Hi all,

I've fished for almost 70 years now and people say I have a better than average retentive memory , so lets hope I can put these thoughts in some kind of logical order.

  I've read many thoughts, ideas, and questions on what spooks bass. Pinging sonar, trolling motors, banging noise from boats, canoes, splashing turtles, all manner of things.

In my experience, in fishing places with little human presence, the fish are more easily spooked by any disturbance we make. After all, they are not used to our presence. Anything out of the ordinary means danger to them.

 On the other hand, fish that live in bodies of water with a great human presence would learn to ignore most of the disturbances we make. They could not afford to wait until the lake was quiet to eat. They have to eat what they can, when they can.

 I can only use my own experience as a basis to put these thoughts out, but this is what I've experienced.

  I have fished places with little to none human presence and I can tell you just a paddle hitting the side of a canoe would shut the fishing down for an hour.

 I have also fished places with a constant human presence, fisherman, pleasure boaters, jet skies, all day every day. On one of these lakes I've caught bass in three feet of clear water , right under the boat. The bass watched me drop a Senko in front of it and teased it until it hit. My PB was caught on one of these lakes. Trolling motor going, sonar pinging, in six feet of water over a weed bed. It hit a spinnerbait five feet from the boat. I saw it come out of the weeds and nail my bait. Constant human presence made them numb to our noises.

  I guess what I'm trying to say is, from what I can see, fishing a out of the way, less trafficked area, it pays to be stealthy. Fishing more populated heavily trafficked bodies of water, not so much.

 

I'm fishing clear water. Lighter line and a stealthy approach has paid off for me. I stay back a good distance to cast, and try to keep boat noise to a minimum. It's worked in the clear water I fish.

Have made the effort to incorporate Guido Hibdon's finesse techniques in my bass fishing. Certainly not all of it but enough to make it meaningful with my fishing. Still, use my bait caster more but finesse fishing downsizing line 6 to 8lbs and small lures 1/8oz and smaller have been productive.

Good Fishing

I have had the opposite experience.

 

I fished a retention pond that is nearby a sturgeon farm my brother manages that has loads of bass that have literally never seen a lure or human and I got to fish for them for the first time in their lives.

 

For the first hour - it was literally fish on every cast in gin clear water that could see us casting and reeling them in again and again and after about 1 hour it slowly became really good casts to cover only worked nicely and then after about 2 hours they wouldn't touch anything and were nowhere to be seen.

 

This is backed up by multiple studies that are referenced in bass fishing podcasts I listen to fairly regularly.

 

Bass learn noises, shapes, colors in all manner of specificity and generality and learn to associate them with unpleasant stimulation and learn to avoid.

 

I have seen bass leave a cove and watch us fish it from behind probably to return to whatever it was they were doing when we decided to leave.

 

It really really depends as with most things in bass fishing but they definitely definitely learn from regular fishing pressure that people are bad news.

 

I regularly fish small pressured spots where people fish all the time every week and keep most of what they catch and people kindly walk up to me and assure me that there are no bass in the pond to be caught and that it seems dead almost every year. 

 

People put live bluegill on hooks dangling over active beds and can't get bit.  These are smart fish. They do not want to be seen. They do not want you to know they are there and unless you are trying very hard to catch them or see them you will never know they are there. 

 

They absolutely learn to feed when the sun goes down and when the lakes and ponds are closed. It is very easy to get the calories they need everyday during that period of time - make no mistake.

 

I regularly catch 6+ lb bass at this pond in the wee hours of the morning in the dark on all manner of lures as though they had never been caught before - when the sun rises - nary a fish to be had unless you get very very methodical.

 

I think that what you say about noise spooking fish is generally true and you can definitely shut an area down being noisy and obnoxious even if fish have never seen people before. But my general experience is absolutely that they learn to avoid people from fishing pressure.

 

Generally speaking, when you're hunting a wild animal in its natural habitat where it has all of the advantages, it pays to be stealthy regardless of how many people the fish have seen or not.

I could not agree more with @Pat Brown I fish some ponds that get a lot of pressure. Publicly stocked ponds. You see people at them all weekend. If ya talk to them they will tell ya they haven’t had any bites. I got a small one over there. You find  plastic worms on the ground. Bobbers near the shore. I can go during the week I the morning and throw a swim jig around and catch fish all morning. 1 pond in the chain is loaded with 1 pound fish. Another isn’t as hot of a bite but has much bigger fish. 
 

I believe they get used to people. And noise and stomping around. I believe they get conditioned to lures also. Or the size or flash or noise of a lure. 

