Sight Casting Largemouth Bass

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.