Big Indiana Bass

Another Great One Remembered

I was reminded of another great bass pioneer last night while surfing the Net. There isn't much I could find about him currently on the web, but I remember reading about him quite a bit when I first started getting into bass fishing around the late 70's. His nickname was "Mr. Bomber", and he was "THE" pitchman for the lure company of the same name. He won the Texas State Bass Championship 3 out of 4 years back in the 60's and is inducted into the Texas Fishing Hall of Fame. He travelled the country quite a bit doing promotional work for Bomber. His name was Floyd Mabry and he was a heavy tackle, play with 'em in the boat cranking kind of guy. He passed away back in 1991, but I did come across this article from the Holmes County Herald date Nov. 21, 1968. You can zoom out or just use "the hand" cursor to scroll down through the brief write-up.

Fractions of Refraction

By Richard Ziert

We know fish use shadow and other positions in diminishing light for concealment and foraging. “Diminishing” is all about penetration, scattering, and refraction.

Light refracts in the atmosphere with air density.

( Clouds – Humidity – Pollution Index – Early & Late in the day – Seasonal Angle of the Sun ),

Light refracts at the waters surface because of the boundary of air to water and the surface temperature difference from the atmosphere.

( Spring – Summer – Fall – Winter )

Light scatters again with wind stirred water surface chop.

( None – Mild – Medium – Heavy ).

Then light scatters off of particles in the water column.

( Clear – Stained – Heavy Stain )

Light refracts with the density and quality of water.

( Gradually, as water deepens – pH Changes )

But light refracts still again at the boundary of two distinct temperatures beneath the surface.

(Heavily Shaded Areas - Over hangs – Weed Beds – Strategically Located Bluff Walls - Docks – Lay Downs –  Rock Piles - Drop Offs - etc. )

Thermoclines are  just such differences; explaining why not much light gets through all those layers and areas of water.

This same difference occurs with any similar water temperature change.

( Incoming Streams, Heavily Shaded Areas, Underwater Springs, and even Rainfall, mixing with lake water).

Adding these “fractions of refraction” together at any given time on any given day can give fisherman a better handle on how deep or shallow to present baits and where their greatest success will be triggered. The more the degree of these factors come into play, the shallower the average bite. Couple this with presentation speed and bait characteristics (less Light – slower/greater contrast/larger profile/noisier ) and you will give yourself a giant leg up over the majority of fisherman on the lake.

Briefly Revisiting the Inherited Traits LMB Study

Back on the subject of bass catchability as an inherited trait for a moment. We also covered it HERE. I came across this posted editorial yesterday in the Outdoors column of The Washington Times by Gene Mueller and thought it rather entertaining. Click the link and take a quick read for yourself.

When the Old Becomes New Again

A few weeks ago, KVJ was hanging out at the qualifier on Brookville when one of the better sticks on L. Waveland ran into him and got to chit chatting. At some point he looked in KVJ's box and saw a certain colored Poes crankbait and mentioned that that particular bait was the "hot" bait over on Waveland right now. When KVJ told me that I just had to laugh. What are the odds that an 18 year old kid just happened to have the "hot" Waveland color of a particularly old bait? Pretty good if he fishes with me a lot - LOL.

Bass fishing is a funny sport. We all like to figure out a secret bite, or a hot color that the competition hasn't quite dialed into yet. I'm no different than anyone else and that mentality is a big driver for why I still fish as seriously as I do. When we do figure it out, however that comes about, we'd like to believe that we've found something new. In reality, much of what we do is nothing more than the old coming full circle and being "new" again.

I started fishing tourneys on Waveland about 20 years ago, and began to get really dialed into the bite out there a few years later. Back when KVJ was celebrating his first birthday and still crapping his Pampers, my partner and I were whacking the competition on Waveland in the days of double team limits and a declining fishery. We were often accused of cheating, but we simply put in our time and figured out a couple bites that the competition hadn't. We also learned the lake like the proverbial "back of our hand".

One of those bites was the deep crankbait bite, and we threw those exact same colored Poe's baits back then. They were the "hot" baits at the time, but others before us that we learned from did very well deep cranking with a particular color Mann's 20+. We were just more specific with our presentations, trying to replicate the approach of one deep cranking newcomer to the national tourney scene, David Fritts.  Having been tipped off to this bite last year by others who've fished out there with me, guys getting on Ebay and buying up these "hot" baits now as well as using other deep cranks aren't doing anything but replicating what us old timers knew was a "hot" bite out there over two decades ago. And, of course newer baits like the Strike King series of cranks and Rapala's DT series work well too, it's just that everyone has those baits because you can get them right off the shelf of your local tackle store, and they're new and they're popular. That's one reason why some guys are taking these baits and getting custom paint jobs on them. Still, they do catch a lot of fish right out of the box "as is". I guess my only gripe is with those out there now pretending to have discovered this "new" bite.

