Sight Fishing

One of the funnest ways to catch spring time bass is sight fishing. Sight fishing is an exciting way to fish because you get to see the bass react to your bait from the time it enters the water till the time it engulfs it.

One of the most important pieces of equipment that you can have is a good pair of polarized sunglasses. If you forget your sunglasses this time of the year you are at a great disadvantage. Polarized sunglasses allow your eyes to cut the glare and see a lot deeper into the water. Make sure you get two types of lenses. Gray for sunny days and tan for cloudy days. Flying Fisherman makes some great sunglasses at affordable prices that will last you a long time. Most tournaments out their require you to hook all bass sight fishing in the mouth. Sunglasses help you see if the bait is in the mouth our on the side of the fish so you ensure your catch counts.

When it comes to bait selection make sure that you have a whole bunch of different offerings tied on. I like to use soft plastics for my sight fishing. For sight fishing it is hard to beat a texas rigged tube, lizard, or sweet beaver. Honey Hole Hooks has come out with a new hook called the Spring Hook that is just a really sharp and strong hook that makes rigging plastics a lot easier. The built in screw keeps your bait perfectly positioned so that you can spend your time fishing rather than messing with your bait. The new hook will make your texas rigging a breeze. Make sure you check them out at www.honeyholehooks.com

Also you want to make sure that you have a shakeyhead rigged finesse worm and a jig on your deck. A shakeyhead does a great job of making the bass angry as they often can’t stand a worm sticking up on the bed like it’s feeding on the eggs.
For all my shakeyhead fishing I use OMEGA Custom Tackle’s The Savior.

A full skirted football jig can also be great too on spawning bass. This presentation is often overlooked but does a great job of imitating a nest robbing bluegill. OMEGA Custom Tackle has a great football head jig in the Derek Remitz Signature Series. It’s got a great hook in it to get those big females in the boat.

Something different to try is a drop shot rig with a finesse worm. You can take that rig and pitch it into the spawning nest and keep it on the bed for eternity to entice the fish into striking. While I don’t have that much experience with spawning small mouths I’ve heard that the technique is really deadly on them.

Lastly don’t count out floating stickbaits. I saw the potential of working them over spawning beds last spring. For some reason bass hate stuff worked over their heads just as much.

Whatever baits you decided to toss to the bass make sure that you have some bigger ones and some smaller ones. One trick that will help you put some more spawning bass in the boat is to pitch a larger bait into the nest first to make the bass angry and if you don’t get bit take a smaller bait and pitch it into the nest. Sometimes that can be the trick to getting them to react.

Spawning bass can a lot of times be tough customers so when you find them try and get a feel for which ones you can catch in a reasonable amount of time. If a fish swims off when your bait hits the water it’s going to be a lot harder to catch then one that is locked onto the bed. Bass that are sitting on the bed at a slight angle with their nose down are usually the easiest to catch.

Jerkbait Lessons Learned

Well I spent a bit of time on Lake of the Ozarks over the past two weeks and while I struggled with getting onto the right kind of fish for my tournaments I feel that I learned a little more about jerkbait fishing. Jerkbait fishing has never been one of my strengths. It’s something that I’ve messed with but I haven’t mastered. It’s a technique that I am hoping to continue to improve upon and I hope to someday become skilled with a jerkbait. Here’s a couple of tips that I would like to share though about my experience of playing with the jerkbait over the past two weeks.

When you have overcast conditions some of the best colors that you can have tied on during a shad kill are bone, and black and chrome. These colors seemed to work the best. The bone color really stands out in the overcast conditions and it does a great job of mimicking shad.

When you work your jerkbait one of the best cadences to try first is two short twitches and then a pause. The biggest thing you have to mess with is how long you pause the bait. When you are looking for active fish a lot of times you just have to wait 5 seconds in between twitches. I caught a lot of fish letting the bait sit from 10 to 20 seconds. In practice I caught some letting it sit for about 25 seconds without moving it. If you know you are around fish try slowing down and working it really slow and letting it sit sometimes for up to a minute.

The places you want to look for to get your jerkbait fish are on secondary points and bluff end points. Look for the secondary points that have chunk rock and pea gravel mixed. Transitions like these attract bass in cold water. Try and spot brushpiles up on these points or any other stickups. Take your jerkbait and toss it right over the brush piles and let it sit. If the bass are around you can tempt them into coming up and eating your bait.

Some of the best bluff end points are the ones where you have the bluff end coming into a chunk rock bank that creates a shelf. One one of these points I caught a 6 pounder off in practice that just drilled it.

