BIG baSS
By Russ Meyer
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L
ocating groups of big bass can be very
challenging to say the least. After all it’s what
all bass fishermen dream about. Most of us
find one here and there from time to time, but putting together a limit of them, or culling several
limits of them nearly as big, is a beautiful thing.
I am sure that a lot of pros have had similar
thoughts. But hearing different twists from other
anglers’ perspectives on this subject may be just
enough info to make them that much better of a big
bass kind of guy or gal. This is what I have learned
over the last 20 plus years of tournament fishing and
thousands of prefish days.
BAIT, BAIT And MoRe BAIT
That is the key to being ‘successful’ at finding a lot of big bass. When on Lake Shasta, depending on the season, I will usually start at the back of a cut or river channel. I start in around 15ft of water and follow the exact creek channel, zigzagging in and out of the channel, heading out of the cut until I reach about 150ft of water. Once I establish where and at what depth the bait fish are living in that cut, I will move on to the next cut until I have hit almost every good cut on the lake.
This can take a day or two of graphing. Sometimes less, but to do it right on a lake the size of Shasta takes some time.
So now that I know where most of the schools of bait are, I have also likely learned by accident where
a lot of fish are living and what they are doing, just by spending a ton of time using my electronics. The key now is to use a spoon and run through the coves that had all the bait, and fish the bait balls. I have cut my search way down for my next time out. Most of the bait will live in those areas for several weeks if not months. Using the spoon does not usually produce big bass, although it can win tournaments. On average they are just school fish. But what I am after is catching fish from these schools. I don’t want to spend a lot of time there, I just want to catch enough fish to see what they are feeding on and how big that bait is. Large Shad draw big fish...period. So if you hit 20 cuts holding bait, you’re going to find a few of them holding Big Bait. When you see that big bait (usually shad) you will find with them big catfish, big squaw fish, trout and BIG BASS. Now you can switch from a spoon to a swim bait of some kind, or top water, depending on how deep the big bait is. These fish will almost always be in the creek channel.
Time of day plays a big role as well. Early is better for graphing mostly because the bait tends to be shallow in the early morning, backing off deeper as the day moves on. When the sky is high, bass usually lie on or close to the bottom, making it much harder to see them on your graphs. However, when it’s earlier in the morning with low light, the bass will often move up off the bottom to feed on the bait fish that are in the upper water column along the creek channels. The main thought here is to locate bigger bait in order to
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