth, because the angler kept it moving away too quickly.
In the spring, as the water temps rise into the 50s at midday and during the afternoon, you should get more strikes from fish moving into warmer waters. On a cold morning when fishing is slow, if the water temps are slowly climbing, you can reasonably look forward to afternoon action. Don’t go home at lunch.
Reporting in his blog from Falcon Lake, Texas, in early February 2008, veteran pro Charley Hartley described the rewards of fishing bass as they are staging for the spawn. “ … they’re biting jigs thrown right into the bushes off the secondary points. The bass are staged on the last turn in front of the spawning bays. And when I mean staged, I mean they’re everywhere. Like I said, they’re hitting jigs today, but to tell you the truth they’d probably hit just about anything you throw in there. They’re hungry and not at all shy.”
—Charley Hartley’s Bass Wars,
February 5, 2008 on the B.A.S.S. site at
www.sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/index
Live bait—such as shiners, minnows, and even sunfish—are such a deadly attractor to bass for two important reasons. First, and most obvious, is the fact that they are the real prey bass are accustomed to feeding on. But equally important, and often overlooked by anglers who use them in open water, these live baits swim into and underneath thick pads and cover where big bass lurk and lures never go.
If you are fortunate enough to locate a hole where a big bass resides, your surest way to get the lunker will be using a live sunfish. Not too big, not too small, a 4-incher is about right. Hook it up top, at the dorsal fin, with a Number 6. Feed out line to let the bait swim into the hole … then wait.
Picking the right hook size for the plastic worm you’re using is simple. Basically, it’s big worm, big hook; small worm, small hook. For a 7- to 8-inch worm, a 3/0 or 4/0 hook will be just right, while a 1/0 will be too small and a 6/0 too big. For a 5- to 6-inch worm, use a 2/0 hook. For finesse worms under 5 inches, use 1 and 1/0. Now all you have to do is to make sure they’re sharp.
The thought of losing the expensive swim baits so popular with western bass anglers is downright scary. To make sure your Huddleston Deluxe Trout Lure is rigged properly go to www.bassresource.com and check out the detailed, step-by-step article and photos by “Fish Chris” Wolfgram, under the “Articles” and “Bass Lure Techniques” sections.
“Crankbait addicts can be so pleased with their big-lipped, deep-diving lures that they sometimes forget the effectiveness of lipless or super-shallow crankbaits,” says Don Wirth in his basspro.com article “The Inside Scoop on Super-Shallow Crankbaits.” Baits like Mann’s 1-Minus and the Bomber Square A are deadly swimming slowly through patches of water in or alongside tight cover.
Wirth continues on the same subject, “You’re probably thinking, ‘Run a $6 crankbait through a brushpile? No way!’ But a properly presented super-shallow diver is a deadly alternative to a jig or spinnerbait in this snaggy cover.” He recommends using a short, under-handed pitch past the brushpile or other cover, then, “ … reel s-l-o-w-l-y until you feel the bait contact the cover.” Stop your retrieve the instant the bait touches something, and it will float upward, clearing the obstruction. Start retrieving again and hang on for action.
“Clip the leading hook from each set of the trebles on your crankbaits to reduce snagging in tight cover.”
—Don Wirth, “The Inside Scoop on Super-Shallow Crankbaits,”
www.basspro.com
One of my favorite Web sites for bass articles and products has become Jim Porter’s Guide to Bass Fishing, www.stickmarsh.com. The site has innovative lures for bass and panfish, and Porter’s articles are solid with experience and usable information.
Be aware that those pretty and expensive bass lures that tempt you in the shops and catalogs aren’t overnight creations. The lure business is highly competitive, and much research and testing goes into every creation. Every curve and shape, every ounce of weight, affects the way the bait will swim.
There are so many crankbaits out there that choosing a winner can be a bit confusing. They may all look the same, but the bill makes the difference. Long bills dive deeper, wide bills give more side-to-side action, and rounded bills give a steady wiggle.
You can’t expect a long-billed crankbait, designed to dive and fish deep, to perform well for you in a shallow-water patch of weeds. Every lure has a purpose, a job to do. Think about that before you tie one on and put it to work. What, exactly, do you want it to do in the existing conditions to catch fish?
Before you tie on a lure, figure out exactly what you want it to do.
