From Bassin' Magazine
Pattern VS Location Lakes
Story By Mark Hicks

Some of the best bass anglers on the planet break lakes down into types. One type is the pattern lake, where you can find a set of circumstances that produce bass throughout the lake. For example, you start catching bass from boat docks that have less than 4 feet of water under them in a creek arm. If you run from creek arm to creek arm and fish only boat docks in 4 feet of water, you are fishing a pattern. If the bass are on that pattern, you can catch a bunch of them, usually one per dock.

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A “location lake” requires that you find a place that holds a quantity of bass and milk it for all it’s worth. An example would be a river channel bend that sweeps past a stump-covered, main-lake point that drops from 12 to 25 feet of water. There might not be any other place just like it on the entire lake.

Which of these categories do your lakes fall into? Missouri bass legend Denny Brauer, whose likeness has appeared on the Wheaties box, claims it could be one or both.

“I normally don’t find patterns on small lakes,” Brauer says. “Say I find a stretch of riprap that’s holding bass. Well, on a small lake, that may be the only riprap on that whole body of water.”

A large lake, on the other hand, might have many riprap banks that could be part of a pattern. However, even big-bass waters can be location lakes, especially in winter and summer, when bass tend to gang up on specific underwater structures. These same bass waters usually transform into pattern lakes in spring and fall when bass move shallow and spread out.

Fishing A Pattern
Alabama’s Tim Horton, a former fishing guide turned bass pro, patterns bass in fall when they move to the very backs of creek arms. The bass follow shad into the creeks and gorge on them. The bass will hold next to docks, stumps or whatever cover is available in 2 to 6 feet of water. However, they follow the balls of shad when feeding. You can usually see the shad schools rippling the water, and the splashes of bass when they snatch shad from the surface.

“When the bass are surfacing, I pick them off with a ¼-ounce topwater bait,” Horton says.

Horton fares well with shad patterns, such as silver with a black back and Tennessee shad. If the bass are feeding beneath the surface, he switches to a 1⁄2-ounce topwater, usually chrome with a black or blue back. Horton runs all three lures through schools of shad, past any cover he comes to and casts directly to bass when they bust the surface.

If the fishing slows in the back of one creek, Horton runs to the back of another creek and continues catching bass. For this pattern, he favors a reservoir that has many creeks close together, such as Alabama’s Wilson Lake.

“The nice thing about this pattern is that you can catch bass all day,” Horton says.
Brauer does well in many tournaments by expanding his pattern from day to day. For example, he won a spring tournament on Sam Rayburn Reservoir in Texas after the bass had moved into shallow water. He was plucking the bass from isolated willows in small pockets by flipping a jig to the bases of the trees.

On each morning of the tournament, he would start where he stopped fishing the previous day and look for more isolated willows in small pockets that fit the pattern. By the end of the tournament, Brauer was fishing places on the lake he had never seen before. He claims this happens often when he’s fishing a pattern.

Milking ALocation
When Brauer fishes a specific location, he might spend four consecutive days on one small area. That’s what he did when he won a tournament at New York’s massive Lake Champlain. On his practice days, Brauer had found quality bass on a 50-yard stretch of thick bulrushes in a large bay. There were miles of bulrushes in the bay that held bass, but this one section attracted a cluster of fish.

On the first day of the tournament, Brauer caught a limit in a few hours by flipping a 1⁄2-ounce jig dressed with a Strike King Denny Brauer Chunk. The bass were holding on the outer edges of the bulrushes, and they eagerly snapped up the jig. Brauer then left to save fish for the remaining three days of the event.

“I picked off the most aggressive fish the first day, which usually happens when you fish a location like that,” Brauer says. “It took me four hours to catch my limit the second day, and I had to get my jig deeper into the cover.”

On the third and fourth days of the tournament, the bite got even tougher, which is normal when you milk a given spot. Brauer had to step up to a 3⁄4-ounce jig to penetrate thicker cover and dead-stick the jig for 30 seconds or more to coax bites from the reluctant bass. On the last day of the tournament, it took him the entire day to squeeze five bass from the bulrushes. His four limits of bass totaled 80 pounds, 3 ounces, which is an average of 4 pounds per bass.

In that instance, the thick bulrushes limited the lures that Brauer could fish. When bass gang up on something like a drop-off that has stumps or shell beds for cover, another way to milk the spot is to show the bass different baits. Pro angler Kevin VanDam typically has an arsenal of rods rigged with different baits when he milks such a spot.

“I like to keep showing the bass different things, but I always go back to the one bait that has been the most successful for me,” VanDam says.

On each day of the tournament, VanDam would first sweep the ledge with a crankbait and quickly catch as many as 12 bass, sometimes on consecutive casts. When the bass stopped biting the crankbait, he would switch to a 3⁄4-ounce spinnerbait and catch a few more. Next, he would try a soft-plastic swimbait and catch another fish or two, followed by a 10-inch worm, which also got a few more bites.

“Then I’d go back to the crankbait and get them going on that again,” VanDam says. “If I had thrown the crankbait the whole time, I would have only caught bass on that initial flurry.”

Places Within Patterns
VanDam is just as good at running patterns as he is at milking locations. On some lakes, he finds a dozen or more spots that fit the same pattern, and he might hit them all two or three times a day on a milk run. Though this falls into the pattern category, one or two places in the pattern often produce most of the bass.

This was true when VanDam won a Bassmaster Elite tournament at Lake Guntersville. The pattern was isolated grass beds on small points. Shad were spawning on the outside edges of the grass, and VanDam picked them off with crankbaits and spinnerbaits.

“There were a lot of places I was fishing,” VanDam says. “But three of them were really the key to winning the tournament. That’s pretty common when you’re running a pattern like that.”


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