The cool thing to me is that the crankbait bite is still just as "hot" in 2009 as it was in 1989. Even cooler is that the specific holes, or more correctly the "spot on the spots" haven't changed over that same time period. Guys try and get all secretive and place brushpiles out there now days, but those brushpiles really just get in the way and detract from what is actually holding the fish there. Fortunately the brushpiles break down and disappear after a few years. In the mean time, they're easy to find and I'll gladly add them to the GPS unit and fish them for bonus bites while they're still attractive to fish.

My long time tourney partner, Bryan Johnson, and Jim Huguenard, his draw partner for a tourney on Waveland today just reiterated the above point. Jim caught his first ever Indiana limit and Bryan was right there with him, the boat combining for nearly 22 pounds of bass today (2nd and 3rd place respectively) fishing some of the same "20 year old holes" I showed to Bryan. The best part for Bryan due to his work schedule is that he didn't need to take any time off prefishing or burn up any weekend time with the family. I simply gave him some lineups and marked a few spots for him and the two went out there and executed. BTW, Josh McDermott ended up popping the boys for the second year in a row out there ;) I showed Josh a few spots out there last year, but from the sounds of it he didn't need much in the way of deep spots as the shallow water morning bite was on, and Josh is a shallow water specialist.

Speaking of shallow water, a lot of guys don't realize just how easy it is to figure out where you need to concentrate your efforts when hitting a lake. Everybody gets all wrapped up in the dock talk and the patterns and get to hopping here and there, but 10 minutes with a graph would be so worth their time. The screen shot to the left (click to enlarge) is one from Waveland today and is pretty self explanatory. When you see shad schools balling up and trails of marauding bass sitting out over the drop and in intercept position, good things begin to happen. The key though is focusing on the depth of all this activity, in this case 6'-8'. Fish aren't pinned down on the break, or slid down toward the bottom of the drop. They're all up and active. This shot was from late in the day when the boat traffic had the shad pushed down, but you can bet it was an even shallower zone of activity first thing this morning before the boats started piling in. Bottom line is that within 10 minutes of hitting the lake, you could have easily determined that most all the good stuff was going to be coming from shallow water today and then adjusted your game plan appropriately. It would have been really easy to fish too deep today and miss out on all that activity if you weren't paying attention. Take home message is time spent idling is time spent wisely.

Twilight Time

By Richard Ziert
 
“Heavenly shades of night are falling – It’s twilight time”.             – Circa 1944 
 
This endearing melody has been recorded again and again by such as The Platters, Anne Murray, and Andy Williams. It is a love song. Its lyrics give support to those who fish late afternoon into evening. The song speaks of the mist of evening with purple curtains, deepening shadows, a rendezvous beneath the blue. Hum along with me as we grow nostalgic; as we see ourselves at these times.
 
There’s something here that goes beyond face value and into the night. Common knowledge tells us both the break of day and the approach of night are twilight time, and prove productive times to fish. The nuances of such conditions can further our catch.
 
WW2 - Bomber Command was tasked with the night bombing of Germany , and wore red-lenses in goggles for about an hour before flying a mission to provide night adaptation of vision. Submariners switch to red light before opening the hatch at night. Because white light briefly degrades night vision, these goggles or lights are designed to reduce the adaptation time from light to dark.
 
But what of this transition period for fish? Most experienced anglers notice a complete bite shut down after twilight for about an hour? Coincidence? Not hardly. These fish are adapting to their own form of night vision and are temporarily vision impaired. Timing and our place in the moment is everything in life. So it is with fish and fishing. For greatest percentage bets, fish shallow initially at twilight. Then as the black of night approaches, fish somewhat deeper, or  more shaded areas. These fish who were never shallow and have the foraging advantage of less light penetration, have already adapted to the light change. After about an hour, go shallow again if you wish.
 
“Together at last at twilight time.”

Very Interesting Stuff Out of Oregon

I came across this very intriquing story out of Oregon:

Lunker largemouth roam Lost Creek Lake

It brought up several questions/comments in my mind:

"We really don't want them taken out right away," Johnson says. "We want to see them have a chance. It was probably poor timing for us to put them there before Memorial Day weekend," he says.

Why can't they just put in place some type of mandatory catch and release practice for that lake on largemouth bass, possible even an 'emergency' ruling?