In his excellent blog, Jim Porter’s Guide to Bass Fishing at www.stickmarsh.com, in an article on fishing soft-plastic jerkbaits, Porter debunks theories that bass spit out plastic baits: “ … Unless you scare the bass with a sudden jerk on the line or letting him pull the line too tight, a bass normally WILL NOT drop that soft-plastic lure. It doesn’t LOOK, SMELL, nor TASTE like real food to the bass. But if he thinks it is trying to get away in some manner, he just won’t let go.” Porter goes on to describe how to fish his company’s soft jerk-bait, the “RIPPIN’ Stick.”
Saltwater anglers know all about sea anchors and drift socks to hold their boats better in the tides and currents. Savvy bass anglers know about them too—and use them to cut down on the drift in strong winds. Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops have them.
There’s one important thing to remember when you’re an experienced largemouth angler heading out for smallmouth for the first time: downsizing! With few exceptions, lures for smallmouths are smaller than your favorite largemouth baits.
In the BASSlog Blog, where he keeps tabs on things like moon phases and best lures of the pros, B.A.S.S. pro Richie White reports that favorite soft-plastic colors are green pumpkin, watermelon, and watermelon/red fleck. Other good choices are black/blue, junebug, black, red shad, and blue fleck. For diving crankbaits, the leaders are shad, baby bass, blue/chartreuse, white, firetiger, and green/orange. Shad is the best color for jerkbaits. Check out White’s BASSlog at www.sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/index.
In his wonderful and now-mellow book, Fresh-Water Bass, Knopf (1946), the legendary Ray Bergman describes experiences when he learns that largemouth bass wise up to certain lures. He was using a white surface plug in a week’s fishing, and each day his catch became smaller and smaller and finally stopped altogether. His companion suggested going to live bait. “But I didn’t want to fish with live bait. I wanted to fish with plugs. I put on a green underwater one and used that, and I started to catch bass again. This seems to show clearly that these bass had become wise to the white plug.”
“For Lake Erie smallmouths, there is one over-whelming choice: the goby. Gobies are nonnative fish that were introduced into the Great Lakes from the discharge of ballast water by ocean-going vessels. These fish are small but voracious feeders and are outcompeting many native species, such as perch, for food. On the positive side, the goby has created a tremendous forage base for smallmouth bass and the brown fish are bigger and badder because of it.”
—Tony Hansen, “Drop-Shotting Smallmouth
Bass,” on the Bass Pro Shop Outdoor Library,
www.basspro.com
Bluegill and crappie anglers are sometimes surprised when the tug on their line turns out to be a hard-pulling, fighting largemouth bass in the 1- to 2-pound class. When bluegill fishing, you can make this unexpected treat happen more often by using a single earthworm hooked right through the middle. Set your float to let your worm dangle at various depths, and you’ll catch a bass. I don’t know why this single-worm trick works, but it does.
Lake Erie is, without a doubt, one of the greatest smallmouth destinations in the world. Some say it’s the absolute greatest. It’s big water, so you have a lot of planning and preparation to do, but the resources for the fishing—guides, lodges, tackle shops—are all there.
While bass will sometimes strike lures the instant they hit the surface—and even grab them right out of the air—most bass-fishing experts put their faith in letting their surface plug or bug rest on the water a few moments before starting the retrieve. The theory is that the bait splashing down will frighten fish in the immediate vicinity, even make them swim off some distance. Let the bait sit until well after the ripples spread away and die out completely, then give the bait a twitch. Then do some more twitching. Then, as you retrieve, try slow crawls with wiggles, violent jerks and pops, or whatever seems to be working.
“He [the plastic worm expert] knows by the delicate sense of feel that he has discovered which type of bottom cover his worm or eel is dragging over. That’s right, he can tell by the feeble feel transmitted by his line what substances—hard, soft, tall, short, or snaggy—his lure is approaching, in, or coming off of.”
—Homer Circle, Sports Afield Fishing Annual, 1972
“ … all fishermen who crawl worms and eels over bottom cover will tell you their biggest bass, and most of their bass, grab the lure immediately after they feel it crawl over and drop off a branch, weed, log or other obstruction.”
