Spinnerbaiting Muddy Water Largemouths

Out on the road for my job, I thought of fishing Senkos at our neighborhood pond tomorrow, then the deluge came, and I thought at first only of water too muddy for that approach. Once I was home, the obvious solution hit. Most likely, a current of muddy water flowed from the inlet, the bass congregated. I tied a black spinnerbait to six-pound mono and walked to the pond with my St. Croix.

Not much current entered the pond at all, but at the outflow (photographed) water moved. Perhaps more water entered at the other inflow at the head of the pond where I didn't venture. At any rate, I caught three of my five bass associated with this muddy, moving water. Bass love to trounce on spinnerbaits with vibrations emitted through stain.

Of the five, one was about 2 1/4-pounds, two of them a pound-and-a-half or so, two about a pound. Two of these fish hit almost at my feet. It's important to complete a retrieve right up and along the bank, since bass are much less shy under cover of heavy stain.

A rewarding 20 minute stint. The bass are averaging the same size as two years ago. I wonder what happened to all those two and two-and-a-half pounders I caught and released.

Topwater Largemouth and Smallmouth Bass: Changing Light Advantages Predation

 

        

One day last August at 1:00 p.m. on Ringwood State Park’s Shepherd Lake, my son and I bass fished an even handed way—weightless Chompers worms 17 feet down along a weedline’s edge, the breeze light enough for control. We heard a whoop and watched an angler catch a good-size bass back in the weeds. It became apparent he fished topwater plugs. Another good bass struck. I looked at the sky to notice the sun had dimmed as clouds thickened and understood, feeling distinctly one-upped by someone else taking an odd approach. I pride myself on doing things differently because that tends to make the difference. I believed I knew why those bass hit, but hadn't thought to try topwaters.

         

Largemouth and smallmouth bass serve as an interesting academic research subject for an obvious reason: anglers want to know. I never believe a single fact explains an entire complex behavior, such as why bass feed early and late during summer, but sometimes a single cause seems to explain everything. The eye structure of both largemouth and smallmouth advantages them over forage fish in changing light. Bass see forage early, late—and with thickening or weakening clouds mid-day—better than forage see them.

         

Don't confuse this with the tapetum lucidum, walleye namesake, which advantages walleye over prey in any very low light or turbulent water, not particularly changing light. But bass and walleye may hug bottom for the same reason, although exceptions to this behavior exist. Walleye suspend over oxygen depleted depths, and bass sometimes cruise slowly in mid-column or near the surface right out in the open under intense sun. Usually they won’t hit because they are not staging to prey at all. They don’t seem to notice you just a few yards away because they are less aware than normal, as if in suspended animation. When feeding, bass usually stage at or in cover to ambush prey, or prowl the bottom, particularly among aquatic vegetation or rocks, with their eyes directed upward.

Forage fish naturally tend to swim nearer to the surface in order to evade predators on the bottom—they have little choice but to create safety in numbers. Not only do bass see them better than they can see bass given equal light, it’s darker near bottom where bass camouflage—and against light at the surface, forage make distinct silhouettes.  

For relatively shallow water—as deep as 12 feet if clear—nothing beats a surface lure now when light is changing. Bass know they have the advantage, are looking skyward for a mouthful, and catch sight of that commotion. You can just imagine the trigger response. So many strikes leave no doubt that bass put their all into the sheer thrill—whatever this is for a bass—of demolishing the target. From eye socket to spinal column—it’s a very short fuse and a hot detonation.

The typical opinion states that calm water is best for topwaters. I don’t really disagree, but it may not be true. This past May I arrived at Round Valley Reservoir on a lunch break without my lure bag, but I had a rod and my license. As soon as I parked, I reached into the glove compartment to find a big, white buzzbait. The sky was clouding. The wind drove the surface like buffalo herds.

Unlikely? I thought so. But not only did I catch three bass in 45 minutes, fishing the shoreline at Lot 2, one was a smallmouth that struck from at least 8 feet of water. I knew the breakline adjacent to a shallow flat was prime locale—but would a bass really come up with that much wave action above it? Perhaps it was crucial it was a big buzzbait.

For chopped surface—try to beat the commotion. You may not be able to do it with a musky plug, but choose larger lures and the type that creates the most commotion like buzzbaits, Crazy Crawlers, Jitterbugs, and the Devil’s Horse.

For a calm, mid-day surface, my preference may be for smaller plugs, and I especially like the clear plastic versions of Hedden’s Tiny Torpedo and the smallest Zara Spooks. Whether they make a difference or not, I’m curious about these choices and have caught bass by them.

Now is the time to begin to think about big bass in the thickest vegetation available. Often lunker bass are not at the outside edge of weeds along the deep open water, but just inside where thickest vegetation begins, and even further back in it as if they intend to hide from you. Try Money Frogs, Boohah Baits, or Phatrats—if you get a strike it will blow weeds wide open.

