Seeing is catching

Seeing a fish react to your offering is perhaps the most exciting experience in fishing. Whether it’s a group of tailing bonefish or a muskie stalking a bait back to the boat, little else elevates the angler’s heart rate like seeing it all happen. Bass fishermen get their opportunity for this visual experience in most lakes in the country as water temperatures climb into the 60s.

Each spring, the spawning ritual begins as male bass begin cruising the protected shallows in search of a site to build a nest. They will eventually fan out a spawning bed in hopes of attracting one the females that will soon join them.

“It can be as early as January or February but primarily it starts about the first of March,” said Pam Martin-Wells, Woman’s Bass Tour professional who lives near southeast Georgia’s Lake Seminole. “It has a lot to do with the moon, but it has to correspond with water temperature. Water temperature is probably the major factor, and then you work that around the moon.”

Most anglers will tell you that the full moon is the most active spawning time. It’s been suggested that this is because bass can better guard theirs nests from predators at night during this time. Another theory states that fish have evolved to use the moon as a timing mechanism so that the bulk of fry will be hatched at the same time, thus overwhelming predators and ensuring a higher survival rate.

When these conditions begin to bring bass into the spawning areas, the fishing can become more like hunting.

“When I am just looking for fish, and I really don’t know that they are in the area, I’ll go through with the trolling motor on high and if I spot a fish I’ll keep going and mentally mark that area,” Martin-Wells explained. “And then I’ll come back with a more stealthy approach.”

Success in bed fishing hinges on your ability to see the fish and how it reacts to the bait.

“The key piece of equipment is a quality pair of polarized sunglasses. If you can’t see the bed or the fish, or part of either one, it’s going to be a lot harder to catch them.”

Martin-Wells first gauges a fish’s mood by her approach.

“If you pull up on a bed and a fish runs off and it takes two or three minutes for it to come back, typically that fish is going to be harder to catch. If it runs off and come right back, you can tell that one should be relatively easy to catch. If one just doesn’t leave the bed … sometimes that’s the tricky one. If it won’t leave the bed, even if you park the boat on top of him, sometimes those are the hardest ones because they are just down right stubborn.”

Positioning the boat as far from the bed as possible and still being able to see how the fish is reacting is important to success. Making the right cast is as important.

Rick Loomis, who guides on Texas’ Lake Fork, stresses, “Don’t ever splash the bed. Don’t ever land the bait on the bed. Always throw the bait behind the bed, and bring it up. There are times here where the fish get so shallow that you have to almost throw it up on the bank.”

Loomis sometimes fishes with clients who have not experienced a great deal of sight fishing. Teaching them to trust what they see is often part of his day at the office.

“One thing about bed fishing, it will teach a lot about how fish bite. I have some of my clients say, ‘Where did my bait go?’” Loomis said. “That fish will suck the bait in and blow it out … you are watching them, and you never feel them do it. When they flared their gills, they are getting the bait right then. A lot of anglers wait, trying to feel the bite.”

By taking time to watch a fish on a bed, you can see that the bass is constantly chasing bream, turtles and other fish from its nest. Its instincts are purely territorial, with no interest in eating. Anglers have to appeal to this instinct to catch bedding bass. Some fish will simply pick a plastic lizard up by the tail and carry it off the nest and drop it. Less aggressive fish can be aggravated into biting an intruder that just keeps coming back.

“If you were sitting off at a distance, it would appear that I am trying to snag the fish, because I’ll throw the bait in there and I’ll snatch it out,” Martin-Wells explained. “That just agitates the fish … rather than a bait sitting still or barely moving, where it can ease up and nip and take it off. The fish is looking at that like, ‘He’s eating my eggs and leaving quick.’ You do that several times and suddenly the fish is saying, ‘You’re not getting away this time.”

The pace of this action is important.

“If you ever get that fish fired up, you don’t want to wait, or start talking to your buddy about your girlfriend,” Loomis said. “You don’t want to let the fish cool back off. If you have them flaring on it or acknowledging the bait, that’s not the time to think about changing baits.”

He says getting in a fish’s face is a good way to get a strike.

“Target their head. You always want to bring the bait past their head. A lot of times you can get a reaction strike by lining it up on the fish’s head and swim it by real quick. A lot of times they’ll just grab it.”

The fish will often help the angler with his tackle choices.

“It’s depends on how the fish reacts as far as what I will choose,” Martin-Wells said. “I’ll throw anything from a lizard to a Wave tube, trick worm or jig. Primarily I would throw a lizard, but a lot of times you have to downsize.”

On line: “I hate to be redundant, but that depends on the fish. I’ve had to go down to eight-pound test line, and others that you could throw 65-pound braid. If it’s aggressive enough, I think you could throw an anchor in there on a 500-pound rope, and that fish would bite it.”