by Bruce Middleton, June 01, 2008

Which is best and when is it best for each???

From post-spawn all the way through to the end of fall I love to launch my boat on one of my favorite lakes first thing in the morning when it is just barely light enough to see what I’m doing around the boat. Once in the water I fire up the motor and run as fast as I can to the nearest point on the lake according to my map. I reach for a search bait, usually a spinner bait with perch colored Indiana spoons and a Muddler skirt, or a Rat-L-Trap and start working from the deep end of the point right up to the shoreline. A Muddler skirt is a small under sized black/gray/white skirt about an 1-1/2” long. The spinner bait is ¼ ounce and is a small 2-blade spinner that shows up in the water as a small target that really gets the bass excited. The Rat-L-Trap is usually shad colored or orange and 3/8’s or ½ ounce size.

Then I fire up the motor and run to the next point looking for the early morning feeders and the last of night feeders. This is a very exciting time and you can catch 3 to 6 bass with in and hour or so, all before the sun comes up full and hits the entire surface of the lake. I then run for the shaded side of the lake and work it with top waters going from noted structure to structure. Moving as fast as I can so as to cover as much territory as possible.

Then when the sun finally comes up full I head for the docks and slow down and start to methodically work them. Covering every nook and cranny, every brush pile between docks and the over hanging trees in between. About 10:00 or so I head for the pads and weeds then bring out the frog. By 1:00, I’ve already hit the shoreline weeds on both sides of the lake and I’m at the launch again and getting ready to head home after a good days fishing.

This shows one way to run and gun and stay and play the bass on any lake. But by no means is it the only way to work bass using this method. While I subscribe to the theory that if your not having a good day of fishing you need to slow down and really work at getting strikes, you can always go the other way and use the take it or leave it approach. This approach is akin to using a top water bait, like a buzz bait, at high speed. The bass has one chance to reaction strike the lure or it is lost. This take it or leave it approach has its advantages in that you can cover a lot of water in search of active bass.

Professional bass anglers and those who enter a lot of fishing derbies for fun and or profit are also some of the best runners and gunners. This is because they are trying to figure out the best pattern to fish and where to fish in the least amount of time. They will cover a lake in short order looking at grass beds, flats, points, the shallows, docks and channels and then trying different lures and baits to see what the bass are interested in that day. If they can establish a pattern, they stand the best chance of winning. The best pattern at the best locations will always win. Now the pros get warm up days but they will be the first ones to point out to you that a pattern that is hot today may or may not work tomorrow. And since tournaments are several days long, you had better have a lot of gas in the boat to move around the lake with because that pattern will change with the weather, pressure, movement of the sun and other factors.

Another good time to run and gun is when you establish a really great pattern that the bass are all but jumping in the boat for you. Say the pattern is a buzz bait along the weedy edges of the shoreline. You may have to run all over the lake to hit all the weedy spots that that lake offers.

Running and gunning is also used on lakes that are large enough to have a lot of varied structure and a lot of good habitat for the bass. If you have a good map of say Lake Roosevelt, where you have marked out 35 great brush piles and log jams, you may have to run and gun just to fish them all and get back to the launch before the sun sets on you. Scale has a lot to do with it too. Bigger lakes offer so much more than smaller lakes that when it comes to trying to fishing a pattern there is just so much more to choose from.

Running and gunning is an approach for searching out active bass. On any given body of water there will be a curtain number of active bass at any given time of the day. Some of the best places to look for active bass are where there are baitfish. For this you need good electronics, a great map of the lake and an intuition about where the baitfish will be at any given time. This intuition is made up of experience, time on the water and an eye for detail.

Baitfish have a habit of hiding in plain sight. They have to be in the lake, that much is a given but the where varies, but not as much as you might imagine. Hatchings will of course be in the shallows, buried in the weediest habitat they can find. This is purely for survival. However the adults are more often than not found out in open water, suspended off the bottom. They move not so much with the currents as they do with changing light conditions. Nature has given them a degree of camouflage and they use this to blend into the water and surrounding background to become invisible. When the lighting conditions are most optimum, they will stop suspending and find forage near the shoreline, bottom, in weeds, lily pads and the like. When the light conditions are not in their favor, they stay out in open water off and away from structure where safety in number is their only defense. They do feed out in the open water on plankton and floating crustations but they are at the whims of the wind and are forced to move with it on large open bodies of water. However, on lakes of less than 3,000 acres, this wind effect and plankton movement is minimal as the lake is just too small to have much effect, as there just isn’t enough plankton available to the baitfish. It takes a very large lake indeed to produce enough plankton to effect the movements of baitfish.

So if we factor out the plankton, since most of the lakes we fish up here in Washington are less than a 3,000 acres, we are left with light conditions and seasonal movements only. So, when are the best light conditions for baitfish to be 1- suspended in open water and 2- near structure where bass wait in ambush. And 3- what other factors influence baitfish movements.

Firstly, baitfish are hardy little game fish and predators themselves. Generally speaking, they spawn after bass do, they are the first to arrive at the warming flats at the first signs of spring and they need less oxygen than bigger fish like bass. When the bass first move up onto the flats in the spring the baitfish are already there. They are the first to gather around any green vegetation and the oxygen it produces. The first green is also where the first algae starts to form and the crustations start to feed on them on great numbers. This cycle eventually bring in the higher predators, like bass. In the fall they are the first to move to the mouths of feeder creeks and even up the creeks where the water is warmer and richer in oxygen.