—Homer Circle, Sports Afield Fishing Annual, 1972
Doug Hannon isn’t called The Bass Professor for nothing. He has spent his life studying and catching largemouth bass in general, but specializing in big bass—really big bass, the 12- and 15-pounders. You see Doug on various TV fishing programs, but his headquarters is his Web site, www.bassprofessor.com. You can learn a heck of a lot about bass fishing by visiting with Doug there, including all the info on his Snake lures that catch monster bass and the new spinning reel he has developed that eliminates those troublesome loops that can mess up your fishing. Doug also has a terrific book, written with W. Horace Carter. It’s called Hannon’s Big Bass Magic, and you can get it from Doug’s site and places like www.amazon.com. I bought the book and have devoured every page with great relish.
The Bass Professor, Doug Hannon, is a firm believer in the contradictory viewpoint that bass feed more in the day than they do after dark, but that the average angler will catch more and bigger bass by fishing late and at night. Behind Doug’s belief is this logic explained in his book, Hannon’s Big Bass Magic: “The darkness covers up an angler’s presence and, most of all, his mistakes … I feel that bass have long since become conditioned to the fact that man spells danger. My studies show that only one in ten bass which sees a lure will strike it and that one makes a mistake … At night … close inspection is more difficult for a fish, and he may strike without any investigation.”
“ … I am convinced that lunar influences have a big impact on bass and also that they will strike more frequently on those nights when the moon comes up in the evening before the sun goes down.”
—Doug Hannon, Hannon’s Big Bass Magic
In his book Hannon’s Big Bass Magic, Doug Hannon says that studies of world record catches in the 1970s revealed a definite correlation with his favorite moon phases to fish. Those are the three days on each side of a full moon and dark moon. It’s interesting to note that these same moon phases are the favorite of legendary angler Stu Apte, who discusses them in another section of this book.
Sometimes it’s possible to ignore a lake that’s close to your home, simply because it looks as if it’s harboring too much activity. But when you really consider the people using the lake, and come to realize that they’re mostly swimmers, kayakers, sailboaters, and float tubers—not fishermen—you may find you’ve got a good fishing spot all to yourself. Not on weekends, but during the week, especially at dawn.
“The trick in fishing tidal waters is to fish the right spot at the right time. Mostly, the bass turn on when the tide first starts to move. It doesn’t make any difference if the water’s rising or falling, just so it’s moving.”
—Charley Hartley’s Bass Wars,
March 28, 2009, on the B.A.S.S. site at
www.sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/index
“The water will move first near the mouth of a creek or bay. Fish there for a few minutes and then, when the bite drops off, go back further into the tributary and fish another spot as the water starts to move. If you’re quick you can fish several places that way every time the tide moves.”
—Charley Hartley’s Bass Wars,
March 28, 2009, on the B.A.S.S. site at
www.sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/index
Mark Hicks, in an article “Carolina Rigging,” Bass Times Tips and Tools, November, 2008, reports that “Jared Lintner, an Elite Series pro from Arroyo Grande, California, regards the Carolina-style setup as a search bait.” Lintner won several tournaments fishing California lakes to depths of 60 feet with a ¾-ounce Carolina Rig matched with a 6-inch PowerBait Lizard, “Now,” reports Hicks, “Lintner’s favorite setup is 20-pound-test fluorocarbon line, a ¾-ounce tungsten sinker, two 8mm glass beads, and a 3/0 Gamakatsu hook knotted to the end of a 3- to 4-foot-long, 8- or 10-pound-test fluorocarbon leader.”
The swimbait surge is one of the latest bass-fishing buzzwords, resounding from tackleshops to boats, coast to coast. These are realistic-looking, mostly soft-plastic designs made to swim in fresh or salt water. They are among the more expensive lures (some of them very expensive), and if they didn’t catch bass and win tournaments you would not be hearing so much about them. Both Cabela’s, www.cabelas.com, and Bass Pro Shops, www.basspro.com, offer good selections.
The swimbait lure option has spread across the nation like wildfire, and the Western-oriented site www.swimbaitnation.com makes the most of it with articles and reports from pros and amateurs on using swim-baits. In the clear waters of the West, a lot of bassers have caught onto the fact that bass love eating stocked trout. There are swimbait trout imitations that cost a bundle (how about $40 to $50 for the Huddleston Trout or the Baitsmith Magnum Trout?) but catch big bass and win tournaments. One of the sites mentioned for these swimbaits is www.basstackledept.com. The hunt is on to break George Perry’s World Record (22 pounds, 4 ounces).
A lot of good fishing information and tips related to California fishing is available on the site www.calfishing.com.
