Arkansas Outdoors
Fish eat in the heat; savvy anglers catch them
One of the most effective and simplest creations for the summer bass angler has been the suspending deep-diving crankbait.
Fourth installment in the Fishing Master Class Series
Despite the heat, summer is an excellent time to catch largemouth bass in Arkansas.
For years, the most productive summertime pattern among the top professional tournament anglers was using deep-diving crankbaits on deep structure. David Fritts and a coterie of eastern anglers popularized this pattern on the highland reservoirs of North Carolina, Tennessee and South Carolina. Fritts, the king of the deep crankers, was known for drilling holes in his crankbaits and injecting lead so that they would suspend at the nadir of their arcs instead of rising. This led lure makers to introduce all kinds of products to replicate that effect. Remember SuspenDots? Those were little lead wafers with adhesive on one side to attach to the bottoms of your crankbaits. I still have a bunch of them. Other companies repackaged lead wire that fly fishermen use to make weighted nymphs. You were supposed to wrap the wire around the shanks of your crankbait’s treble hooks to add weight.
Remember the Rip-NRick? Named in honor of Rick Clunn, who promoted it, that was a short-lived jerkbait made by Norman Lures of Greenwood. It came with a syringe with which you injected water into a nipple. The amount of water dictated how deep the lure suspended. It had no action to speak of and it cast like a brick, but if the grommet held and didn’t allow the thing to fill with water, it caught fish.
The simplest solution, of course, was the suspending deep-diving crankbait.
In Arkansas lakes, submerged brushpiles are the most popular and most consistent bass holding cover in the summer. Mark Davis, winner of the 1995 Bassmaster Classic, is a master at catching bass off brushpiles. Scott Suggs of Bryant used that pattern to win the 2007 Forrest Wood Cup on Lake Ouachita. An angler that I met randomly at Lake Dardanelle in July 2005 took me on a brushpile tour in the vicinity of Lake Dardanelle State Park, and we caught a limit before noon with Texas-rigged soft plastic worms.
There are basically three ways to fish brushpiles in the summer. You can wait for bass to school over a brushpile and catch them with topwater lures or swimbaits. You can nick the edges of brush with crankbaits or jerkbaits, a Mark Davis specialty, or you can get a bait inside the brush, as my partner and I did with the worms at Dardanelle.
Deep cranking is still a very effective method for catching bass in hot weather, but western anglers in the early 2000s proved that you can catch a lot of big bass easier in shallow water. Brent Ehler, a California native, astonished experienced southern anglers by winning an FLW Tour event on Lake Ouachita in May 2010. Technically that was a spring tournament, but the weather was unseasonably hot. Ehler targeted adult bass swimming in what he called “wolf packs” in coves with a jerkbait and a topwater prop bait. Other anglers targeted fish behaving similarly with swimbaits, which were emerging in 2010.
Ehler, Suggs and and the others did nothing new. They just threw a new wrinkle at an old pattern, which is targeting schooling bass on flats. Largemouths are binge eaters in hot weather. They are inactive for most of the day, but they go on feeding frenzies for short periods.
I’ve seen it on DeGray Lake this time of year fishing with the late J.O. Brooks, and I’ve seen it on Greers Ferry Lake this time of year fishing with Kevin Short of Mayflower. I watched Mike Iaconelli come within a hair’s breadth of winning a Bassmaster Elite Series tournament doing it on Lake Dardanelle.
Anticipation is the key to catching schooling fish. First, understand that bass usually relate to some kind of structure on or near shallow flats. It could be a collection of stumps or small channels. If you see baitfish cruising nervously near the service or if you see baitfish flipping on the surface, it usually means that predators are shadowing them from below.
You don’t actually have to see the baitfish. You’ll often see what anglers call “nervous water,” a stirring of the surface caused by anxious baitfish that are being shadowed and corralled by predators.
When you see any of that, get ready because a feeding frenzy is about to happen. It might last a good long while, or it might last for only a few minutes. While it’s in progress you can catch bass rapidly. When it’s over, you won’t get another bite until the next period.
You don’t have to wait for fish to school. You can still catch them by going into their homes.
A main key to catching bass in 100-degree weather is finding stained water. That’s easy in rivers, but not so easy in highland lakes like Ouachita, DeGray, Hamilton, Beaver and Bull Shoals. It’s easier than you think. Water appears clear in the upper portions of lakes, especially in tributaries and at the mouths of tributaries, but it is often stained beginning about 2 feet below the surface. It is cloudy enough to make fish feel secure, but it is clear enough for them to see most colors of lures.
At Lake Conway, bass might hold tight to a stump or a standing tree. At Beaver Lake these features are deeper, and there you can add rocks to the mix. If you put a lure in front of a fish, there’s a good chance it will bite. Concentrate on the outside edges of the cover and resist fishing the thicker cover inside the edges.
Time of day is also important. During the heat of the day, pleasure boaters, water skiers, tubers and personal watercraft cause a lot of commotion and can cause bass to deactivate. After about 4 p.m., non-anglers often leave the water. When it calms down, bass often venture out to feed.
It’s not fun fishing in the heat of an Arkansas summer, but when the fish bite, it sure makes it more tolerable.