Locate Bedding Bass In Murky Water Story & Photos By Mark Hicks
How do you catch bedding bass when you can’t see them?
This is a common problem when dingy water, cloud cover or windy conditions prevent you from seeing what’s beneath the surface, even with polarized sunglasses. Under these conditions, you must resort to blind bed fishing. That may sound daunting, but savvy fisherman Rob Kilby scores big by blind bed fishing every spring.
Kilby keys on the places where bass normally bed. This varies from lake to lake. He usually finds bedding bass in quiet creek arms, coves, canals and backwaters that get plenty of sunlight. Eastern banks tend to be more productive, especially early in spring, because they warm first and are protected from cold north winds.
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Bass spawn on the best hard-bottom areas they can find in their given environment, usually near some type of cover. However, cover isn’t a necessity, such as when bass spawn on clean, pea-gravel bottoms. Kilby catches many spawning bass next to flooded stumps and bushes, windfalls, docks, emergent vegetation like pads and bulrushes, and submerged grass like milfoil, coontail and hydrilla.
When shallow-water fishing catches fire in spring, many of the bass you catch are spawning fish, even if that isn’t your intention. By casting to cover, you inadvertently run your lures over beds and trigger bass to bite. This is one reason a spinnerbait is so effective during spring.
Kilby often slings a 3⁄8-ounce tungsten spinnerbait that sports tandem Indiana blades when he blind bed fishes. He favors perch- or bluegill-colored skirts because bass attack when these panfish encroach on their beds. Colors like chartreuse, yellow, red and pink fire up a bass’s protective instincts.
Rip A Spinnerbait
“I run a spinnerbait faster than normal to get impulse bites from bedding bass,” Kilby says. “A spinnerbait looks like a bream darting through the bed, and the bass will smack it.”
Kilby retrieves his spinnerbait tight to any cover that looks like a potential nesting site for bass. He rips the spinnerbait past the sunny and shady sides of the cover since bass often hide in the shade next to their beds. If a spot looks especially promising, Kilby hits it with five or six casts to rouse any bass that might be there.
Should a bass boil on the spinnerbait and miss it, Kilby follows up immediately with a 10-inch Texas-rigged ribbontail worm with a 3⁄16-ounce bullet sinker. A fast spinnerbait retrieve, multiple casts to cover and a follow-up bait allow Kilby to load up on spawning bass he can’t see. Fishermen who cast spinnerbaits haphazardly to cover only catch an occasional spawning bass.
Fling A Fluke
When the bedding cover is aquatic vegetation, Kilby relies on a Zoom Super Fluke that he Texas rigs with a 4/0 wide-gap hook and no weight. He often chooses a bright color, such as bubble gum, so he can better see the bait and the strike.
A stiff baitcasting rod and 17-pound line help Kilby wrestle bass from submerged grass. The grass is typically visible under the water during the spawn, but it may be all the way to the top in warm Southern climates.
Kilby casts the Fluke to any holes he sees in the grass, since some holes are made by bedding bass. He casts beyond a hole, slowly twitches the Fluke to the edge of it and then kills the bait so it sinks slowly into the hole.
“It’s one of the best ways on the planet to catch them,” Kilby says.
If a bass swirls at the Fluke but doesn’t grab it, Kilby makes repeated casts to the fish with the same 10-inch worm he uses to follow up spinnerbait strikes. He knows the bass is there, and he sticks with it until he goads the fish to bite.
More Plastic Tactics
North Carolina bass pro Marty Stone also dotes on the Super Fluke when he blind bed fishes. He does especially well casting this bait around flooded bushes in clear water when the wind and clouds make it hard to see into the water.
“I twitch the Fluke pretty fast through a stretch of bushes,” Stone says. “I don’t catch all bass that strike, but I go back to the bushes where the bass fired out but didn’t close the deal.”
When he returns to a bass that rolled on the Fluke, Stone pitches a Texas-rigged Zoom Brush Hog to the bush with a flipping rod and 20-pound fluorocarbon line. He matches the Brush Hog with a 5⁄16- to 1⁄2-ounce bullet weight, whatever size is needed to pull the bait down through the limbs of the bush.