Bassmaster Elite pro Jeff Kriet has earned a great reputation for his deep-water results in lakes like Kentucky, Oneida, and Clarks Hill. He fishes with quite an arsenal, but in particular likes drop-shot fishing and shakey-head worm fishing. Kriet has lately been cashing in (literally) on using his shakey-head techniques with the worm of his own development. It’s the Jeff Kriet Squirrel Tail Worm, sold on www.bigbitebaits.com. What’s unique about Kriet’s worm is the thin, limber tail that literally dances every time the shakey head is pulled or bumps something. Kriet combines the worm with his Big Bite Shakey Head Jig, 
-ounce 75 percent of the time and the rest. See the article “Shakey Details Matter,” according to Kriet on www.bassfan.com.
© Pat Ford 2010
This largemouth hit a jig worked along a mild dropoff.
I have run the details of Col. Dave Harbour’s favorite, shallow-water worm rig in several magazines, and I have fished the rig with great success in varying waters—from northern smallmouths to southern swamp bigmouths. Here’s the rig, what Harbour called “The Super Rig”: Start with a soft 6-inch, straight-tail purple worm, such as Crème’s Wiggle Worm, Dave’s worm of choice. Hook two No. 5 or 7 black snap swivels together, then add a leader of 14 inches the same test as your line. The worm is not hooked Texas-style; instead, thread the hook from the head deep into the body, then out, leaving the body pushed up over the eye of the hook. This gives the worm a humped position that really works.
If you haven’t given drop-shot fishing a try yet, you’re missing out on a great fishing technique. The variations on the technique are many, and you can have a lot of fun experimenting with them. Right here, however, I will keep it simple and explain a basic rig that will catch bass—not to mention walleyes and panfish—wherever you fish. Basically the rig is another wrinkle in the “Bottoms-Up” fishing trend. At the end of your line is a tungsten weight, say ¼ or 
ounce, hooked to the line with a snap swivel so you can change the weight as the depth demands. Tied with a Palamar knot 12 inches or so up the line is a No. 2 Wide Gap hook. Put your worm or jig on that hook, and you’re in business. You can add a swivel above the hook if you wish. Hook your worm through the nose or through the body wacky-style. Drop it straight down and jig it, pull it along the bottom, experiment until you find what’s working.
Over the years, TV personality and celebrity angler Bill Dance has frequently recommended fishing a Texas-rigged plastic worm. He likes darker color worms early and late, and transparent worms in the middle of the day. He fishes the worm by letting it drop to the bottom, then pulling on the worm by raising the rod from a 45-degree angle to vertical. Then he reels up the slack. The worm is “pulled” with the rod, not reeled. Reeling is only for taking up slack.
In tournament fishing, catching lots of bass doesn’t matter. It’s the total weight of your five fish at weighin time that puts you in the money. For most of us anglers, a 2-pound bass is a nice fish. But in the vast majority of tournaments, catching five 2-pounders isn’t going to be good enough. You’ve got to turn your back on those spots and find bigger fish most of the time. As in all fishing, there’s no such thing in tournaments as “all the time.”
© Pat Ford 2010
Grassy, brushy shorelines are always good spots for bass.
Some tournament anglers, in the frenzy of competition, don’t have the time to find bass on their own. Their strategy is to find where other boats are fishing and join the party. The next time you’re on the water, keep an eye out for congregations of boats. If you’re not catching fish where you are, then get over there!
Dreaming of becoming a professional bass angler, competing in tournaments for big bucks (and perhaps even making it to the Classic and winning a bundle)? Well, before you do something foolish like quitting your job or taking out a second mortgage on your house, read the blog where one of the best professionals tells it like it is—costs, sponsors, the hard work, the “real” rewards. We’re talking about Charley Hartley’s Bass Wars blog, archived on the B.A.S.S. site at www.sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/index. In his reports of September 10, 18, and 28, 2008, and October 2, 2008, Hartley gives the clearest, no-nonsense look at the realities of turning pro of any site we’ve seen. No matter whether he is writing advice on tournaments or simply giving you tips on lures and strategies, Hartley is worth reading every time he posts a new report.
© Pat Ford 2010
Some tools of the trade.
“Let me make something clear: I have never—not once in thirty years—tried to discourage anyone from turning professional and following their dream. I followed mine and wouldn’t expect any less from anyone else. But there are financial consequences to the decisions we make.”
