Paul Roberts

Thanks for posting that old article, Brian. Thanks for putting this up too, slonezp. In lesson #4 the presenter passes on the old faulty info that fish (at least most warmwater species with ductless swim bladders) can make large depth in a short time period. This isn't the present consensus. They may move laterally and/or with a much lesser depth change than is depicted by the presenter in the video. This may happen seasonally, for some fish in some waters, but not in response to a cold front or on daily feeding movements. (Bass may change depths as much as 30ft to chase and strike prey, but must return quickly to their acclimation depth.)

One of my GoTo's for a long time now has been the 6" Mr. Twister. They are dirt cheap and I've bought them in the 100 packs. I boil the tails and fish them as a swimming worm -just a killer bait and technique.

OK. I was wondering about the position of the bass in relation to the rocks. Also, what's going on at 15 ft there -in the 2D color shot? Plankton? Thermocline?

Ouch! Cabin fever striking already?? While I see Raul's point, that the water in front of you -the spot- may be handled the same way in both natural and reservoirs lakes (I use the latter term bc there are plenty of man-made smaller waters that are more like natural lakes than impounded rivers), there can be some appreciable differences between res and natural, respectively: -base food chain: often limnetic vs littoral (often rooted macrophyte) -prey base: often shad vs bluegill, perch, or young bass -response to precipitation in terms of turbidity -water level fluctuation -effects of current from water regulation activity on fish activity No we can't just say there are only two types of bass lake! Lowland res can be like many natural lakes, and highlands share characteristics with oligotrophic lakes, or many quarries for that matter. And the water in front of you most probably has to be dealt with in similar fashion. However, there are some appreciable differences between the two. If you weren't hip to them, you might find yourself dumbfounded -like the first time I fished a res and couldn't catch a darn thing -"what is going on with those fish???!!" -until the water began to move and bingo! Reminds me of a canal I fished a lot once upon a time. Yes, it was man-made lol. Current weighed in heavy. In most natural lakes I fish, not so much.

Wayne, is there any current running there? OK, this is getting to be cheating lol. Great thread. Amazing posts Wayne. Thanks for sharing them.

"Reinforcement" is the holy grail in fishing! Each year and day can certainly throw us curves however.

The Ned Rig method is pretty much a (better and more durable) reinvention of an old idea called "Do-Nothing" fishing introduced by Charlie Brewer a good 40 years ago. As MO_LMB says, it's a "no-feel" technique which essentially means: If you feel something that wasn't you, it's time to set the hook. Brings back deeply etched memories for me. My first real consistent success in bass fishing came when I adopted Charlie Brewer's methods, and ran with it from there adopting various plastics parts and tying my own jigs. I loved the Beetle-spins too, and adopted the clip-on overhead spinners into my UL jig boxes. Then there was Dan Gapen's river slipping and his Ugly Bug jig. Just great stuff there. The "Ned-Rig" I'd come to on my own back in the late 70s. The rig was an obvious adaptation to make for a young cash-strapped angler who couldn't throw away his broken plastics. I found just the heads of worms -the simplest of grubs -very effective on SM and LM alike. Yes, I caught lots of little ones, but the little jigs took lots of the bigger ones too. In fact, oftentimes catching bigger ones one after another (and not wading through dinks) had to do with finding them. The big ones (up into the 4lb range) liked those little jigs too. As to fishing them around wood: As T9 mentions above the Ned Rig has been used primarily in silt bottomed reservoirs with little cover. Such a rig will work anywhere you are confronted with open coverless water. I however did fish them around wood at times and found that some light wire hooks (esp the "tinned" ones) could bend open enough to pull free from snags -even on a fresh 4lb line. Bend em back and keep fishing.

This is true if taken from a wide scale. Focus in to specific waters and times and things will often narrow down a bit. There are even patterns to be found. There are places bass won't be, and each water and season can offer different challenges and opportunities for bass. Great starting question and I'd suggest you get to reading as it's a big topic as varied as the waters bass make livings in.

