Active or inactive

[WRB]

The two words between catching bass and fishing for them is active and inactive behavior.

Bass are like most predators and some people, the don't live where the eat. We go to the restaurant or market to find or buy food, we don't live in the parking lot waiting for the meal.

Active bass are in the market or at the restaurant, not in the den. Inactive bass are in the den resting.

The key to catching bass is offering them something to eat when they are hungry and active. Knowing the difference between inactive bass that are resting away from where they eat and active bass looking for something to eat will save you a lot of time.

How bass are positioned on structure or cover and baitfish tells you if they are inactive or active. How they strike lures tells you if the are active or not. The location of the bass tells you if they are active or not.

You could be fishing in the restaurant, but it's not open and no bass are there. You can be trying to get bass in the den to eat and they are not hungry. Trying several different lures isn't going to open the restaurant or interest the inactive bass.

If you know where the restaurant is located, waiting for it to open is a better use of your time, then trying to catch bass that are resting.

Spend some time on the water and learn where the markets and restaurants are located and whats on the menu.

Active hungry bass are easier to catch then inactive bass.

WRB

[Catt]

By setting up between the kitchen and the living room

You will have 2 opportunities; coming and going

Coming to the kitchen they are hunger

Going to the living room they will stop for a quick snack

[Busy]

You are talking about setting up on a drain Catt?

What do you look for in drains, besides fish obviously?

Solid structure lines, food, etc.  What I want to know about is the water in the drain.  What is the water doing in your most productive drains?  Sorry if I cannot ask my question clearly.

[Fishing Rhino]

The solution is simple.

I'm going to use a jello lure.

Bill Cosby said it best.  "There's always room for jello."

[WRB]

One misconception with bass is they live at one location and the dinner bell rings when prey comes by.

Feeding areas are almost always away from resting places. Bass become active and swim to where they know from experience prey will be available. Also from experience the bass uses safe routes to enter and exit feeding areas. These routes are almost always deeper water and deeper water in a shallow lake could be a 2 foot depression, creek bed, ditch/drain and in deeper lakes steep walls, river channels, points, etc.

First you most know where the house is to locate the kitchen and know someone is home. Setting up between the kitchen and living room doesn't work if the family is down the street at the neighborhood banquet. The bass will come home, so it's good to keep checking, if you are in the right neighborhood.

WRB

[RoLo]

In my view, it would be a costly misconception to believe that bass in all lakes live the same lifestyle.

Almost without exception, the lifestyle that forces bass to shuttle between lounge and foodshelf

is that imposed by a manmade reservoir where bass are forced to adapt.

In "natural lakes" the living is easy, where bass are highly residential to say the least.

More than one telemetry study has clearly demonstrated the stay-at-home behavior of largemouth bass in natural lakes.

Weed-beds are their home in a natural lake, where you may find bass all day long and year-round.

To be sure, when bass are inactive they are exponentially more difficult to catch, but they're still there nonetheless.

Given adequate dissolved oxygen, bass tend to cling to the best weed beds year-round, regardless of water temperature.

Tracking studies on "natural lakes" have additionally shown that even during cold-fronts,

bass did not move laterally but burrowed down in the heaviest cover within the same water column.

Roger

[Catt]

I've found and telemetry studies have verified especially in manmade reservoirs is there are bass that are highly residential and there are those that are nomadic. There are bass that are shore line related and there are those that are main lake related; both shore line and main lake have residential and nomadic bass. I tend not to target those that are nomadic opting instead to zero in on those the stay at home.

Once you have found key structure where the residential bass live you have found structure that will produce year after year. While fluctuations in lake levels from year to year will change shapes of weed beds and weed line the bottom break lines/contour lines remain the same.

Now with the living room found it is a simple matter of circling it with your electronics and a map in an ever widening pattern looking for the feeding area; with the kitchen located you must fall back on Structure Fishing 101 which states the following.

Bass must have a visible path of breaks and break lines on a structure from deep water all the way to the shallows, which is where the bulk of food is available to game fish. As bass move along a structure they pause or stop at "things"breaks and break lineson the bottom. It is at such "things" that anglers can expect to make consistent contact with fish as they migrate along a structure. This is why a certain stump or flooded tree, dock piling or submerged rock consistently produces bass for anglers. Most of the time, such a spot is merely a break or bass stopping point on a structure. Find more such breaks on the structure, or break lines, or even the deep water sanctuary near the structure, and you'll catch more and bigger bass more often.