Still, the original stocking of rainbow trout and largemouth bass proved effective as largemouth feasted on fingerling rainbows and grew to become the largest largemouth in Oregon.

Interesting given their more northerly latitude. Perhaps the rainbow trout/giant largemouth bass relationship occurs regardless of locale? Also note that Yoder's two big swimbait bass featured on this site from Indiana both came from a pit stocked with rainbows.

Sometime in the mid 1980s, someone illegally released smallmouth bass in the reservoir, where they felt at home among the rocks and didn't struggle with fluctuating summer water levels as much as largemouth do. By the mid-1990s, smallmouth bass were everywhere and only a few big largemouth remained. Smallmouth were feasting on juvenile largemouth, and by 1997 the fishery was all but gone, another casualty to renegade fish-stocking.

Sucks from a bait bucket/armchair biologist point of view. Around here though it is usually illegal shad stockings. Still, we anglers need to realize that outside their native range, largemouth or smallmouth aren't necessarily a good thing. If they're not already in a body of water, there is probably a good reason why.

On the other hand, a very cool scenario playing out where smallmouth are severly outcompeting largemouth in a given environment or habitat situation. Probably not unlike the spotted bass saga in many mid-central and  southern reservoirs, as well as what happens in the lower ends of impoundments (SE US) where trophic levels are low.

Since then, groups like Johnson's committee have helped ODFW biologists catch bass in other lakes and release them into the reservoir.

Don't try this at home kids :) It is almost always frowned upon to transfer fish from one body of water to another, even when waters are very close to each other. The risk of transfer of some type of previously unintroduced pathogen/virus/critter/etc. is too great. Interesting that they would publicly mention this fact, though there are very few other ways in which to get mature bass into a body of water as cost to rear to that size would be prohibitive. On the other hand, you could also argue that fish reared in ponds on DNR properties that then subsequently get stocked into state waters is in essence no different than what is occurring here.

"They've been catching them so easily because all those Davis Lake fish have seen are flies," Johnson says. "They've never seen spinner baits before."

How cool is that? Conditioning? Pressure effects? To what level does this apparent conditioning really effect bass biting? For example, when some company comes out with a completely new worm design, is it really different enough via some cue that fish will bite it better than all the other commonly thrown worms? What about newly introduced colors on already existing and well utilized baits?

They also are planting willows and sinking discarded Christmas trees by the thousands each winter to create more largemouth habitat in the moonscape lake bed.

Can you really change just the basic cover in a lake and subsequently override other more seemingly dominant habitat characteristics enough to change a fishery? Would not things like water clarity, forage base and trophic level trump cover? IDNR has documented a slight increase in abundance of smallmouth bass over the years at both Monroe and especially at Patoka, explained presently by time and washing/removing some of the silt/dirt covering the underlying bedrock. Exposing more of this material and changing basic substrate seems to have created better habiatat conditions for the smallies in these reservoirs. 

A Bait Indiana Bass Anglers Have Forgotten

I was walking out of the marina Saturday afternoon when the local security officer waved at me to get my attention. He took a couple steps toward me and then spoke. "Hey Brian, I caught 18 yesterday".

I nodded and inquired, "white bass?"

"No, largemouth", he said. Now he had my attention. "Right over here and in this next bay over" he gestured, pointing to the cove just above the marina.

"Any size", I asked. He held his hands apart and motioned, "About like this". Looked about keeper sized to me. So I asked the big question next, my Mercury still running behind me as I was about to head out onto the lake myslef. "What did you catch them on?"

He got a grin on his face, stepped a couple paces closer, looked to either side as if to see if anyone was too close to overhear, and then stated in a softer tone than what he had been speaking in, "natural colored Touchdown worm."

"Really?"

"All in about an hour and a half on that little pre-rigged worm", he said, and with that, he strode off, duly impressed with his angling accomplishment from the previous day. And I have to admit, I was impressed to. It got me thinking back to "the old days", back when you couldn't fish a tourney up at Wawasee without seeing a red Touchdown worm tied onto at least one rod in every boat. The little worm that had accounted for who knows how much money from off the shallow weedbeds of the Ohio River. The prerigged worm that half the guys who made the State Team many moons ago up at Tippecanoe-Barbee used so effectively, swimming them over weed flats to secure their position atop the State Finals competition. Been there, done that, saw it all go down. Too much thought for one day, I had to try it again.

