Hot water fishing, man, it can be tough. And the reason is during the hot days and during the hot summer, during the course of the day the fish move around quite a bit actually. And you could be fishing the right lure, the right presentation at the right place, but at the wrong time and not catch any fish and get real frustrated. So let me talk you... let me walk you through the course of a day during a hot summer day of fishing and how to approach this.
First things first, in the early morning hours when it's just dawn, you got low light levels, get up on the flats. Now I'm not talking the very backs of coves, the backs of pockets. You want flats that are near deeper water, so closer to the main body of water. Or if you got a really big flat, don't go all the way to the back of the flats. But the flats, especially if they got weeds on it or scattered boulders, scattered stump, any kind of cover on it, that's what you want. A barren flat that doesn't have anything, skip those.
The best way to approach those is first of all with buzz baits. I like going covering a lot of water with buzz baits. You can cover water quickly and the fish are aggressive and they're apt to hit top water lures. With a buzz bait you want to go a little bit, as slow as you can, but keep it up on the surface of the water. So a super fast retrieve isn't necessary, although sometimes bring along, give it a quick pop, and then keep the retrieve. Even those little quick sputters and splashes can attract bass. But otherwise, a steady retrieve works just fine.
Another bait that works really well is a spinner bait. Spinner baits can be fished a lot of different ways, but primarily cast it out and wind it back in. I like to use a double Indiana blade or a double willow leaf blade for this white spinner bait with either silver blades or gold blades. And again, you cast it out, you can try a couple of different retrieves. A medium retrieve can work really well right across the tops of weeds, works exceptionally well. You can also burn it back so it just bulges the surface. Don't let it break the surface, but forms kind of like a wake just under the surface. That can be extraordinarily effective. And then you can also fish it a little bit slower and get it a bit deeper. If the weeds are a little bit deeper, if you're fishing a little bit deeper flat, you can fish it that way.
Another bait to consider is a rattle trap or a vibrating crankbait, a lipless crankbait. Typically a chrome with black back or chrome with blue back works really well during low-light conditions. And again, you can buzz it back quickly or do a normal steady retrieve.
With all three of these baits, what I like to do is fan cast in a clock-type pattern. So my first cast might be 10 o'clock, the next cast would be 11 o'clock, next cast 12, then one, 1, 2, and 3, so on, that kind of thing, just to cover the water. Then move. Either you move the boat or walk down the shoreline, rinse, lather, repeat. That way you cover the water really well and you can get all those active bass.
Now, if you're doing that and they're getting the bite, it's going good, but then the bite starts to wane, you can go to a slower-moving bait. I like to use like Senko's soft plastic stick baits. You can use a weightless Texas rig over the weeds or you can use a wacky rig version of it, either way, it can be very effective catching those bass that aren't really willing to chase down baits. Another is a fluke, weightless fluke, white. Just go out there and let it sink, twitch it, let it flutter down, give it a little twitch, let it flutter down. A little bit slower way of fishing, but that can catch a lot of bass.
Now, as the sun gets higher up on the water in the morning, sometimes those bass will happen as they move. You can tell because the bite just like dies off and you can't buy a bite. First thing to do is to go to the next deeper water. This could be an outside weed line that drops off into 15 to 20 feet of water. It could be the nearest point that goes off into deeper water. Maybe there's a creek channel that runs along or it swings up to the shoreline and gets some deeper water there. Find something nearby that's a bit deeper than that flat and typically the bass will pull off to that and you can catch them that way. The best way to do it is with deeper diving crankbaits. I like to use crankbaits that go from 8 to 15 feet deep and cover the outside weed lines that way. Maybe catch a little bit of weeds as you do it and yank the bait out of the weeds. That change of direction sometimes triggers a strike. The colors I use are just shad pattern, perch pattern, bluegill, your typical bait fish. You can also probe it with a football head jig and crawl it along the bottom along those weed edges or again those points along those creek channels. Just kind of crawl along there and imitate a crawdad and you can get bites that way.
Those are typically the two ways I go after those intermediate areas. What I call that intermediate is just because as it gets warmer the bass are going to do one of two things. They're either going to move up shallow or they're going to go deep. Let's talk about shallow first. They go shallow. They've got a couple of different options for them. They've got docks. They've got weeds which is mostly in the form of matted weeds and they have thick cover that they can get into.
Let's talk about the docks first. The docks, if the bass are up under the docks, sometimes they go up underneath them, especially the larger docks, but if they're on pilings they're accessible because you can skip baits underneath them. A Senko is an excellent bait to skip. So is a tube. And Grubs, a lot of people don't talk about skipping grubs under docks, but I assure you they're doing it and they're catching a lot of fish doing it. But you can skip baits up under these docks with pilings, especially if you've got weeds on the sides of them. That's perfect. That's a sanctuary for the bass to get up under there and they can feed on baitfish and they feel real comfortable under those docks. You can skip a bait right up underneath there. Remember there's boats sometimes that are attached to these docks. If you can skip along between the boat and the dock, that kind of stuff, those crevices, typically that's where the bass are hanging out and you can get bit that way.
Floating docks, to me, are even better in the summertime because now they've got a definite cover and the bass can set up underneath it. The hard part is getting to them. I like it when it's a little bit breezy out, then that's when I target those floating docks because typically you've got weeds on each side of them and if you've got a breeze coming from one direction, it moves that dock just a little bit and now you've got a little opening between that weed line and the dock. And if you can flip a jig or a Texas rig plastic creature bait up in there, let it flutter down, boom, you'll get hit.