There may be many structures, breaks, and break lines in a body of water. But only a few of them are so well related to deep water that schools of large bass consistently use them. Thus, the search for good, fishable structure can be a quick one, with often much of the work done simply by studying accurate contour maps of the water.

[Eddie Munster]

"One other thing to keep in mind when fishing anywhere you think the fish normally live is to downsize your bait. When fishing structure that congregates fish, they will most of the time be neutral at best, and negative as a rule. If a fish returns home after feeding, he's not likely to want to chase a big crankbait or fill up even more with a 10" worm. I call it the "desert principle." If my wife has just fed me a 16 oz steak, I'm likely to refuse the offer of another one. But give a few minutes after my steak, and I might find room for a brownie. When you fish where they live, go small and slow." By Paul Crawford

An excerpt from this link on the subject of structure and fishing where the bass are resting. Paul Crawford's articles are at the bottom of that page. Pretty good read.

http://www.pondboss.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=92463#Post92463

[Catt]

"One other thing to keep in mind when fishing anywhere you think the fish normally live is to downsize your bait. When fishing structure that congregates fish, they will most of the time be neutral at best, and negative as a rule. If a fish returns home after feeding, he's not likely to want to chase a big crankbait or fill up even more with a 10" worm. I call it the "desert principle." If my wife has just fed me a 16 oz steak, I'm likely to refuse the offer of another one. But give a few minutes after my steak, and I might find room for a brownie. When you fish where they live, go small and slow." By Paul Crawford

An excerpt from this link on the subject of structure and fishing where the bass are resting. Paul Crawford's articles are at the bottom of that page. Pretty good read.

http://www.pondboss.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=92463#Post92463

My thoughts exactly

[WRB]

Bass are simple creatures, and they stick with a good situation until something turns them off of it. When feeding they normally pick a good area and come to that area all the time.

A break line can be a weed line on a glacial lake in Wisconsin, a subtle hard-bottom on a shallow lake in Florida, the edge of a timber lined creek channel in Texas, or the base of a rock pile in a deep California lake. Whatever the bass use to move into a feeding area. Where the bass go when not feeding is anyone's guess.

Bass are also individuals and may roam great distances and be spread out in some lakes or bunched together in other lakes, they are rarely far away from their food source.

If you look at early pioneers like Perry who formulated a theory that bass move as a group from deep to shallow during periods called migrations, without the aid depth finders, or biologists like Mike Lembeck who conducted telemetry studies on California deep structured lakes proving bass were not affected by wind, bright sun light, cloud cover, rain caused no significant change to their position on structure. The bass would hold on structure for some time and transient bass would hold for less than less than a day. Lembeck was never able to identify groups of big bass moving together. When individual fish leave a popular holding area, they go in separate directions. It's the saloon theory, according to Bill Murphy; you have a local saloon you always go to, there's a bunch of people there, and once in a while the same people are there at the same time.

WRB

PS: Lembeck implanted 200 bass with transmitters, the bass ranged from 1.2 lbs to 14 lbs., a 3 year study with over 800 observations on San Diego county lakes.

[A-Jay]

Bringing it back ~ Because its Gold.

A-Jay

[scaleface]

Ok. This is a serious question . Lets say the dinks are chowing down on shad at 12 foot deep on a extended main lake point point . Big bass are known to favor  this point too . Will the big bass show up after awhile to dine or should one  try to find their den on that point and what should one look for ?

[WRB]

Dinks are on the big bass menu. If small bass are confortable feeding the big bass aren't there or inactive...fish deeper or move.

Tom

[senile1]

46 minutes ago, A-Jay said:

Bringing it back ~ Because its Gold.

A-Jay

Indeed it is.  Thank you for bringing this back up.  I missed it the first time around.

[scaleface]

24 minutes ago, WRB said:

.fish deeper

Deeper further out on the point , off the sides or both?

 

 

Another question if the small bass are active then do we assume the larger ones are ?