“I usually catch the bass on the first or second pitch to the bush,” Stone says.
The Brush Hog is a fat 6-inch bait that has oversized appendages and twin ribbon tails. Stone claims the big bait appeals to heavy bedding bass and that he often gets them to bite faster with it than with smaller plastic baits. The exceptions are when he’s fishing on bright, bluebird days after a cold front and when the bass have been pestered by heavy fishing pressure.
Fishing pressure made Stone downsize when he fished a Bassmaster tournament on Florida’s Harris Chain of lakes. He opted for a 6-inch Texas-rigged Junebug Zoom Trick Worm matched with 3⁄16- and 1⁄4-ounce Gambler Florida Rig sinkers that screw in to peg themselves. He used the 3⁄16-ounce weight when it was calm and the 1⁄4-ounce size when the wind blew.
Many of the bass were spawning in bulrushes and Kissimmee grass, and they were pounded by the tournament anglers during the three-day practice period. When the four-day tournament began, the bass were gun-shy and in no mood to engulf a big bait.
“I was flipping the Trick Worm into the outside edge of the grass in 3 to 6 feet of water,” Stone says. “You could only see down about 2 feet, so I was bed fishing blind.”
Stone would soak his worm in the holes, shake it in place and make 10 or more casts to the same hole to get bites. It’s easy to stay put and do these things when you can see a bass on a bed. However, when you’re fishing blind, as Stone was, this takes supreme confidence. It was a slow process because only one hole in every 20 to 30 holes gave up a bass. Stone’s persistence resulted in four limits of bass that weighed 61 pounds, 12 ounces, which was enough for first place.
Dead-Sticking
Dead-sticking a soft-plastic bait in a bed is a proven tactic. Some of the most productive lures for this approach are sinking baits.
Ohio bass pro Frank Scalish catches many bedding bass he can’t see by dead-sticking a 6-inch Texas-rigged Yum watermelon lizard without a weight. The lizard has the same slow, seductive, horizontal posture as a sinking bait but shows bass a natural enemy that eats their eggs. That’s bad news for the lizard, but good news for Scalish.
He rigs the lizard with a 2/0 hook, which is light enough to impart a slow sink rate. Bigger hooks make the lizard sink too fast. He fishes the bait with 10-pound test fluorocarbon line and a 7-foot medium-action baitcasting rod.
“I cast the lizard in water that’s just deep enough where you lose sight of the bottom,” Scalish says. “I call it the invisible zone.”
Scalish casts parallel to the shoreline into the invisible zone and lets the lizard sink to the bottom with a dead-still rod on a semi-slack line. After the lizard touches down, he lets it rest for a few seconds. If he doesn’t get a bite, he reels in and casts again.
According to Scalish, the biggest bass spawn in the invisible zone away from cover. They are generally overlooked. The exact depth of the invisible zone depends on the water’s clarity. In dingy water, it may be less than 2 feet deep. In clearer water, it may be 5 feet or deeper.
Mini Carolina Rig
If the invisible zone is much deeper than 5 feet, the sink rate of the lizard is too slow for effective fishing. This is when Scalish goes to his mini Carolina rig. The heart of the rig is a 3⁄16-ounce tungsten sinker that he pegs to his 10-pound fluorocarbon line 18 inches above a lizard.
“The mini Carolina rig gets down faster than a lizard without a weight,” Scalish says. “But you still want to work it as slow as frozen molasses for bedding bass. You won’t feel most bites. Your line just moves off.”
Floating Jerkbait
Scalish triggers aggressive strikes when he blind bed fishes with a floating minnow. He favors Bomber’s Model 15A Long A and the 41⁄2-inch Rebel Holographic Minnow for this ploy. He twitches these baits just under the surface wherever he suspects a bass is bedding. Then he lets the minnow float almost to the surface and twitches it down again. As the minnow rises, it backs up. By continually repeating this process, he can keep the minnow working over the bed for several seconds before it comes out of the strike zone. Scalish then casts back to the same spot and continues his twitching presentation. The constant aggravation usually is more than a bedding bass can take.
“When they hit that minnow, they smash it,” Scalish says. “I’ve caught more than 30 bass a day doing this.”
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