Big Striped Bass Bunker Drifting

My brother Dave with his very first striper, 25 pounds. He went out through Barnegat Inlet with my other brother Rick and with Dennis captaining his boat. They snagged bunker, tossed them in a live well and quickly dorsal hooked them, drifting.

Pat where I work also caught one off Sandy Hook over the weekend, drifting three miles out over 50- foot depths, his 40 pounds. He looked just elated as Dave in the photograph.

Pat uses a cast net and practices throwing it in his backyard. Technique is involved, but once you have it down, it's a lot easier than weighted treble tossing from a boat. You can get 30 bunker in a single net throw, then just load the live well, and you're set all day drifting

Big stripers are still around. Whether or not they will be at the end of the month is yet to be seen. They've blitzed beaches as late as early July in the past. Since spring really took awhile to get underway, just maybe bass will linger late this year.

We're headed for the Manasquan dog beach June 20th and I haven't looked it up online yet, fishing or not. If not, maybe we can get some casts off the inlet rocks, maybe not. Whether or not my son and I are headed out on Dennis's 30-foot boat this spring or summer, no definite word as yet. But I intend to buy Dennis a cast net, if he will learn to use it.

Alternatives to Lead Fishing Sinkers

 

Lead alternatives good for the Highlands environment

By Bruce Litton

 

          “That’s a half ounce sinker?” Joe Landolfi said. He sat opposite me in one of Dow’s rental boats, reaching across to look closely at the duck egg shape. I was rigging for hybrid stripers with live herring on Lake Hopatcong.

          “It’s steel,” I said. “Some of them are rusted a little, makes them feel homey.”

          Joe has an acute eye. Steel egg sinkers are not really outsized, although they do have about half the density of lead. Why use them?

          Our lakes and reservoirs, some of the rivers, are frequented by diving birds like loons, bufflehead ducks, and mergansers, which ingest stones from the bottom to help their digestive process. Statistics show a great many such birds die from lead poisoning, the result of swallowing lead sinkers instead of stones. Even bald eagles die from the lead poison in smaller diving birds they eat. Everyone loses sinkers to snags, so for the health of the environment, it’s a good idea to use alternative weight such as steel, tin, brass, bismuth, or tungsten.

          Alternatives are new on the scene, but many states have already passed legislation against the use of lead weights. For more than 5000 years, lead has been used for fishing beginning with ancient Egyptians, so the change is nothing less than revolutionary from an historical perspective. After what mankind has done to the Earth, we are entering an age of unprecedented environmental appreciation.

          Fish have always fed people and symbolize human spirituality; spirituality is nothing if not connectivity to the planet. We anglers participate in a practice older than European origins—a form of endeavor upon which civilizations are based. America began with fishing. The Northeast seacoast, particularly George’s Bank, was exploited before settlements took root. And the following example is my favorite: a tax levied on the sale of striped bass paid for the first Colonial public school in Plymouth, MA, 1670. I wonder what kind of sinkers. Nets need them too.

          Lead alternatives don’t make sinkers a big, bulging eyesore, and tungsten is twice the density of lead and a much harder metal. Tungsten is expensive, but cool stuff. If you want to punch through surface vegetation with a worm weight, nothing is better than a tungsten bullet sinker pegged at the hook’s tie loop. If you love jigging, why not invest in tungsten jigs to get a margin of more distinct feel? The metal makes harder contact against rock or sunken timber. It doesn’t make much difference, but that would be the whole point, just to see if you can appreciate the subtlety. And if you do, then it seems to be a big difference indeed.

          Alternatives on the market cover everything now: spinnerbait heads, bladebaits, jigs, egg sinkers, split shots, tungsten putty, tiny cylindrical weights, and slip weights of all kinds. Like anything else, they need and deserve a critical eye to discern right uses. When I fished the Salmon River for steelhead with my son a few years ago, I weighted my float rig with shiny, tin split shots. A helpful angler approached who told me take them off I wanted to catch any. Steelheads are extremely visual fish and apparently get spooked by split shots that reflect light.

          So Boss Tin of Colorado came up with solutions. By mixing tin and bismuth, the company has produced a line of dull toned split shots that are better than fresh lead to avoid scaring sight-wary trout and steelheads. They also have a complete line of fly leader sinkers that look like little sticks and bits of stone to camouflage the presentation, really ingenious stuff. Likewise, Bullet Weights has a complete line of alternatives from the famous bullet weight for bass, to split shots, to bottom bouncers—dozens of types.