Be careful when you get that bite. Sometimes it's hard to detect. First time that happened to me, I flipped in there and the lure was following about three feet of water and the line kept peeling off. It was like three, four, five, six feet. Finally, it probably felt like ten feet of water. I realized, it's not that deep here. Why does my line keep peeling off? Oh, a fish might have it. I set the hook, boom. I had thrown the bait on this side of the dock and this fish jumps out of the water on this side of the dock, way over here. I'm like, whoa. I had to get him back underneath and back and around. It was a neat little fight. The point is I didn't feel the bite. Pay attention to your line where it enters the water. Sometimes they just grab and run off with it. You don't see the line jump or anything, so pay attention, sometimes those bites are subtle. But fishing docks can be really good.
The next form is weeds, typically matted vegetation. The bass can get up underneath there. The water is cooler there. There's a lot of zooplankton microorganisms. There's baitfish in there. Plenty of stuff in there to feed on. Lots of cover and it's dark and shady. Great for them to ambush these things. Getting to them can be, there's two different ways to do it. One is bring something across the surface, like a hollow-bodied frog, hollow-bodied rat, or a spoon, like a Johnson Silver Minnow. Bring it across the top at a steady pace. Then when you get to an opening, pause it and let it sit there for a second. A lot of times the bass will track it. They'll follow that noise and then it gets an opening, boom, then they'll clock it. So make sure you're targeting those openings, cast past those openings and bring it to those openings and let it pause.
Sometimes they'll blast right on through the canopy and that can scare the bejeebies out of you. So when that happens, resist the temptation to set the hook. Bass sometimes will jump up and hit it and miss it and they'll take several attempts at it to finally hit it. If you set the hook when you see the blow-up, you're going to take the bait away from them and you won't catch them. So wait until you feel the fish actually tug on your rod. And when you feel that weight, then pop them. Then you'll catch a lot more fish that way.
The other way to go after fish that are under canopies is to punch a bait through the canopy. And it's a technique called punching. Yes. Shit, wonder why it's called that. You're using a weight that's at least a half ounce, bullet sinker, up to a one and a half ounce, with a slim profile creature bait, like a beaver style bait or a worm or a Senko, something like that that can get through the canopy without getting any appendages hung up on it. It'll punch through a lot easier that way. You cast up in the air and let it come down, boom, and it penetrates that canopy. When it comes through, a lot of times when it first comes through, the bass are right there and they'll annihilate it right then and there. Other times as it falls, you have to feed it line sometimes, as it falls through the water column, the bass will hit it then and another opportunity for them is once it hits the bottom, you give a little twitch and sometimes, whack, they'll hit it then. Again, be a line watcher, a little bit more difficult to detect the bite because of the canopy is kind of interfering with your feel. So you got to be on point for those bites, but it can be a very productive way to catch bass in shallow water on these hot days.
Finally, in the shallow water is cover that they can be in. This can be in the form of flooded bushes, timber, laydowns, or thick weeds that they can be buried up in. And you got to go in after them. And flipping and pitching is the best way to do it. Either with jigs, tip with a craw, or go in with soft plastic baits. I like to use creature baits in this case. It could be like a brush hog or it could be a rage craw. Even a rage bug can be very productive. It kind of has a bluegill-type profile to it. It's a variety of different plastic baits out there you can use, but you rig them Texas style so they don't get hung up in this stuff and you can flip and pitch deep into this stuff and draw them out.
Typically, the best way to approach it, say for example, you got to lay down, start with the outside edges first and pick off any bass that might be very active on the outside part of it and then work your way in deeper and get those bass that are hanging out in the heart of it. If you start in the middle of it and you catch a bass, then you get to spook all the fish that are around it that you might have been able to catch. So pay attention to your approach on these things. Same thing with any kind of cover, any kind of flooded bushes, things like that. So that's shallow.
Now the other end of the spectrum, as I mentioned earlier, is if they go deep. Deep is not going to have so much weeds. You're going to be fishing mostly structure here. Although you may have some sunken brush piles that you can fish. Aside from that, you can have rock piles, you can have channel ledges, deep points, humps, those type of things is what you're targeting here. And they can be approached by several different ways. The first one that I like to use is crankbaits. I like to get a deep diving crankbait that gets down to the depth of where this is at and try to bounce it along the bottom, ricochet it off rocks, and get that erratic action and trigger a strike.
Typically, the bass are pretty active this time of year. So using a bait-fish-colored crankbait and fishing it so it's ricocheting off the bottom triggers a lot of bites. That's usually the most productive way to do it. You can also use slower-moving baits. I like to use a football jig for this, throw it out, and crawl a football jig along the bottom, imitating a crawdad just kind of bubbling its way on the bottom. And you can effectively fish pretty much any kind of structure using a jig.
Texas rig bait works pretty good too. I'm a little reticent to do that because that bullet sinker can, if you've got a lot of rocks around, you can wedge up in those rocks and get stuck. You get hung up a little bit more. But if you don't have a lot of rocks present, then Texas rig works just fine. Just pay attention to what you're fishing.
And then finally, a finesse-type approach. You can use a split shot rig with a small finesse bait behind it. You can cover a lot of water with that. It's amazing how fast you can fish that rig. Finesse doesn't necessarily mean slow. In a split shot rig, you can fish it almost as fast as you do a crankbait and cover a lot of water. But now you're using a small three-inch bait, maybe a tube or a grub behind it, a three-inch grub. That can be very, very effective. And a drop shot rig. If you find specific pieces of structure, like a hump or a rock pile, or you've got maybe a deep buried weed line on a point that you want to really pick apart, you use a drop shot for that. And just use, again, a small three-inch bait or a small finesse worm, something like that. And you can work it methodically and very slowly and pick apart that structure and catch a lot of fish that way.
So that's kind of how you go across the course of a day during a hot day of fishing. Hope that helps. For more tips and tricks like this, visit BassResource.com.
