next 10 minutes three more quality fish
joined him.
Here’s the “take home” message: most
baits are a lot more versatile than most
anglers realize.
That’s the deal. lake Commandos has
taught me to fish creatively with attention to the details, making subtle, onThe result? We smoked the bass! Again, it
the-fly adjustments, when necessary to
seemed counter-intuitive, but it worked!
provoke strikes.
Lipless Cranks Where?
Just weeks ago i was on another Texas
reservoir fishing with Tony Owens, biologist/tournament angler with the Texas
Freshwater Fishery Center in Athens.
Tony chose rattlebaits as his pattern, so i
picked jerkbaits. The water temperature
was trending upward all week, jumping from 50 to 60 degrees in a matter
of days. All indications pointed to bass
starting to move up toward spawning
habitat. So we targeted shallow areas
with the warmest water we could find in
the system.
This particular outing also illustrated just
how important color can be once the
pattern is set. my guest fished natural
shad color and i picked chartreuse. We
fished the same baits on the same gear
in the same areas and chartreuse flat-out
caught more fish than natural shad. Of
course, once he switched, it was game
on!
Left to fish intuitively, i would’ve thrown
a spinnerbait, jig, or a Texas-rigged
worm, but never a rattlebait. But by
being forced to do something different,
i learned an entirely new way to catch
bass.
Here’s one last example. This past summer we were stormed off our objective
lake and onto a smaller, 500-acre lake
picked at random. my opponent chose
a medium-diving crankbait and i
went with a shallow diver. it wasn’t
long before i was up 10 or 12 fish to
his zero.
We gave ourselves the
choice between two different rattlebaits for the episode:
the Sebile Vibe machine and
the slightly b