After nearly a month on the road traveling the country, I return to my home waters and find some hungry bass.
It sure has been a while since I’ve updated the blog, but in light of recent events (losing my job, traveling across the country with my buddies and feeling the desperate urge to do something fulfilling with my life) I’ve decided to commit to this venture - starting with today’s fantastic return to the waters of my hometown in search of some largemouth bass.
It’s mid-June here now, which is right around the tail end of this year’s spawn. As my social media indicated in the past few weeks, my friends still at home were having a blast fishing with soft plastics, so I knew that would be a place to start. If the lads are catching them on the worm, then the summer pattern I scored with last year should be in full effect. When I awoke this morning to find myself in my own bed, I quickly set about rigging for the day. I took three rods, my Lew’s Fritts Perfect Crank, my Dobyns Fury stickbait rod and the old Bass Pro Qualifier, rigged with a weighted Gamakatsu EWG hook screwed into a 4 inch paddletail. It’s safe to say that a crankbait, a stickbait and a weighted swimbait is my go-to trio for finding a pattern this time of year. Sometimes you pick the right baits, and sometimes you don’t - it became apparent very quickly I found the winning combo for my first day back.
I got out on the water around 11am, and pulled out my crankbait rod. I tied on a basic bluegill pattern with no rattles and a 3-5 foot dive rating - a trusty old Strike King KVD 1.5. It’s the first picture you’ll see on this post. I tossed the bait out to open water just to check the spool tension, and not three cranks of the handle later did I hook into a little largie. First cast back in CT - got a fish.
I remember hearing somewhere that a fish on the first cast is bad luck. I’ve never done it before, but an interesting scenario unfolded on the second cast of the day that made me at least consider the superstition. Still slightly alarmed and confused by where that fish had taken the bait, which I randomly cast into open water, I decided that the best course of action would be to just wing another one out there - if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? And, sure enough, I immediately got walloped by another fish, this time much, much bigger. I reeled for a few seconds and got her closer to the boat, and had just enough time to see the shine on her belly before she erupted out of the water like a tarpon and shook the hook right at me, disappearing back into the depths. Good luck to hook it, but bad luck to lose the fish, right? I think I’ll say the bad luck was accounted for by losing that sucker, as the rest of the day’s fishing was pretty damn good.
With two fish hooked in about a minute, I started a lap up the shoreline, just covering water with that same crankbait. The wind was blowing pretty heavily, so a stickbait was out of the question until far later in the day. I landed another little fella about 20 minutes in, again on the crank, and decided to go find a windless pocket to try the stickbait in. I also just bought my first Shimano reel, which I’m using for stickbait fishing, so I needed a place to start putting it through its paces. I bolted across the whole lake, dead into the wind, then ran the crankbait around the edges of two docks and over a pile of boulders that I know to exist deep in one little pocket. No such luck at first, but a little bit of persistence paid off with yet another reasonably sized bass hooked and landed about a half hour after getting to the other side of the lake.
Crocs (and socks) for scale.
At this point I said to hell with it - I want to catch something on my damn Shimano! I tucked away the crankbait rod, grabbed the wormin’ setup and started dropping the stickbait into shady pockets right up along the shore, popping the bait low and slow back to my boat. On three occasions I had a bedding bass pick up my bait and move it away, but I was unable to swing right and land one. They didn’t seem very committed to eating it, they just wanted the thing away from their babies. I worked back towards my car for about a half mile with no luck, until finally I watched my line scurry off to the right at quite a clip, at which point I reeled down and set the hook, pulling in the best bass of the day on a green pumpkin Yum Dinger. Sweet victory.
All in all, the day couldn’t have gone any better. The early-summer pattern is just as it was last year, so now I have a steady foundation upon which I can experiment later on in the warm months. I just got my first Huddleston, and have been slowly collecting big swimbaits of other shapes and brands. This year’s goal is to land a 5-pounder, and swimbait fishing has started to become more and more appealing for that purpose as the months have gone by. We shall see - thanks for stopping by!