Well... I can't answer that question bc I didn't fish this year, being overseas. But I'll ditto the value in keeping records. I can't be everywhere and my memory is not what it used to be. Or, it never was all that great and I just didn't know it, until l started keeping records. Reviewing my logs of previous trips saves me time and stupid mistakes. Also ditto to not fooling yourself as to whether your water has big fish to offer or not. If enough anglers visit a water body, they'll find some of those big fish. They are rarely a big secret. More likely, they are rare, or non-existent. Start ahead of the game and target waters that grow big fish.

Well after moving west I can say that this analogy works out better for whitetails than it does for mulies. Mountain mulies are known for "random roaming" and it's a bugger to pattern. I suppose it's more like chasing bass targeting open water schooling prey. That said, I use topos for mulies and elk as there are features that provide easier travel, good bedding areas, and the best/most abundant food options. Mark out potentials, ground truth them, then know when to be there. Pay attention to weather, conditions, and circumstances. It's a real world out there.

I actually have a picture of my first, a rock bass, caught in ‘65 or ‘66. This trip to the Raquette River in northern NY started the whole thing for me. Those memories are forever etched in my mind. I remember my dad cutting saplings for my brother and me with a hatchet. Dad rigged it with black nylon braid and probably a snelled hook. I remember feeling apprehensive standing in the tippy boat. I remember the smell of mothballs and must in the life preserver that had hung in the cabin over the long northern winters. And I remember that first fish -or at least its bite. I was distracted, a bit nervous about the boat moving under my feet when I did, until I received a tug on my line, from down in that mysterious water below us. I was shocked. I remember the feeling was “That wasn’t me. There’s something…alive…down there!” Later, I remember my Dad coming in after dark with the other men, with two BIG fish. Bass (smallmouths) they were and I was in awe. Dad caught them on a Jitterbug his father had given him back in the early 1950s. That particular plug has a story all its own. I still have it and have caught many bass on it since. Some pics from the 70s, when my fishing success took off, after getting hold of Fishing Facts, Spoonpluggin', and In-Fisherman. Natural? Hmmm…not sure what that means. I fished a lot. I suppose starting young helps. There is no shortcut really. I’m glad of that. I wouldn’t trade that time for any other.

Thanks, Howard. I enjoyed the article. In the small reservoirs I fish along the CO front range, predatory birds are almost constant threats to fish. We have kingfishers, terns, various herons (both day and night), grebes, mergansers, osprey, bald eagles, and pelicans. We have several nesting pairs of osprey that scan my waters daily. I've watched bald eagles nabbing fish (usually carp -esp the bright orange fish-bowl releases ). A ring of pelicans can be almost frightening to watch in their efficiency -especially during drought years. And watching grebes hunting in clear water under bright skies has given me a respect for endothermy that I couldn't have realized prior. They are fast and relentless! Again, thanks for being a catalyst for an interesting discussion.

As an angler, I'm apt to use 'dink' to describe anything that's smaller than the expectation of quality in that water, although I'm more apt to say "smalls" or "little ones". For the water's around my present home, that's fish under 11-12" -depending on how much they impress me or how much my ego needs a boost that day . "Quality bass" tend to be 15" or 16" up. In many of my waters, larger females tend to be 18 to 20". Anything past that is a rare fish. Being primarily interested in how nature works though I'm more apt to use the term "immature" and in this light these are the bass still in the process of learning/"tuning to" their environment. Most of those won't be around by next year to be counted. In reality this may have little to do with size as bass can mature as small as 9" or 10" in some poor quality waters.

Ah! I've busted that myth -in the other direction. Years with large hatches of bass in ponds the fishing crashes, until we go to little jigs or in one case streamer flies, and bang bang bang! Bass CAN become selective, or... focused. Granted I've only had this happen twice over the years -that I've been hip to anyway. But they were memorable for the sheer numbers of bass fry and fingerlings and the difficulty in getting the larger bass to bite standard sized lures. We solved the problem to our satisfaction by "matching the hatch" and the lesson left an impression. Here's another myth-buster: "Never say never".

I assume everything is a myth right up front, just to get it over with.

