Editor's Log
May 19, 2008
While many of our southern buddies have long been basking in the glory of a busy pre-spawn season, or even spawning activity, for others of us those activities are still being longed for – waiting patiently, or in all likelihood not so patiently.
That’s exactly what I want to talk about today - waiting patiently or more accurately, waiting. No, maybe it’s weighting…err, weighing I guess it is. Yeah, that’s the ticket, weighing.
There are some activities that are plumb easy, some semi-tough, and some that are downright nasty hard. Will Rogers, my favorite countrified philosopher from way back in the day said that the three hardest things to do are, in order:
- To climb a forward leaning fence,
- To kiss a backward leaning woman,
- And finally, to say something intelligent in response to a compliment.
I gave up on the first two missions as being totally impossible but never actually had the opportunity to practice Rogers’ advice on item three, which was to say “Thank you,” and then shut up. But, I did run into two tasks that I found to be downright confounded, cussedly difficult.
Both sort of come loosely under the general heading of technical or instructive writing – sorta like writing a set of instructions on how to tie a shoelace. Any aspiring wordsmiths out there go ahead; work on that one for a moment. No hurry…the rest of us will wait. It’s a stumper, isn’t it?
I found it to be just about that hard to describe how I knew I’d been bit when in the process of swimming a chartreuse Hula Grub (#169, not that it matters for the purposes of this story) through bank-side shallows and back toward the boat after having made a pinpoint quartering cast toward a gravelly and gradually sloping shore.
This was a favored and highly efficient method for locating pre-spawn male bass as you can systematically vacuum up literally miles of shoreline in the space of a spring morning. When the slope, boat speed, boat position relative the bank, cast angle, line choice and weight of the bait all came together it was sheer magic – the bait followed the bottom contour perfectly with only periodic contact and was soon below the boat inches above bottom at about the ten to fifteen-foot depth contour – brilliant!
I observed Gary Yamamoto putting this exact technique to good use as we filmed a Hula Grub promo video back at Lake Powell about 20 years ago. It worked great back then and it just as certainly works today, but it hasn’t become any easier to describe nor to teach exactly how we know when we’ve been bit.
Having said all of that just to have the opportunity to say this, now we’re getting to the core of the issue, the grist of the subject you might say, we’re ready to shuck the corn right down to the cob. That’s right boys and girls, the answer is not blowing in the wind, it’s hanging in the balance, so to speak – it’s a matter of weight.
During the medium to slow retrieve necessary to make this particular technique work we must constantly “weigh” our line/bait combination – if you’re spooled up with 14-pound with a half-ounce Hula head tied on with a five-inch Hula Grub (chartreuse, of course) pinned to it maybe it feels like (to your practiced touch) about an ounce. You gotta start somewhere and this number is merely for reference. It’s a baseline.
To review, we’re targeting pre-spawn male bass that are hotter than a pot of collards, with a presentation that places our bait in a downward glide just above bottom, gliding toward us as we also move toward the bait and a point where we will meet the bait as it touches down just under the bow of our boat. Can you picture that? I hope so.
Properly executed, during the space of this really cool “sliding” retrieve you should feel the bait occasionally “tic” the bottom – that’s probably not a fish; be cool here. However, if during the retrieve what previously felt like about an ounce suddenly feels really heavy, or really light, you should really do something. Yes Virginia, there is a bass in the lake and it’s on the end of your line and you should do something significant, and do it very soon.
There you go, congratulations! You now know everything you need to know to catch pre-spawn bass by utilizing the sliding technique and via the method of weighing your line/bait combination, a weighty accomplishment, for sure.
I guess if you’ve made it this far (God bless you for your high pain tolerance), in fairness I should mention that the foregoing is all you need to know so long as you don’t mind hooking and catching only a small percentage of the fish that actually mouth your bait. Unfortunately, catching those bass is a somewhat weightier matter, indeed.
The only defensible reason for the foregoing tiresome litany was to get us to the point where we are really thinking about feeling that bait, weighing it, figuratively of course, but just as real in any event. Beginning with the one-ounce figure as our baseline starting point, there are a lot of weight increments between that point and “really heavy” and “really light”. I’ll bet you’ve already guessed the secret - most every one of those minute incremental changes signals the fact that there is a silly old male bass on the other end of the line, many times mouthing the bait as he swims directly at us and the boat.
Unfortunately, young Mr. Bass probably won’t be there long, even though he’s sucking the salt out of that delicious Hula-morsel. You’ve got to make a move right then, in the first instant that you’re aware of the weight change - do something fisherman-like.
You know what I’m saying…if the bait seems to be 1/16th ounce lighter than it was when you started the retrieve, what would you do if you were a really good fisherman? Hmm? Maybe that would be a good time to make your move, put something on ‘em.
Of course it would, and you know that very well, along with every other thing I’ve bored you with in the preceding paragraphs. But then that wasn’t the challenge we set out to conquer, was it? Our task wasn’t to simply know how to do it; it was to write about, or explain, how for another fisherman to successfully accomplish the task.
The next challenge we’ll address is how to know we’re bit on a spoon or blade bait when it’s in freefall eighty feet beneath the boat. Blessedly, that will have to wait for next time. For now I believe I’ll rock back here and take the weight off.
Good fishin’
Jerry Puckett