Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Spawning Bass -- like a ticked-off dog



Make that bass growl!!


The bass are just now starting to spawn!  This is the best time to get out and sight fish bass in the shallows, or, in dirty water, pitch up into shallow water and wait for your line to jump!

With the early warm weather we've had this year the bass are spawning earlier than ever.  I recently found 5 male largemouth prepping beds for their female partner to drop her eggs.  These fish are aggressive, territorial, and willing to chomp on nearly anything you put in front of them. 

I managed to catch all 5 of those bedding bass, releasing them to watch them swim back to their beds.  Mind you, this was on the MS river -- the only legal place to target bass in MN right now.  Unfortunately, Minnesota is one of the only states in the entire country that bans bass fishing on lakes this time of the year.  Most people don't realize that Minnesota is the exception to the norm.

Even B.A.S.S., an organization who's goal is to protect bass through responsible tournament fishing practices condones bass fishing during the spawn, and holds many tournaments where bed fishing takes place without detriment to the fishery.

There should still be some bedding fish to be caught come bass opener, but not as many as previous years with the early spring we have this year.  You might have to go north to find a good spawning bass bite this year!


My favorite technique for bed fishing is pitching a texas-rigged tube or creature bait right into the middle of the bed and twitching it as slow as possible.  The bed will appear as a 2'-5' diameter light-colored patch on the bottom of the lake, often covered in clean gravel/shells from the fish sweeping away the sand/muck with it's tail.  You want to be as far away from the bed as possible while still being able to accurately cast to it.  Using a highly-visible plastic, like a white tube, can help detect bites.  When the white disappears, the fish ate it!!  Polarized sunglasses are a must-have in order to see what's going on under the water -- as being able to see the fish and how it reacts to your lure can make a huge difference in your success rate.

I like to compare a bass's mentality to that of a dog... you poke at it enough or find something it doesn't like, and then repeat repeat repeat, eventually it will snap.  While you can't hear the fish 'growling' like a dog would when its ticked off and about to react, you can visually see the bass becoming 'upset' that your lure repeatedly is visiting its nest.  When you see the fish turning sharply to nose your bait, you know its ticked off and ready to bite!  Like this:



Here's a couple big girls getting ready to spawn that were landed in my boat this year:

Steve Loraus with a nearly 5lber.


Marty Sexton with a nice one.


1 comment:

  1. Good to hear you had nice fishing with your buddy. Hope I can catch fishes like those. Thanks a lot for sharing. :)

    ReplyDelete