More Drought Carnage

[Paul Roberts]

Continued with my bank fishing drought-stricken ponds. Found similar aggressive feeding behavior, but today’s pond was different in layout, resulting in a very different response in those aggressively hunting bass to my lures —namely super-spooky and picky fish.

 

This pond has no small confined deeper spots to concentrate the fish. And no cover to speak of, esp no hard cover, to create spots-on-the-spot to concentrate my casts. But bluegills were pressed onto the shallow gradually sloping banks, with aggressive hunting bass just beyond; A carnage zone set-up, right?? 

 

I started with roughly imitative feeding-type lures (swim-jig and swimbait) that are Go-To’s when bass are aggressively targeting prey fishes. But getting the lure to the fish without spooking them was only the first barrier. Then the open clear water with no cover had those bass unconvinced that these lures were "prey", evidenced by follows and rejections, and short strikes. Upon close inspection, the bass simply did not see the lures as "prey". It was pretty frustrating. 

 

Lures traveling through open water —where the fish can observe them for some distance— are sure to give off inappropriate cues. Quite simply, lures can look pretty stupid, in fact, most of the time. Lures need to do something special to draw committed strikes.

 

So… I did something special, or used a lure that could do something special in those conditions: Take advantage of the most obvious "ambush point" I had at my disposal —the surface film. I waked/bulged a spinnerbait just under the surface and those same “picky” bass turned into committed biters, just like that. I ended up with 10 fish: One on the swim-jig, one on the swimbait, and 8 on the SB in almost as many casts.  Cool to see.

 

Bank Full

Drought!

Ooooooo....

Whack!

 

 

 

[roadwarrior]