—Charley Hartley’s Bass Wars,
October 2, 2008 on the B.A.S.S. site at
www.sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/index
“So, when you analyze your skills realize that there are thousands of club champions and hundreds of anglers who have won big charity tournaments. Lots of guys can catch bass. That’s not the test. The test is skill coupled with fanatical perseverance, a single-minded purpose, a love of the sport, and the marketing ability to make it all work financially.”
—Charley Hartley’s Bass Wars,
October 2, 2008 on the B.A.S.S. site at
www.sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/bassmaster/index
Bass fishing is more complicated than fishing for sunfish or crappie, partly because of all the different types of bass tackle and lures. Bass are still members of the sunfish family, however, and they share certain behavior characteristics with bluegill and crappie. Anywhere you’re likely to catch these latter fish, you’re apt to find bass, since they all hold around the same types of structure.
Let’s begin with the simplest technique. You can catch bass on a long cane or fiberglass pole, but you need a stronger pole than you used on bluegill, and your line should be at least 12-pound test.
Tie on a slip-bobber rig with the bobber set at around 3 feet. Use a 1/0 or 2/0 steel hook. Add a light sinker 6 inches up from the hook. Then bait this rig with a gob of nightcrawlers or a live minnow hooked through the back.
Drop your line near likely fish-holding spots, but don’t leave it in one place for more than 2–3 minutes. If a bass is there, it’ll usually take the bait. When you get a bite, wait for the bobber to disappear before setting the hook. Then pull the fish quickly to the surface and land it.
When using the long-pole method, work your way around the pond, being careful not to let the fish see you. They are skittish when they’re in shallow water, and they’ll spook easily.
While this long-pole method is a good one, most experienced fishermen go after pond bass with casting or spinning tackle and artificial lures. Casting allows you to reach targets farther away and also to cover more water. Many artificial lures will catch pond bass, but my three favorites are topwaters, spinnerbaits and plastic worms.
Try topwaters early in the morning, late in the afternoon or at night (during summer). Use topwaters when the sky is overcast, especially when the surface is calm. In warmer months, I prefer poppers and propeller baits that make a lot of noise and attract bass from a distance. In early spring, I like a quieter floating minnow.
Sometimes you have to wade right into cover to reach the big ones.
Cast topwaters close to weeds, beside logs, along dams or anywhere you think bass might be holding. Cast past a particular object, then work the bait up to where you think the fish are. Allow the bait to rest motionless for several seconds, then twitch it just enough to cause the slightest ripple on the water. This is usually when the strike comes!
If a spot looks good, but you don’t get a strike, cast back to it several times. Sometimes when bass are “inactive” (aren’t feeding), you have to arouse their curiosity or agitate them into striking, and repeat casts may do this.
At times, though, bass just won’t strike a surface lure. If you don’t get any action on a topwater lure in 15 minutes, switch to a spinnerbait and try the same area. Keep your retrieve steady, and try different speeds (fast, medium, slow). You might try try “fluttering” the bait— allowing it to sink momentarily after it runs past a log, treetop or other cover. This can trigger a strike from a bass that’s following the lure during a steady retrieve.
Don’t be afraid to retrieve a spinnerbait through brush and weeds. If you keep reeling while it’s coming through cover, this lure is virtually weedless. You may hang occasionally (use strong line with these baits so you can pull them firee), but you’ll get more strikes by fishing the thick stuff.
Plastic worms are what I call “last resort baits.” Bass can usually be coaxed into striking worms when they won’t hit other lures, and plastic worms can be worked slower and through the thickest cover. They’re also good for taking bass in deep water. Plastic worms are top prospects for midday fishing in hot weather.
For pond bass, use a 4-7 ½-inch plastic worm rigged Texas-style with a 1/16 -¼ oz. sliding sinker. (The heavier sinker is for deeper water.) Cast it right into cover or close to it. (Make sure the point of the hook is embedded inside the worm.) Then crawl it slowly through the cover, lifting it with the rod tip, then allowing it to settle back to the bottom.
A spinnerbait is a super-productive lure for catching bass in ponds and small lakes. This is an easy lure to use. Simply cast it and reel back with a steady, medium-paced retrieve. Most strikes come around cover where bass hide to watch for prey.
