Sight
Casting Largemouth Bass
By
Bruce Edward Litton
I spent my teens especially fishing a
series of six ponds, four of them owned by Princeton Day School. I knew Headmaster
Doug McClure from church, and he gave me permission without my asking. Good
water quality and rich vegetation never overwhelmed any of the ponds to put
them on the list of notorious weed-choked spots. They offered excellent
largemouth bass fishing year round.
Best remembered, the shallow flats of
these four to six-acre havens staged great sight fishing during hot summer
afternoons when temperatures frequently reached the middle 90’s. I peddled back
home eight miles on my 10-speed Schwinn to eat a late lunch, my stomach
growling, after watching damselflies dip low, seemingly to make contact with
vegetation at the ponds’ surface. Just once, I experienced a clear view of a
damselfly disappear into the wide-opened maw of a leaping bass.
Recent years have afforded me
opportunity to fish the same way I caught so many bass all those years ago. A
calm late morning or afternoon, a shallow flat of clear water, damselflies and
largemouths. Wherever you find clear shallows and these dragonfly-like insects,
you may find bass on the cruise, looking upward as they swim out in the open or
along edges and in pockets of weeds, obvious to the eye and vulnerable to
weightless plastic worms.
So much is drummed into us about
early and late in the day for summer largemouths, but they feed casually all
day for whatever serves an easy meal. On the cruise, bass often mix with
sunfish, some of them small enough to eat, but the sunfish show no fear. Rather
than exhibiting any interest in giving chase, bass conserve calories burning at
a high rate of metabolism in very warm water, but they will leap for a
damselfly when close enough. And they avidly take plastic worms well-presented.
In recent years, I’ve used
seven-inch, thin-bodied traditional-style plastic worms successfully for sight
fishing, but during my teens, never strayed from four-inch worms, my favorite
brand the Ringworm, which I haven’t seen on the market since. Ringworms the
first to appear with the soft plastic separators built into the body to trap
air and emit bubbles on descent, many of us now have familiarized with Keitech
plastics of the same sort of design, only with paddle tails to allow function
as swimbaits.
Before you try cast-and-retrieve methods
while sight fishing largemouths, as you would be tempted with a paddletail,
consider that bass may—very likely—only want what’s delivered right in front of
them. Whatever sort of worm you choose—four inches is close to the size of the
sorts of tidbits they forage on during the day—go light with gear, usually no
more than a medium-power spinning rod and six-pound test monofilament. Unless
you fish thick vegetation with lunkers about, that’s all you need. Otherwise,
use 15-pound test low diameter braid and always a lengthy fluorocarbon leader
of the same measure. Fluorocarbon is less visible in the water than
monofilament. Tie the two by uni-to-uni splice. A barrel swivel would just
complicate matters.
I haven’t tried another approach that
might work. For those of you who like ultra-light spinning, tidbit-size
plastics like two or three-inch grubs on size 2 or 4 plain shank hooks and line
as light as four-pound test for casting efficiency would be interesting. Some
ponds featuring weeds not so dense also don’t host many big bass. A lot of fun
with fish up to a pound or so might await anglers who explore the lightest of
possible approaches, or for another possibility, a fly rod and nymph patterns.
Just don’t use the sinking beadhead variety. Since I’ve tried tiny Gudebrod
Blabbermouth topwater plugs and a few other brands without much success, I
can’t recommend poppers, but about this I only speak to the limit of my
experience.
During those eternal summers of my
youth, I often awoke at 4:00 a.m. to peddle half of my journey to Princeton in
total darkness, arriving at what we called the First Pond to ditch my bike and
begin fishing well before sunup. That’s when I did very well with those tiny
topwater plugs using a light-power rod. And as the sun climbed, I switched to
the little worms and began behaving more like a great blue heron than a young
lad, perhaps. Some of the bass good size by my youthful standard, very few of
them approached two pounds, but on occasion a three-pounder would appear in
water not much more than foot deep. I never caught any of them, besides hooking
up once. On that miraculous occasion, a whole pod of at least half-a-dozen bass
from 2 ½ to 3 ½ pounds appeared together cruising all at once, and I never forget.
Bass appearing visibly to your pursuit make an impression, and why not settle
on small ones, if that’s what you see?
Not all of the bass cruise flats. The
pod of big ones seemed to simply rise out of the Fourth Pond’s deepest water
and invade a sunlit shoreline edge, along with many other bass besides, I
caught cruising shorelines. Why bigger never appeared, I don’t know. By other
methods, under different conditions, I caught bass in McClure’s Ponds that
approached five pounds. But we all know big bass seem wise. The great exception
to their hiddenness—in recent years—involved a cruiser I estimated at 21
inches, slowly wallowing along a Mount Hope Pond shoreline. My stalking days
came back in an instant, and though I got the worm in position for a take, the
bass swam on by as if not noticing, and then descended to the deep.
Precision casting is a must. Getting
a worm ahead of a bass in motion by about two feet is the rule, but as you
develop experience, you get better at sensing just where the sweet spot may be
and lightly presenting that worm exactly where it needs to go. You could spend
a lifetime perfecting pinpoint pitching and casting. These bass are not like
redfish on a South Carolina marsh flat, which bolt like bulldogs for a fly cast
six or seven feet in front of them, stripped ahead of them to provoke pursuits.
As a rule, a sighted largemouth during an afternoon of blazing heat will not
change its course for a worm. You have to try to make the worm as it descends
meet the bass right there at eye level. And then all the bass does—if it does
anything, not always—is flex that vacuum mouth.
There’s tension in this game.
Anticipation. Not every bass complies, and success is not as easy as may seem.
To an outsider, it may seem folly to spend time pitching and casting to fish so
plainly vulnerable, but anyone who gets involved in a few hours of this deeply
relaxing and riveting recreation comes away feeling fulfilled of a challenge.
Interesting - I don't think I realized you were sight fishing. I would just fan cast, letting the worm sink slowly, waiting for something to just start taking up the slack. 5" Mister Twisters were my favorites
ReplyDeleteWasn't always. Probably not most of the time. Many days, though. Also at Hedden Park in Dover, recent years. Worm fishing is very particular, once you get good at it. Dover I fished about six years ago. And by the way, an interesting, diverse town at the terminal moraine of the Wisconsin Glacier. A native brook trout stream leads into the pond. All the worming I've done since isn't sight fishing in the literal sense, with very little exception, but it does involve intuitive sense--anticipating where an individual bass might await. This means most of the casting is probing for that hunch that once and awhile exactly predicts a take.
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