THE CHILLY SIDE OF BASSIN'
by Soc Clay for Heartland USA
Cold weather is no time to lay down fishing rods if you want to get in some hot largemouth action.
It was downright cold as I eased the old Grumman car-topper away from the ramp and pointed the bow into a breeze that caused my fishing partner, Denver More, and I to zip our heavy, down filled parkas all the way up. Our hopes were that the weatherman was correct when he predicted temperatures would rise into the high 50s by early afternoon. Maybe that's what other anglers were waiting for. Right now, though, it appeared Denver and I were the only two souls hardy enough (or foolish enough) to venture onto the lake.
Two days earlier a terrific rain had dropped an inch of water into the drainage area of the lower Midwest flood control reservoir, causing both a slight rise in lake levels, as well as bringing in a fair amount of silt, giving the water along the lake's edge a yellowish color. Not muddy, but definitely stained. That's the reason we'd decided to make a late-season try for bass.
Denver and I are both old enough to remember when bass fishing in all but the lower South came to a grinding halt by early October. "Water's too cold," old timers had said. Besides, most of them were hunters and the seasons for upland game were about to open. Magazines were filled with advice for storing winter tackle, preparing outboards and the like for the long winter wait until spring. Only a few nincompoops, too dumb to know better, stayed on the lakes. What they didn't know and the "nincompoops" weren't telling them was that bass fishing could be better during the late season than any other time with the exception of spring.
That fact was demonstrated a few years ago when I attended a fishing tournament held on the first weekend in December. That's when a father-son team won big bucks by casting floating Rapalas to the shoreline, simply because they didn't know you had to fish 25 feet deep or more to catch a bass at that time of the year.
The two anglers were delighted they were so...ignorant.
Denver and I hoped we were too ignorant to know you can't catch bass in the shallows this late in the year. In fact, our fish-catching arsenal consisted entirely of lures designed to work the shallow shoreline areas just as we had in October.
Because the U.S.Army Corps of Engineers had been drawing the lake down since summer, a great deal of the places we might have looked for bass weeks earlier were now high and dry on the bank. Essentially, the draw-down had accomplished what tournament fishermen have to do each time they go out. That's eliminating water that has less chance of holding bass than others. Places like long, featureless shorelines, mud flats with no structure, long, sloping points that have no stumps, rocks or contours. Sure, there can be a bass in these places, but success increases dramatically when the angler focuses on spots that contain the desired habitat bass prefer.