When fishing lily pads, brush or other thick vegetation, cast to openings and pockets. Cast off points, ends of weedbeds or riprap, and corners of piers. These are places where bass are likely to hang.
If you don’t get action in the shallows, and you suspect the bass are deeper, it’s time to change tactics. Since you can’t see underwater, you must locate structure by interpreting what you can from the surface. Find a gully feeding into the shallow end of the pond. Then try to imagine how this gully runs along the pond bottom, and cast your plastic worm along it. This can be prime bass-holding structure.
A second deep-water strategy is to cast a plastic worm into the deep end or along the dam, then crawl it back up the bank. The third option is to simply walk along the bank and cast at random, hoping you’ll locate bass along some unknown structure under the water. In all cases, however, it’s very important to allow your plastic worm to sink to bottom before starting your retrieve. When casting to deep spots, if you get a bite or catch a fish, cast back to that same spot several more times. Bass often school together in deep water.
There are other baits you might use in special situations. Many ponds have heavy weedbeds or lily pads. You can fish them with a topwater spoon that wobbles over plants and attracts bass lying underneath. Leadhead jigs tipped with a plastic trailer (grub, craw-fish, etc.) can be hopped across bottom when searching deep-water areas. Diving crankbaits are good for random casting into deep spots.
A variety of lures can be used to catch stream bass and smaller panfish. Spinners, diving crankbaits, topwater minnows and plastic worms and tubes are all deadly on fish that inhabit small moving waters.
Smallmouth bass eat insects and baitfish just like trout, and you can fish for them with your standard trout flies. But that’s not as effective and certainly not as much fun as getting them to chase bigger bugs. A small-mouth’s number one prey is crayfish; thus any streamer with lots of action and stuff wiggling at all angles to look like the claws and legs of a crayfish will drive them wild. Bead-Head Woolly Buggers with rubber legs, Yellow Muddler Minnows, and patterns with rabbit strips all appeal to smallmouths. Throw in a few patterns that look more like a baitfish, such as a Clouser Minnow or a White Zonker, and you’ll have the streamers covered.
Another favorite smallmouth food is the hell-grammite, a large black larva of the dobsonfly. A black Woolly Bugger or large black stonefly nymph with rubber legs will do for them. Fish these dead drift, with or without a strike indicator, especially on days when smallmouths aren’t aggressive and inclined to chase streamers.
The Woolly Bugger is one of the best flies for river small-mouths.
Don’t rule out surface poppers, though. Small-mouths will investigate small bass bugs, often hanging back for a full minute before smashing them, but there is nothing more thrilling than catching a frisky small-mouth bass on a bug. Even if you come upon a small-mouth sipping delicate mayflies on the surface, you can often convince it to go for a bigger mouthful and inhale a bass bug that is ten times the size of the mayflies it’s eating. And there is no better surface bug for small-mouths than the cone-shaped chartreuse popper with rubber legs known as a Sneaky Pete.
Smallmouth Bass
It’s silly to wait for a trip to Montana or Alaska to enjoy some fly fishing. Anglers who have fished throughout the world still thrill to the dawn rise of a largemouth bass to a popper in a suburban golf course pond. And the many species of sunfish swirl eagerly to small poppers and regulation troutflies, making you feel like a hero. I would be willing to bet there is a pond within five miles of your house that holds some bass and panfish, no matter where you live. Even the ponds in Central Park are packed with eager bass and panfish just waiting to inhale a fly.
Here’s how to find one: Pick the pond closest to your house that is reasonably accessible. (“No fishing” signs on golf course ponds are only meant to be obeyed during the day, and dawn raids on these places will evoke thrills you forgot when you reached puberty.) When spring flowers begin to bloom (this might be March in Florida or May in North Dakota), begin scouting the shoreline for saucer-shaped nests made by bass and panfish as they clean a place on the bottom prior to laying eggs. The spots typically show up as a light spot or a clean area of gravel in an otherwise muddy bottom. Now you know fish live there. Catching them is simply a matter of trying a small surface bug or a size 10 Hare’s Ear Nymph.
Chances are you won’t have to travel far to find a pond filled with bass or sunfish.
After spawning is over in a few weeks, the fish will stay close to the shallows, but in midsummer they might spend most of their time deeper, in the middle of the pond. But don’t worry. They still come close to shore to feed at dawn and dusk, when you can sneak in without getting caught.
