Topwater Largemouth Bass Tip: Changing Light Explained

 University research has shown that largemouths have a visual advantage over fish forage when light changes gradually. Why should I bother citing the source when it's obvious largemouths hit topwaters early and late? They like to look upward and ambush from below, and most of what they grab swims in mid-column or thereabouts, I suppose. But if largemouths use aquatic vegetation growing from upward from five foot flats to hide their presence in clear water, commotion on the surface above is a perfect target.

Only early and late?

Especially during summer, it often seems so. Sometimes I think it is so. But if you get gathering cloud cover in the afternoon, even early afternoon, light intensity is changing and bass move to feed because it's made easier for them so long as that light continues to darken, or begins to lighten again later. But the typical sun in, sun out, of passing cumulus is probably too rapid a change to make a difference. But who knows. I have seen excellent topwater action during summer, 1 p.m., when cloud cover advanced very slowly.

When you see bass move like this, appreciate it. Recognize these creatures are actually responding to objective facts. Otherwise, it's all the same, you just happened to catch a few in the afternoon, and you get no impression of why this is--which means you learn nothing.

I knew someone in my teens who supposedly became schizophrenic. I became intensely curious about what was really going on with him. He had been out of the hospital, on meds, but it was "understood" that he "is" schizophrenic for the rest of his life. I got to the heart of his problem. "Everything's the same," he said. And he described for me and indicated how nothing had reality, nothing had objectivity, factuality and meaning, yet he spoke as one human being to another, an act that defied his claim.

 

So I thought long and hard, not saying anything for how long I don't know, and came to an insight I knew I couldn't share witth him, because it would make no difference. He wasn't schizophrenic. He had given up. He had seen "enough" (no doubt, his mad episode had seen a lot), and decided to gloss everything over with the lie that it's all the same worthlessness. He was willing to speak to me, but I soon felt that he needed his own determination to come to any truth. We all require society for our verbal facility, but some of the very best moments are not shared, entirely private, vivid, uniquely distinct, and remembered all your life long. A change of inner light that provokes determination to strike out, and that seems to have been the only hope for him. Perhaps schizophrenia really is the awful disease psychiatrists claim it is, because for whatever reason, those who suffer it don't get such good ideas elemental to any sort of opportunity. I don't really believe that. And I've heard of so-called schizophrenics fully recovered.

 

Bass and the human brain, changing light...it's not all the same, but to draw analogies opens wide vistas.  

How easy must be for people who have given up. If it's all the same old, same old, you don't have to do anything. Oh, no, you just get done to and the lie won't protect.