[A-Jay]

In today's 'fast paced' world of bass fishing a good bit of what is accomplished by anglers in the public eye is often credited in part to the recent 'advances' in electronics.  With good reason in fact, as there have been some effective & useful gear introduced in just the last few years.

 

That said, and the reason I chose to bring this most excellent thread back, revolves around it's title;

"Active or inactive".  

 

 With the advent of Xtreme Depth Sonar, Chirp, 360 imaging, SwitchFire, Dual Beam Plus, Mega Side & Down Imaging, Precise GPS, Smart Strike, Panoptix, real-time underwater 3D mapping; (much of which I do reply on most every trip), to date, and as far as I know, there's only one way to determine this most crucial factor - and that's to go fishing.   

There are occasions when we can 'predict' when & where it's going to happen.  Sometimes we're right - sometimes we're not.   In my experience, there's not a replacement for time on the water - especially one body of water.  Where if & when one gets on them, by being there through the changes (and there are many) we have some chance of 'staying on or following' the bait & or the bass.  But fishing a place once a week or only 2 or 3 times a month, can often make consistency a tall order.   Despite it all - the Challenge & the Hunt is addicting. 

 Clearly none of this is even remotely new or earth shattering information, I offer it as a friendly reminder that being in the right place at the right time is just as humbling as the often experience alternative.

A-Jay

[WRB]

1 hour ago, scaleface said:

Deeper further out on the point , off the sides or both?

 

 

Another question if the small bass are active then do we assume the larger ones are ?

Could discus threadfin Shad behavior and how LMB target these pelagic baitfish separately. When bass are juveniles they tend to school for protection as do Shad. Finding a active school of juvenile size bass chasing a Shad school is common. When the Shad school comes to a location that compresses the school and the juveniles bass are pushing the bait onto structure adult bass often use this event as a response triggering feeding activity. Big bass learn from experience being deeper under the Shad school picking off injured Shad is more effective then chasing the school.

Are all the bass on the same activity time table...no, bass are individuals that sometimes group together to take advantage of a feeding opertunity. Definately a repeatable pattern.

Tom

[12poundbass]

2 hours ago, A-Jay said:

Bringing it back ~ Because its Gold.

A-Jay

I had not read this before. I thank you sir for resurrecting this great read! ?

[A-Jay]

1 minute ago, 12poundbass said:

I had not read this before. I thank you sir for resurrecting this great read! ?

You're welcome my friend but all the credit goes to the OP and original contributors.

A-Jay 

[SWVABass]

So @WRBthat’s great info on threadfin, they Lake I fish has those as well as gizzard Shad. How and when do lmb and/or smallmouth target one, and how does a having stripers play into that mix? Are they less likely to move out into open water and school to chase baitfish? And what type of structure would you target?

[WRB]

Getting off topic on this 9 year old thread. Start a new post.

Tom

[Catt]

53 minutes ago, Swbass15 said:

So @WRBthat’s great info on threadfin, they Lake I fish has those as well as gizzard Shad. How and when do lmb and/or smallmouth target one, and how does a having stripers play into that mix? Are they less likely to move out into open water and school to chase baitfish? And what type of structure would you target?

 

Under "best of" read know thy shad part I & 11  ?

[SWVABass]

Will do @Catt thanks!

[NHBull]

The best old thread I have read this Winter, thanks for bringing it back from the dead.

spawn for central NH starts around Memorial Day, and it feels like everything is inactive especially LM.

think I will start looking at things differently when ice out hits

[Turkey sandwich]

11 hours ago, WRB said:

Dinks are on the big bass menu. If small bass are confortable feeding the big bass aren't there or inactive...fish deeper or move.

Tom

 

To add to this...  an alternative is to know the best ambush spots on that point.  Larger fish may not necessarily be deeper, but possibly dominating the better ambush points.  To further borrow from the restaurant analogy, celebrities often get the best seats and preferred service in restaurants.  Think of the dominant predators as celebrities.  Whatever the dominant predators are in a body of water, be it bass, pike, musky, large trout, walleye, etc, they're going to dominate the best feeding positions based on their feeding style.  In your case, WRB's suggestion could be spot on, or they may be sitting behind the boulder on the edge of the weed line 20 feet away at the same depth.