I had the opportunity to get out and do some bass fishing on the 22nd this month and couldn’t wait. It’s been an unusually cool spring with very short periods of heat. This day was in the mid-sixties with cloudy skies. I chose a small lake that is close to the house because my time was limited. I couldn’t even get there until a bit after 1:00 pm and had to leave by 7:00 pm. Oh well, at least it was a chance to get out there and see what the bass were doing.
I started out with a spinnerbait, a swim-bait and a wacky-rigged worm. I was thinking that there would be fish in every stage of the spawn. When I got there, it was a bit windy with fairly clear water and a decent amount of new weed growth. I started chunkin’ around the weeds with the spinner and the wacky worm. Unfortunately my first bite wasn’t coming easy but with persistence, I managed to pick up a nice fish on the wacky worm about an hour into my day. I noticed that the strike came where there were stick-ups adjacent to lily pads. So I kept concentrating on these specifics to see if I could develop a pattern for my limited time there.
Sure enough, the next strike came in an area that was almost identical to the first. After that fish, I managed to pick up several more by concentrating on these kinds of areas. I was also throwing the spinnerbait as I was going. This is one of those confidence baits for me and I can’t imagine a spring fishin’ trip without it. Sure enough, I managed to pick up a solid fish by running the Crystal Spin through some sparse stick-ups. Again I focused on the arrangement of those reeds and the water depth of that strike and was able to pick up a couple more where I found similar conditions.
One of the things that I noticed as I was fishing was that there were some balls of fry in the water. I wasn’t getting any bites on the swim-bait so after having seen the fry in a half dozen places, I decided to make a change on that rod and put on a Koppers Live Target Red Ear. That turned out to be a good choice. In the areas where I saw the fry, I cast in and around them and got my strikes from those post-spawn fish. These bites were particularly aggressive with one coming as I was answering my phone. That one almost made me drop my rod! Instead, I dropped my phone. Fortunately it didn’t wind up in the drink. Here again, I kept moving and every time I ran across similar conditions to those that were in play when I got the strikes, I used the same lures that caught the fish and was able to pick up more.
This is one of those trips that just winds up working out. The fish remained consistent for the short time I was out there and it didn’t take much more than staying tuned into three variables and being willing to move to find those particular conditions. The coolest part of the day is the fact that, as I write this, I am still picking little pieces of loose skin off of my left thumb from lipping the fourteen fish that I managed to catch and wishing that all trips were this easy!
See ya’ on the water …