I admit, if you go in my garage and look at the tackle shop hanging on my walls as the wife refers to it, off on a far corner peghook of it's own, you'll find about a dozen and a half Touchdown worms still packaged and ready to roll. I stood there and looked through them, found a 6" purple-firetail worm and removed it from the pack. I pulled out a 7' spinning rod loaded with 8 pound test, tied on the swivel and worm, cut the little sinker it comes with in half and pinned it on the line just above the swivel. Then off to the bank I go, headed toward the riprap dam of the local lake for some crazy little experiment. Is it to prove the validity of the story the officer told me, or more a challenge that I too can fish this litle worm. Maybe a test just to see if the thing really does work still.

I pull into the parking lot, exit the truck, spinning rod now in hand as I stride down the grassy hillside to a corner of the dam. This is the shallow end with scattered weeds growing amongst the silty flat. I step down onto the rocks, make a nice toss across the weed flat, let the worm sink for 2-3 seconds and then commence a slow, steady retrieve. The worm gets almost all the way back to me, well within sight as I watch it "swim" it's little death spiral back to my feet. But before I can get it completely wound in a 14" bass rockets from an adjacent weed clump and sucks the worm in. Honest to God, first cast! I chuckle to myself, almost in disbelief as I try and remove the little hooks from the basses mouth. Can't believe I forgot the long-nosed pliers. You'll need them handy if you fish this worm. The hooks might be small, but because of that they penetrate gristle, and removing them with just your fingers can be a chore.

I fish down the rock bank of the dam a ways, some casts paralleling the rocks with a swimming retrieve, others cast out at a 45-degree angle away from the rocks where I let the worm settle and then fish it back like a mini Carolina rig, just a bit faster with sweeps and pauses. A couple more little fish here, another 14" bass there. I reach the spillway with some deeper water adjacent to a weed flat - this spot surrenders the best fish of the evening, a nice, fat 16"-er. Ninety minutes later I'm headed back home, happy with the results of my little experiment and again reminiscing about days gone by when the little worm was a staple in most bass anglers boxes.   

I get home to see that I've received yet another Bass Pro catalog in the mail, about the 5th one this season already. I must be a good customer or something. I peruse the pages, looking at all the newest lures. Nine dollar spinnerbaits, $3 jigs, $17 crankbaits, and $35 swimbaits. The sport has really changed over all these years, and technology has given us some wonderful equipment and lures with which to pursue our sport. We are certainly the better off for it as anglers, for the most part. But this is still bass fishing in Indiana, where 80% of the time we are always looking for "just one more keeper" to add to our well to get us a check, or worse yet, just one keeper please, regardless of size so I can get some points and not take the dreaded blank. Admit it, some days you just struggle to get any bites. We all do. You've gone 7 hours into your tourney with nothing in the well to show for it. Whatever you've done or thrown obviously isn't right. What are you going to do for that last hour to save face? For the price of that 20-oz pop sitting in your cooler, you can have a little "emergency bait" stashed in the bottom of your box, hidden from view most of the time so your 'bass pro' persona doesn't suffer at the hands of your buddies, but that might become a game-saver and make an otherwise forgettable fishing outing a bit brighter come weigh-in time...They do still work.

Pic-A-Lake & Pic-An-Attitude

contributed by Richard Ziert

If you don't have your head together for any reason, you will fair poorly in just about anything you do. Getting your head together in picking a lake to fish starts one or more days before you make the trip. A short road or two ago I learned to pick the best lake for forecasted weather conditions. With poor weather, shallow lakes with poor fisheries should be avoided. It's far better to drive another hour or so to get to a more productive lake, than spending all day kicking yourself because you didn't. Sometimes that better lake can be just across the road from a poor one. Contrary to some pretty much standard comments about fishing not being a job, I go fishing to catch fish, and therefore it is a job in a way. I try not to shackle myself before I start.

Regardless of the lake, certain aspects of attitude come to the fore.

Make an A.S.S. out of yourself! Accuracy - Subtlety - Sensitivity. 

Not all fish are turned off because of poor weather. You need to pick your spots wisely, and be almost pin point accurate fishing those spots and angles to spots. You have to get as near to the fish as possible without spooking them with the splash of your bait. You need to pick the right angle of approach to keep your bait "in the zone" longest.

Subtlety is largely the degree of fineness while finesse fishing. Reaction bites will work sometimes during poor weather, but a finesse approach will work more often. Anatomically accurate colors, action, and features to baits, live bait, small baits, slow to slower moving baits, jiggled in place baits, stopped baits, and so on is what is needed.

Sensitivity can be practiced. Poor weather conditions often say not only do you have to be both of the first two items to my list, but it says the fish are more sensitive, more subtle, and they are likely in places - physically and mentally - they wouldn't be under better conditions. Knowing this alone makes you more sensitive to the situation.