Always loved Jonathan Winters. It's apparent he's really fished from his familiarity with tackle, and his fish impersonations are pretty good too. What's interesting is that he wrote this for a national television audience in 1963 -a time period when proportionally more people fished compared to today. I wonder if such a skit would be lost on a "national audience" today? Would such a monologue fly on Letterman, Lenno or Fallon? Doubtful.

Curious where your question stems from.

Poetic license.

Cold water bass seem to respond well to short aggressive vertical motion, with little horizontal movement. This is not to say that cold adapted bass won't chase, at times. Blade-baits (Silver Buddy's, etc.), lipless, jigs, spoons, do this well. But slow crawls can work well too. Proximity matters here. Finding concentrations of bass and fishing s-s-s-s-sl-l-l-l-l-o-o-o-o-o-w-w-w-w-w, can work really well at times. I used to tie jigs and fished hair, marabou, then plastic, as waters warmed. A real breakthrough for me came when I found I could catch bass stacked up in creek channel turns by slowing down to a painful crawl. I did this by tying a hair jig on a 1/16oz Slider Head using a wide fan of deer hair, a buoyant plastic trailer, and a clip-on overhead spinner. This thing allowed me to catch those stacked bass consistently weeks earlier than I had previously. As you can read by all the responses above, there are no hard and fast rules that cover, but there are restricted parameters to work within. How wide they are depends on a range of conditions and circumstances. Generally, bass are indeed slowed way down in cold water, but they will feed, and are capable of chasing if they know they can catch prey. Every water body is different and circumstances change at all time scales.

I'm trying to stay outta this, for several reasons: discussing color in fishing is like discussing religion, and I haven't put together what I want to say about it to my satisfaction yet. But... There is one assumption (and yes its an assumption but one that's got some heavy backing) we can make about "green" to bass and humans. It's the same "green", regardless of the potential variations in brightness, saturation, hue, and... neuronal, emotional, interpretations elicited. Bass not only see red to green wavelengths of visible light but have two peak spectral sensitivities at yellow-green and red-orange. The proper question is, "What function might this serve?" The answer is that the green is adapted to bass original environment -an adaptation to vegetated environments -both rooted and planktonic that reflect greens and absorb shorter and longer wavelengths. This is not only suggested by looking at bass, but holds for a number of fish from various taxonomic groups having vision adapted to their environments. Why the red? It's considered a derived, later evolved, add-on to provide contrast to separate camouflaged prey from that green background. Can we use this info? Possibly, yes, at times. But... the real question is, when does "color" trump other factors in the real world -a very very big complex place. Thus there's a heck of lot more to the story on any given fishing day. And in fishing, not all of that is even about "what the bass can see". Kevin Van Dam relates a story in one of his books" (paraphrased): Four pros were sharing a large main lake point, and catching bass on worms. Each found a particular color that drew the most strikes. "The only one that worked", they each said when it was over. Interesting thing was, all four ended up "divining" 4 entirely different colors! Obviously, there's more to these angler's stories than "what the bass can see".

Fish don't even have a "visual cortex"; that's a mammalian add-on. Apparently, fish process visual info right in the mesencephalon (known in fish as the "optic lobes") without sending it on for processing in the neocortex like mammals do.

"Seeing Red" ...a poem...Ahem... Red is an apple ripe on the vine. Red is of Kool-Aide, grapes, and wine. Red is of tumescence, lipstick, lingerie, and high, high heels. Red's pretty important to people. Tackle manufacturer's see Green when they offer Red! Makes me see Red.

Good description. Habitat elements in place (and recognized and understood). From there it's all about season, conditions (trends and immediate), and circumstances.

"Interesting" is what motivates me to fish in the first place! Time in "the library" is part of my fishing time. I'm aware of what you are talking about, and have seen it too. However, images -run through all the iterations from ccd to printing- can be deceiving. That one image is of low resolution and highly pixilated. Many shadow areas are "blue" in such images. You are catching floridanus, right? I agree. There is an awful lot of science (best attempts in a complex and imperfect world) that underlies what we presently know about bass, and there's more to come. Doubt anyone would give all that up -have it erased from memory- and have a go with a blank slate, stick and string. Unfortunately, it appears that line color, even visibility, probably plays a generally small role in affecting bites.

hawgenvy, are you able to post an image of that?