          Just Google lead alternative fishing weights and handfuls of companies come up. Water Gremlin was a household name in the 1970’s when we used to crimp lead split shots with our teeth—never a good idea, nor necessary. The EPA put out a warning to home-made tackle buffs against making lead weights, jigs, spinnerbaits, etc. When melted, lead produces airborne particles that can spread throughout a house, contaminating it just like a gas chamber. Lead can be very bad news in unexpected ways.

         For the ultimate in environmental consciousness, Envio-Weights produces tackle made from reprocessed landfill steel and resin: buzzbaits, spinnerbaits, jigs, as well as split shots and other sinkers. Who would have thought that perhaps the New Jersey Meadowlands might become the source for a buzzbait cutting across calm, pristine looking Oak Ridge Reservoir at dawn?

Summer Techniques: Largemouth Bass, Pickerel, and Rock Bass

Largemouth bass, pickerel and rock bass summer techniques

          Pebbly soil allows relatively sparse vegetation to give you a barren impression of the area flanked by ridges to the north, south, and west. It slightly reminds me of how mountains rise over desert valleys in the western United States. The lake is very deep. How deep exactly, I don’t know. But shallow flats exist to give it better structure than it would have with only drop offs from shorelines.

          Largemouth bass and pickerel fishing good, large rock bass of close to a pound also serve opportunity. In all of my experience, I’ve never known a lake to have so many of these brown-toned members of the sunfish family. I’ve caught one in Round Valley Reservoir, but typically they’re found in streams and rivers. In this lake, they’ll swallow a plastic worm whole if you don’t set the hook in time. Sunfish are present also for panfishing.

          During the warm water season, topwater plugs early and late in the day are especially good for largemouth bass. University research has shown that largemouths are sight advantaged over prey like sunfish when light intensity is changing. Bass like to hug bottom in relatively shallow water around dawn and sunset, looking upward for prey. A topwater lure is most vulnerable in this situation. Pickerel won’t hesitate either.

          Popping plugs like the Pop-R and Plunker, prop plugs like the Torpedo and Dalton Special, surface crawling plugs like the Jitterbug and Crazy Crawler, walking plugs like the Zara Spook and Bug Stick, and weedless soft plastics like the Phatrat and Money Frog are just a list of favorites. Others manufactured in a dazzling array can be effective at one time or another, but these four categories have their special purposes.

          Poppers may be best when surface is calm and calls for a slow, teasing retrieve. Make a cast and let the plug sit until the ripples fade. Then twitch or pop it. Fairly often, the first cast before sunrise is all it takes for the first catch. Bass move as light changes, and if the surface is calm, they charge for the disturbance. Poppers, however, can be effective also on slightly choppy surface with a quick, noisy retrieve, although a prop bait or surface crawler with the metal flanges is more suited to the commotion. Walking plugs retrieved by turns of the rod tip to the right and left make the plug zig-zag like a dog on a chain, sniffing right and left. Something about the crazy action makes bass and pickerel strike savagely sometimes. Since a lake may have some fairly thick weed growth along the shallow edges during summer, a weedless rat or frog can be cast directly onto weeds at the surface and a strike blast a hole right through the mess.

          Some weedlines end where very deep water begins. Soft plastic lures like Senkos and other plastic worms prove especially effective along the drop-offs. Senkos sink fast enough that they don’t need to be weighted to fish as deep as 20 feet. But especially during the day with increased wind, I imagine conventional Texas or Carolina rigs for plastic worms with an inset hook and bullet sinker might work. The difference between the two is that the Texas rig simply allows the sliding bullet sinker to rest against the inset hook. The Carolina rig uses a barrel swivel spaced two feet from the inset hook, so the worm is free to sink slower to bottom after the rod lifts the entire rig high and allows it to fall back. Jigs with plastic twister-tail grubs or synthetic leeches can result in quick hook-ups for rock bass and largemouth bass alike. Since largemouth bass retreat into clear water as deep as 40 feet or so, plumbing this particular secret lake’s depths might be interesting. Plenty of deep water in range of the bank, a boat may yet allow more effective, parallel approaches.

          A canoe or kayak can be wheeled in and launched from one or two spots. Otherwise, lots of bank fishing exists where you can position to cast at differing structures. Some spots difficult to access, careful steps can make casting effective and landing fish possible.

          I think of a surrounding environment remarkably clean, free of litter, and attractive in the desolate way of suggesting desert I mentioned. To reflect on a once busy industrial site bodes well for environmental resilience. Visitors here seem to respect renewal and growth, and release their catch. Sometime in the future a forest may surround the lake and our grandchildren will catch bass and pickerel in a different environment yet.

Color Differences for Largemouth Bass at a Private Pond

Fred arrived and fished before me, catching a lot of bass, one four pounds, another three. This is our annual Scout picnic and opportunity to fish a private pond of 15 acres or so.