When it comes to getting bites try getting your jerkbait to hit stuff like rocks, and brush. Sometimes that is what it takes to get bit. Make sure you have a plug knocker handy though cause those jerkbaits get caught on everything.

When it comes to what brand of jerkbaits to throw make sure you invest in a couple of different styles. For whatever reason the bass will prefer Megabass Ito 110’s one day and your old Smithwick Rogues the next. I think a lot of it has to do with the sound that they make along with the action. Certain jerkbaits though have louder rattles on them which I think makes them more productive in stained water.

One last thing I learned is that jerkbait fishing is all about timing when the water is cold. You can fish a lot of points and then hit one point and load the boat. The key is to be patient and keep your head up and keep on fishing.

5th Place 2,000 Dollar Win on Bull Shoals

This past weekend we kicked off the College Fishing season with Placing 5th out of 40 teams at the National Guard College Fishing Regional Qualifier at Bull Shoals Lake. The finish earned our Bass Club 1,000 dollars and our school another 1,000 as well as a birth to the National Guard College Fishing Regional Championship.We only weighed in two keepers that edged out the 6th place team by .01lbs. I don't know whether to say that we were lucky or unlucky because our motor blew up after just 2 and a half hours of fishing which left us unable to run our pattern. I believe that we could have caught a couple more keepers if we had gotten to fish another 3 hours. We spent the last 3 hours of the day getting towed back to K Dock Marina. I am almost certain we could have won the tournament.

Who knows the amount of time we put into this tournament with our map study and finding out as much information as possible about how the lake fishes. We had a game plan going into the tournament that we would concentrate on some channel swing banks in the back of the creeks that have been known to be productive over the last couple of years. As a matter of fact the fishing reports that we saw up to the week before the tournament talked of some nice bags of fish coming from these areas.

Last week, however, we read that the bite had been dying off in the areas that we wanted to fish and we noticed by watching the weather that the wind had switched directions with the warming trend. The areas that we wanted to fish were getting hit with wind when they were producing and when the conditions started to change so did the bite. Reflecting on what was happening and looking at the weather the last couple of days leading up to the tournament we decided that we would look for cuts and secondary points that were getting the most sunshine and getting hit with the SE wind.

Out the gate we ran to a creek to fish a secondary point and found that there was already about 10 boats back in the creek but nobody was keying in on the secondary point with the channel swing that we wanted to fish. We pulled up on the point and got off to a great start as Mike was able to put keeper number one in the boat in about our first 10 minutes of fishing on a wiggle wart. I hooked up with what I though was a fish on the end of a long cast but it came off. It felt pretty solid but I don't know if it was stick or what because it wasn't swimming at all. We didn't get a bite for a couple of minutes so It was then that we decided to make the move on down lake to fish some bluff points and cuts that had been getting hit with sunshine and wind the last couple of days. We pulled up on the first cut and Mike again hooked up with a fish that stayed down. It started heading out to deeper water and all of a sudden his line went slack. We thought the fish was probably at least 4lbs but we never saw it. It could have been a walleye but what are the chances of that happening? I was convinced at this point to put the stickbait down and from then on we were pretty much both cranking.

It's smart sometimes to fish different baits until the fish tell you otherwise when you are fishing team tournaments. We pulled up on another bluff point and at this point we were both power fishing. I was able to put a nice15 and a quarter inch kentucky in the boat that had some shoulders on it. The fish jumped on my shad rap. It was getting to be about 10:30 am and we were about 2 and a half hours into the day. Mike had caught a handfull of shorts and I had gone through a short to get to my keeper.

That is when we tried to run to another point and we couldn't get the motor to start. It wouldn't turn over. Our observer tried to diagnose the problem. We tried switching up batteries and jump starting it with the trolling motor but couldn't get anything to happen. Apparently the throttle was acting a little funny as we were running down the lake in the morning so perhaps something had gone wrong there. We were about 20 miles from takeoff with about 3 hours of fishing to spare to get back to the ramp at 2pm. We hit the trolling motor on high and desperately limped our way down the bank until we found some competitors around the corner who hadn't gotten a single bite all day.

We were very fortunate that they agreed to help us out and tow us back towards the marina. Moving at a steady pace of 6 mph our day was over. As the time wore on we had to transfer our fish to the other boat and make the run back towards the dock. We had no idea that our 2 fish would get us in 5th place. We though it would take around 15 to 18lbs to get first about about 12lbs to make the top 5 cut. While we are very fortunate to end up in fifth it's frusterating to know that we might have been able to have had a big day if it wasn't for our boat troubles. That's how the cookie crumbles I guess. It's on to the next one which will be at Lake of the Ozarks March 20th. We are hoping to put on a show! Until next time keep it reel!