The Port Arthur News
February 03, 2007 08:18 pm
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Really big largemouth bass are rare creatures and are a combination of good genetics, age and an ability to elude anglers. Of those three traits, elusiveness falls mainly on the hands of the angler who tends to tackle the obvious and avoid the mysterious.
Much of that has to do with the tendency of trophy bass to stay in deep water.
“We do a lot of electroshock surveys to help determine bass population and the overall health of the fishery, but we generally get very few large specimens that way,” said Texas Parks & Wildlife Department (TPWD) fisheries biologist in Jasper Todd Driscoll.
That is why TPWD’s Lone Star Sharelunker program is so important to the department’s fisheries research.
A variety of studies in the South have proven the bigger largemouths tendency towards deep water including a comprehensive project conducted by Auburn University in Lake Seminole in Georgia.
“During the day largemouth bass were offshore in deeper water near large woody structures and moved little. Movement was lower during dusk and night periods, and a general movement towards shoreline areas was evident.”
“Largemouth bass appeared to divide their time between an offshore resting area, primarily occupied during the day, and a near-shore area, where foraging presumably occurred, primarily used during low-light periods.”
Sam Rayburn guide Roger Bacon said he is not surprised at these findings as many of his bigger fish are caught in deep water. Besides being a dedicated bass angler, Bacon also targets crappie for much of the year and his experience on open lake brush piles has given him some unique incite into these deep water bass.
“Working on the brush piles fishing for crappie, we catch quite a few bass and a lot of them, but what has been more interesting is studying the fish we see on the graphs when scoping areas on the open lake for putting out brush. We see a lot of bass that we in turn will go back to catch in spots that hardly anyone will target,” he said.
A lake like Rayburn has a lot of creek beds and humps throughout the main lake area from the north end down to the southern tier. From anywhere from 100 yards from the shore to one half mile from the shore, many of the biggest bass in the lake will live and probably die before anyone catches them.
“It’s a kind of fishing that doesn’t pay off with tons of bites and nonstop action. You have to go out there and put on a jig or jig and craw and work those areas you mark fish and be extremely patient. There are big fish out there but you have to be willing to work for them,” Bacon said.
Something else he said is overlooked is the huge grass beds in some of the deeper covers and that border the main lake. The lake has been holding steady in grass production since the late 1990s and as most anglers know, good habitat means plentiful, quality fish.
“Rayburn really has some impressive grass and that is what holds a lot of the fish. If you can learn to fish on the outside of the grass lines you can score on some big fish. When watching your graph you will see a lot of big fish out deep moving in and out of the grass. You have to fish in with something slow-moving and able to get in and out of that stuff like a Senko. There are some big fish to be caught that way,” he said.
Bacon’s experience crappie fishing is quite similar to mine fishing for white bass on the extreme northern end of Toledo Bend. I had been out with guide Mike Wheatley and learned of a spot where the white bass were thick in the summer.
I returned a few weeks later with a friend and had another good trip fishing over main lake humps, which are basically a series of hills on the lake. They are positioned out in totally open water and are spots that are typically free of angling pressure.
We kept marking some bigger fish right down along the bottom of these humps, so I put on a Bomber 9A and ended up hauling out a seven and a half pound bass. It wasn’t a monster, but was much bigger than the ones people were catching in the shallower water on the lake at the time and was the experience that got me to thinking heavily about big bass in deep water.
I certainly do not consider myself an expert on the subject but my knowledge grew after that experience.
Now that I look more closely at the issue, I plan to spend more of my bass fishing time out in deep water.
Science has shown the big ones are out there with tagging studies and electroshock and savvy anglers prove it every time they weigh in a lunker caught out in waters few anglers bother to fish.
Chester Moore, Jr. is the Port Arthur News Outdoors Editor
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