I fished with Fred down along the spillway, first with a bright red spinnerbait, then quickly snapping on a Senko-type worm as soon as Fred began getting hits, by changing his white worm to black as shadows had overtaken us. It was the same sort of difference in color triggering strikes I recently wrote about after fishing Round Valley Reservoir.

I lost a bass of about three pounds on my first cast, hooked in about six to eight feet of water. I got a good look at the fish, really good sized, could have been a few ounces more than three. Then we casually caught and released bass for about 20 minutes, until we began to head for the dining area.

There was a fallen tree we accessed by climbing down an embankment and fighting off briars. At first, nothing would hit. We must have covered the range with a dozen casts. Then I caught the largest pumpkinseed of my life, must have weighed a pound. It took the five-inch Senko-type with a size 3/0 inset hook. I switched to a slow worm, a traditional Chompers in watermelon, rigged on an inset. This worked. Fred switched to a watermelon Senko-type and we caught a few more bass, and I caught a pickerel also.

After dinner, we cast topwaters for 15 minutes. I nailed another bass, but that was all.

Butler Reservoir Pickerel and Bass West Milford New Jersey

 

Butler reservoir may be worth the hike

          Set more than a mile back in Apshawa Preserve, 40-acre Butler Reservoir in West Milford Township is accessible by hiking the moderately strenuous White Trail to the area near the dam. The Preserve is a joint project of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation and the County of Passaic, well worth a visit by those who like to combine fishing with hiking. The view from atop the mountain summit over Butler Reservoir and a wide regional vista is worth a long, relaxing break. Particularly with the cool breezes of early fall, this could be nice. After a quick descent, an area of about 150 yards of shoreline is all my son and I fished on our recent family outing, and we found the fishing is good for largemouth bass and pickerel. Supposedly, smallmouth bass exist, but I’ve never caught one in water stained by tannic acid, although some rock structure exists in Butler Reservoir, which is necessary for bronzebacks. Fifteen-foot depths near the spillway also support this information’s possible veracity. Otherwise, this is a shallow impoundment: lily pads and other aquatic vegetation are abundant.

          My son began fishing a buzzbait and I shot off half-a-dozen casts with a spinnerbait that felt like it wasn’t moving close and slow enough to vegetation, so I snapped on a Rebel Pop-R. After 10 minutes I felt the rhythm of working the topwater plug next to and in pockets of weeds, but my wife called me over to the spillway. Our black Labrador apparently threated to leap over, but she was just intensely curious with her claws dug in and neck over the edge. No way would she have jumped.

          With deeper water to try, I tied a Chompers worm to 15-pound fluorocarbon and barrel swivel connecting 15-pound test Power Pro. We came prepared for heavy vegetation and pickerel. Fluorocarbon resists abrasive rows of razor teeth. Retrieving the worm back at quick speed for the next cast drew interest from a couple of small pickerel, but I felt interested in at least a fair-size fish.


          I fished the rock dam structure of some sort out in deeper water very closely, not really expectant but making sure. Then I observed that at the far edge of the spillway a slot existed between the bank and a micro weed edge about five feet long and very thin, forming a pocket with weeds in the back of it, leaving open an entry way to the shallow spillway bottom where water flows, finally to drop over the edge. In that pocket, I wholly anticipated the possibility of a bass. Most of the casts any of us make prove less certain. On occasion, we can anticipate a fish without seeing it. My cast propelled the worm about 60 feet in a straight line and it landed perfectly in the pocket’s middle. The line slack, I felt a subtle tick through my St. Croix medium power graphite rod and through line loose and limp, transmitted like a sort of weak electrical click. I let the bass take line for five seconds, then set the hook hard and all three of us marveled at the aerial show the bass gave almost immediately, a good bass about 2 ½ pounds that I finally prepared to grasp at the lower jaw, eager to hold up for my wife—when I saw the hook pull free. I got the fish nearly to my feet. 

          Soon I unhooked and released a small bass. Throughout this time, intermittently, I looked for other places to stand and cast around the reservoir and noted there quite a few. You can hike all the way around to enjoy perhaps several hours or more of steady fishing. A lot of this could be done with soft-bodied plastic rats and frogs. These draw ferocious strikes from bass and pickerel when the time is right. The worms obviously work with an inset hook, but pickerel less likely take them, although we’ve caught more than a few over the years slow-fishing worms as if for bass.

          Butler Reservoir is an out of the way place not far from plenty that isn’t, such as the Town Tavern Country Restaurant where we ate afterwards, and is wild enough for surprises. As Matt led us towards the parking lot, he watched the trail in front of him when Sadie, our Labrador, stopped walking and Matt suddenly looked up. A big bear 20 or 30 feet away looked directly into his eyes as if to say, “What are you doing?” She had two cubs. Matt said, “Woh…,” while backing up. The bears turned and wandered away.