COLUMN
NEWELL’S NOTES
ROB
NEWELL
Food for thought
12
FIND THE BAIT, FIND THE BASS.
It’s a common mantra in bass fishing; one that I read in
bass fishing magazines 30 years ago and still hear bass pros
use quite often these days.
But what exactly does that mean?
We can go to a lake and find “bait” almost anywhere – min-
nows up in the shallows, little bluegills hanging around docks,
shad flickering on the surface.
As a kid I used to wade around at the boat ramp, turn over
rocks and find crawfish – by the dozens. Why even put the
boat in? I already found the bait right here at the ramp. So …
where are the bass?
Over the years I’ve learned there are a couple of key
things about the bass-forage relationship that largely go
unspoken. Pros remain quiet about them, not so much
because they’re a big secret, but because they’re hard to pin-
point and explain. So just saying “find the bait, find the bass”
is certainly true, but there is a whole lot more to it than that.
In any mixed-forage system, there are certain years when
a particular forage species proliferates, sort of like the insects
in your backyard. Some years the fireflies are so thick you
could read by them at night. The next year, fireflies are rare,
but ladybugs swarm you like bees. Then some years the
cicadas are so loud you can’t think over the drone of their
singing. A few years ago we had a bumper crop of millipedes
hijack the backyard.
The same is true for the vast underwater ecosystem.
Some years there are huge bream spawns. Some years shad
spawn with incredible success. Some years bass spit up
crawfish pincers in our livewells by the pound, but the next
year crawfish crumbs are nonexistent. Some years the mayfly
hatch is so thick that the entire food chain moves closer to
the bank because of the protein emerging from the mud and
falling back down from the trees.
These mass propagations are usually sparked by certain
environmental conditions, and, unless you are a biologist, are
largely beyond the average angler’s ability to anticipate. High
water and floods might be premium conditions for one type
of forage to spawn, while low water and drought could bene-
fit another.
The most important thing to understand is that when a
bumper crop of food opportunity is available on a lake, you can
rest assured the bass are dialed in on it, and that’s what’s for
dinner. Your bream bed pattern that worked so good two years
ago is likely to be a dud if the shad population has spiked.
Forrest Wood Cup champion Justin Atkins agrees these
proliferations are an ongoing process that affects forage
bases in lakes and reservoirs from year to year.
“There’s no doubt about it,” Atkins says. “Some years are
more shad years, some are more bream or sunfish years,
and it seems some are more crawfish years.”
Atkins remembers a banner year on Pickwick when he
caught bass on a jig teamed with a plastic craw with orange-
tipped pincers.
“A friend and I crushed them on that jig that whole year,”
Atkins recalls. “The next year we couldn’t get a sniff on that jig.
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