But like bass the baitfish will take so much pressure before it is forced out of the greenery and out into open water where it has a better chance of survival. At dawn and dusk they run the gauntlet of predators to get back into the vegetation to feed. These are the best light conditions for the baitfish. They are harder to see now and they have to be very close to a bass for them to be seen. This is one reason that bass are so active at these times of day. One other reason is the transition of the nocturnal crawfish that are more active at night than in the daylight. At dawn and dusk they are still active and easily seen by the bass.

In full daylight however the baitfish will normally be out in open water suspended well off the bottom and in schools. Exceptions to this rule are sunfish. Sunfish will always be found in very shallow water. They will hardly ever venture out past 8 feet. So if you’re on a lake that has trout, bass and sunfish in it, you can bet the bass are found in fairly shallow water, because that is where the food is. Crawfish on the other hand are found anywhere from 2 inches to 80 feet of water and deeper.

Staying and playing is a tactic where you’re looking to do some dock fishing or the bite is slow and you are having to really down size your presentation and go really slow. You may be out in a big grass flat or a huge lily pad bed where the top water bite isn’t working well and you have switched to a jig, weightless Senko or other plastic.

Stay and play is a patience game. Stealth and long casts are usually called for. It could be a matter of flipping a long shoreline, covering every nook and cranny, several times over in order to get the bass to strike. It is the time when experimentation and fine-tuning occur in order to find the just right color or just right cadence the bass want that day. Do they want a ¼ ounce spinner bait with a white skirt and a short chartreuse trailer or do they want a chartreuse skirt and a white trailer.

It’s always important to fish your strengths. If that is a jig, then fish with it. If your strength is a crank bait or a spinner bait, always start out by using that bait because you have the most confidence when using it but keep in mind it may not always be the best choice in a given situation. Always start with targets you can see with your eyes and work there first. These are obvious places and the easiest to figure out and understand. They are also the easiest to understand and recognize a pattern on and to be able to duplicate catches on or pattern bass. Remember that a pattern is the ability to catch bass under the same conditions in the same type of cover during a curtain frame of time. A pattern can last for an hour or it can last for days. The key here is that everything must remain unchanged, the weather, water temperature, cover, water clarity, everything, even the pressure on the bass for the pattern to hold.

Stay and play also includes not moving off after catching a bass. Where there is one bass there may be more. Don’t spend a lot of time high fiveing each other and taking pictures unless it is a real bruiser. Get the bass boated, unhook him, release him or drop him in the live well, and start casting right back into the area that he just came out of. Two, three and sometime four bass can be caught in one spot if you do it right. Stay and play, don’t just keep moving. A note here, a released bass gives off pheromones that alert other bass and they scatter after smelling it. If you’re in an area where you thing there are more bass, place the bass in the live well for a while. After the catching has finally stopped, then is the time to release the bass in the live well.

Stay and play is a must if your drop shot fishing for suspended bass. You move the boat if you need to move the bait. But Stay and play has its place too. A frog along a weedy shoreline or a big lily pad field is a great place to stay and play. And the old reliable dock fishing is the perfect stay and play playground.

Just as a note to remember when fishing no matter what style, where or when, if a bass is hooked too deep to get the hook out though his mouth without injuring him, try entering, with a pair of pliers, in from the side through his gills. Be extra careful not to damage the gills in any way. If the hook still cannot be safely removed, cut the line and return the bass to the water. A cyst will develop around the hook in a very short time and the bass will spit it out in a matter of an hour or up to a day but it will not kill him. The whole idea is to reduce the mortality rate to as few bass as possible.

Pautzke’s balls of fire are a salmon egg that has been around since the twenties. These fire engine red eggs can be added to a plain plastic bait to add that flash of red and a scent all at the same time. They are a trick I learned a long time ago that has stood the test of time. They work and they last quite a while. They are inexpensive and found anywhere tackle is sold. Use some sometime to spice up a worm and see if you don’t agree. Note that the egg may erode and just leave the shell but that is still red and is still just enough. Now to be fair a lot of angles use red beads for this because they last longer and they don’t have to take the plastic off every time they want to add a new egg. This is fine but then they have to add scent to the rig. So we know that a red round attractor works on a worm or other plastic, I’m just suggesting an alternative to the bead. One other thing too, after threading the hook threw the nose of the worm but before you push it through the body, add the salmon egg(s) here, it looks like eyes that ways and you don’t have to take the worm all the way off to add more. It works well on treble hooks too by the way. They may flatten out after a while but the skin will stay on adding that dash of red you need.

An anchor is another excellent example of stay and play. When you’re out on a windy day and need to slow down to work the shoreline carefully, an anchor is the ideal way to stay in one spot at a time so you can work a an area over well before moving on. You lift the anchor just off the bottom, drift a ways and drop it again to work the next section of shoreline. On windy days with activate bass, the ripple gives them a sense of safety and they wonder into shallow water without hesitation. The added wave action and noise also covers up any noise you make as your bait enters the water. This is a real plus, especially when you make a bad cast. The wind also forces bass to do a lot more sight hunting because of the added wave noise. An anchor can help you stay and play along the entire length of the lake on the windiest day. Or you can try a drift sock, which can be found in any fishing catalog or you can make one yourself. These socks can slow a big boat down to a crawl on a windy day. It is amazing how slow they make you go. They are inexpensive too at around $23 for a 24” sized one.

Stay and play is also the only way to go if you’re after inactive bass. This requires downsized bait or lure and a slow approach and cadence. Dropping a bait into every little spot that a bass may find cover in. this is a time and patience’s game. It is also a great coldwater tactic. Lethargic cold bass hardly ever chase a fast moving lure. Running and gunning in cold water is a waste of time and effort.

Run and gun and stay and play, are great tactics to catch a lot of fish so try it out and see if you don’t agree. Enjoy

Bruce Middleton
bpmiddleton@peoplepc.com