Couldn't say it any better than @Pat Brown did. 

 

I've seen it perfectly exemplified with grouper season in Florida. A lot of species are closed to harvest most of the year. When you're spearfishing during those closed seasons, keeper grouper will literally swim over to you to check you out and show no fear. Once that season's been in for a few days, they're running for their holes if you get within 50 feet of them. Just takes a couple days and a handful of negative interactions with divers to change their behavior entirely.

 

There's plenty of studies on deer hunting that show that it takes about 3 days of hunting pressure for the deer to pattern the hunters and begin avoiding them. 

 

I have a tournament on a small lake this Saturday. The blast off area is a nice flat near the launch. Try and fish it first thing after 20 boats blast off and you aren't getting bit. But after a couple hours of things being more settled, the fish are back on that flat and eating... until all the boats start coming back to weigh in. 

I fish a city lake often, as it's convenient to me. The part I primarily fish is very heavily pressured. Most people you talk to do not catch anything, or very few and far between. The ones that do have success are those that use live minnows, and mostly it's crappie.

 

I have seen bass swim 3' from the shore right in front of me while fishing, ignoring both me and the lures I was using.

I also have noticed that if I start fishing with a crankbait, and get nothing, switching to a soft plastic with a more subtle presentation doesn't usually do any good. But starting with the soft plastic, often will produce a few. After 1-2 fish, then I rarely get another. The most I've caught in 1 day (a few hours) is 4, best I recall, which included 1 crappie that hit a grub.

 

Lures that are different than what everyone else uses seem to work well.

 

I have an old school Spit'n Image, which has worked for me several times, when others usually use poppers and ploppers.

 

I've had success on crankbaits that are out of the norm, or out of the norm for my local, such as a shallow shad rap, shad rap, or squarebills with the hooks tied on to change the sound.

 

Deadsticking a soft plastic has worked, as well as slowly working a split shot. Texas rigging a grub has worked.

 

Oddly, I've seen several friends pull bass out of there using a ned rig. I don't understand this, because neds are popular and a lot of people fish them. But then again... crankbaits, spinnerbaits and plastic worms in a traditional rigging are what the majority of people use.

Oh man, interesting topic. I have had very different experiences, but I think there might be an underlying principle at work between our experiences.

 

I mostly do what I consider urban fishing. That means lakes and ponds where you can see downtown or just a ten minute drive from it. The pressure there is insane. I carry a trash bag with me just to clean up the piles fishing junk that washes on the shore. I get bit, often times very nice bass, but only because I'm fishing at different times (early) and locations (bushwhacking) than most other city people. They are spooky fish and you will absolutely (even bass nerds like us) get skunked many days 

 

Moved out to a more rural spot for the year, at least by my standards as there's no skyscrapers, and it's night and day. There's a little housing development pond I can walk to, it sees very little fishing, and it's almost unbelievably good. I'm hauling four to five pounders out regularly and never leave without at least having hooked up with at leat one bass. They even fight differently, very active, athletic, and angry. Good spots on the nearby sound yield similar results. 

 

That matches my experience fishing lower pressure, clearer waters of the upper Midwest. I fished the lake my in-laws live on, probably one of the few LMB anglers out there, and it was similarly lights out. Those fish just were not used to somebody coming for them.

 

So maybe there's some sort of golden mean at work. Zero or hordes of human activity means very spooky fish. Moderate levels means very accommodating fish?

Could be my experiences are the outlier rather than the norm. For example, one lake we fish has a nice dock at the boat launch. Last year a LM took up residence under it. We called it Fred. I caught it twice last year. All summer long fifty plus boats a day launched and recovered from that dock. Every time we launched, there was Fred. I can only surmise he was used to all the traffic. At least for us, he never swam off. I did have to look under the dock to see him though.

When I show up at the lake, the bass laugh so hard they usually forget about eating for a day or two.  My friend has caught on to this and goes fishing a couple days after me.  The bass are hungry by then and he always catches them.  The bass in one lake have grown so accustom to this pattern, that they will bite my friends lure the day before I go fishing just to save me the embarrassment of having to go fishing at all.

 

I haven't given up.  I have a plan.  I'm going to go to the lake dressed like my friend.  I will arrive two hours late, already be 5 beers in to a six pack, make more noise than an invading army, fish a floating Rapala with a giant swivel, cast it 5 feet on a $10 rod reel combo with ancient 20 lbs mono, and run out of gas 100 yards out from the dock. 

 

If this doesn't work, nothing else will.