Small Fry - Largemouth Bass
You can catch largemouth and smallmouth bass anywhere the Bassmaster folks can catch them with conventional tackle, but you probably won’t bother, because catching bass with a fly sometimes involves fishing a sinking line in twenty feet of water. Most of us prefer to catch our bass on the surface or close to it, where we can fish a floating line. Casting and picking up a floating line is a pleasure instead of a chore. Bass ambush their prey, so when fishing for them in shallow water you will seldom find them far from dense weed beds, logjams, piles of big rocks, or docks. Large-mouths prefer dense mats of lily pads, cattails, and other aquatic weeds, and they will be in the weeds, not just close to them. A weedless fly helps. Sometimes they won’t move more than a few inches from their ambush point, so you should cast right into the nasty stuff. Smallmouths prefer rocky bottoms. Look for them close to submerged logs and large boulders, especially close to a place where shallow water quickly drops off into the depths.
Whether fishing for largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, or sunfish, you should begin by fishing a surface bug slowly. Slow enough that you get impatient. Bass are infinitely more patient than you. The natural tendency is to cast the bug and begin moving it as soon as it hits the water, like something trying to get away. Bass prefer prey that is struggling, and most animals that struggle twitch a few times, then rest motionless.
So cast your bug and don’t move it. Strip in enough line to come tight to the fly but not enough to move it. Then wait until all the rings around the fly disappear. Don’t worry about a bass losing interest, as they often approach potential prey and eyeball it for a full minute before making a decision. Time and again, a bass will wait until everything gets quiet and then suddenly pounce on a fly that is totally motionless. After you’ve waited so long you can’t stand it, give the fly a single twitch. Move it about an inch. Then wait again. Continue this way until the fly is close enough to pick up for another cast.
A deer hair mouse and a cork popper, two very popular bugs for largemouth bass
This twitch-and-wait strategy is by far the most productive way to fish a bug, but if it doesn’t work, by all means try others. If the water is deep, sometimes three or four abrupt twitches followed by a long pause bring bass up from deeper water when they hear the commotion. You can also try a steady retrieve, where you keep the fly moving and never let it pause. Experiment until you find the right formula, and it will work for you through out the day.
Largemouth bass seldom chase a fly aggressively as they are ambushers—sprinters, and not long-distance runners. When you fish a sinking bass fly, move it slowly and steadily, and when presenting a subsurface fly to bass try to position your cast so that nearly your entire retrieve moves the fy along near cover. In other words, if a big log sticks out into a lakeshore, don’t make a cast at 90 degrees to the log, because only the first foot or so of your retrieve will be appealing to bass lying in ambush. Instead, position yourself so that your fy will swim along parallel to the log, presenting a tasty morsel to a lurking bass throughout its progress.
Typical subsurface streamers used for bass
Try to position your boat so you can cast parallel to shore; this will let you retrieve your fly through the most productive water, for the longest time.
Get that streamer in the middle of the thick stuff, too, not just along the edges. Cast your streamer right into the lily pads, drawing it over the surface of the pads, letting it sink into the holes between them. Even with a weedless fly you’ll get firequent snags, but if your fly is not in deep cover it won’t be fishing where large-mouths feed.
Smallmouth bass are found more often amongst rocks and logs than weeds, so here you should try to fish your fly so that it rides just above piles of large rocks on the bottom, or off rocky points and cliffs. A weighted fly like a Clouser Minnow is deadly on small-mouths, and these heavy flies should be fished with a strip and then a pause that lets the fly sink. Small-mouths usually pounce on a fly that is sinking or just beginning to rise after it has sunk, so watch your line for any twitch or pause because a big smallmouth may have just inhaled your fly.
Bass are not leader-shy, and even a fly line landing on top of one seldom spooks it. For largemouth bass, the leader should be as heavy as you can find, and if you can get the leader through the eye of the fly you’ve gone as light as you need to. Big bass flies are very wind-resistant, and a short, stiff leader helps turn them over, so a leader of between six and seven and a half feet long with a breaking strength of fifteen to twenty pounds is about right. You’ll appreciate that heavy leader when yanking a big largemouth out of aquatic salad, too. Smallmouths live in clear water and are slightly spookier than largemouths, so a nine-foot leader that breaks at twelve pounds will straighten the smaller flies used for them and will land even a world-record smallmouth with ease.