Then there's other feely things. None of us know what clods, how uncoordinated, how insensitive we really are until we try to switch hit. Something to make you more sensitive is to take that computer mouse and operate it with your week side hand. Unless you are exceptional, you'll see immediately you just don't have it together. This and other switch hit practice will get better after a while, but it likely will never get as good as you think you are on your strong hand side. However, that practice will make you think about how sensitive you need to be on your strong/dominant hand side. . . and, you will become more sensitive. Regardless of play on meaning, realizing the acronym used above is there to help us become better fishermen, wear the badge with honor.

Triple Your Frustration?

I was talking with a friend who just got back from a tourney this weekend, and we were discussing crankbaits. The guy he had fished with was on a cranking bite and threw it most all of the day. The guy was telling my friend about how the triple grip trebles on his bait were so great, and I made the comment that they're only great for people who don't know how to land (play) fish. I think he was a little offended by the comment at first, but that's my opinion on them.

The guy told my friend about how he doesn't lose fish once he hooks up with them as part of the reason for them being so great. I told him that's fine, but he was going to miss a lot of fish in the process that he could have otherwise caught. If you look at a triple grip hook like in the diagram, you'll notice both the bite and the gap are the same as a regular round bend hook. So what's the problem?

The difference is in the shape/alignment of the hook relative to the shank. Triple grips are pointed inward. That inward bend is what makes them so great for keeping a fish pinned to the hook after he gets on. But that is also what makes them so terrible for hooking up in the first place. So many times with fast retrieves or reaction-type baits a fish will just slap at, bump or roll on a bait, and a triple grip will miss those fish more times than not. A regular round bend Gammie (what I use exclusively) or similar style treble will still hook that fish many times because the point is more outward facing and prone to "snagging" or catching whatever it bumps against.

You can kind of test this for yourself by tieing a triple grip and a round bend hook onto a piece of fishing line and then dragging them around various objects like the floor, or over your hands, etc. The triple grip, due to its shape, will so frequently pull right over most surfaces without catching onto anything. A round bend on the other hand will tend to snag anything that point can get a brief hold on. This is even more so if your hook points are slightly bent out on your trebles (hint: do it intentionally).

My friend tried to argue that I'd lose more fish that way by barely having them hooked, but I fired back that I'd actually catch more because most of those fish were ones that his triple grips would have never even hooked in the first place. I'd rather have a chance at landing a fish, even if those percentages aren't good than to not have had any chance at all, which is what happens so frequently with a triple grip. Plus, going back to my original statement, if you have a good setup and know how to play a fish, so many times you'll still end up landing that fish even if he is just barely hooked. The best example that sticks in my mind was a 6-03 brute that got me big bass in a Geist Earlybird tourney one year when he slapped at my jerkbait and just got a single hook of the back treble stuck in him near his tail. It took about 5 or 6 minutes to land, and I never knew it was a bass until near the end, but I also knew I had plenty of open water to play him in and wanted to make sure I at least saw what I had hooked, and more importantly that I didn't lose my jerkbait. Odds of me ever catching that same fish if I had triple grips on my bait were significantly reduced.

I've tried playing with several arrangements where I mix triple grips with round bends to find the best setup, but I always end up going with straight round bends when all is said and done. The closest I've come to a decent setup while using them is by only replacing the last "tail" treble with a triple grip. Still, you won't find a single triple grip on any of my baits at the moment. Even ones that come stock on a bait, I take them all off and give them away, replacing them with round bend Gammi's.  So agree or disagree if you want, but in my eyes, if you're using triple grips on your treble baits than you're not catching near as many bass as you could be, or you have an insecurity issue when it comes to landing fish ;) which means you probably also have and use a net in your boat...but that's another discussion for another time.

Elwood "Buck" Perry

I can't exactly remember what I was surfing the web for when I came across this next little piece. That is exactly why I like surfing though; you never really know what you'll find or where you'll land. Anyway, it is the obituary/write-up in the New York Times for Elwood "Buck" Perry, inventor of the Spoonplug and largely considered the father of modern day structure fishing. His theories, though some since proven incorrect as modern science advances, were at heart the basis of scientific understanding of the habits and behaviors of largemouth bass. With degrees in both mathematics and physics, I can only imagine the thought processes running around in his head as he applied those basic understandings to his fishing.

Even though it has been less than 4 years since his passing, we so often forget about those who pioneered certain aspects and approaches to this sport. Buck was certainly one of those pioneers and it seems only fitting that he gets a mention on this site. I might even try and get my hands on a Spoonplug (my dad used to own many of them) and head to Waveland this summer to try and catch a bass on one of those things, just for "Buck".