These bass-fishing techniques sound loony, but they produce plenty bites.
The orange-bladed spinnerbait that March Take Home Angler Matthew Hymel threw at Lake Cataouatche so threw me for a loop that I began to wonder if those gaudy blades were just the tips of the proverbial iceberg.
Those orange blades flat out worked. If something that off the wall works, there’s got to be other wacky stuff that bass anglers across Louisiana do to catch bass when nothing else seems to be delivering the goods.
I wasn’t sure if I would find extreme stuff like bass anglers purposefully fishing crappie jigs in a spawning bed, drilling holes to let all the rattles out of a lipless crankbait, or maybe even throwing that old pink crankbait that everybody jokes about.
I thought I would probably find more subtle stuff like fishing a lipless crankbait with one big rattle in it rather than 15 tiny ones. Or maybe it might even be that some angler targets a piece of cover or structure that nobody else even thinks about fishing.
Whatever tricks there may be out there that would allow me to catch bass while all the other boats around me could only wonder what was my secret, I just had to know what they were.
Five anglers from across the state willingly told me what they do differently to catch bass. Some of their ideas were eye-popping; some were of the why-didn’t-I-think-of-that variety. And these are only five ways of doing things just a little bit differently.
Imagine how many more secrets are being so closely held out there on the water that we may never know what they are. I’ll tell you what: I can’t wait to try out these five tips, and if I see somebody around me catching bass while I can’t, you can bet I’m going to politely sidle up beside them to see if they want to go on the record.
Cliff Crochet
This Bassmaster Elite Series pro from Pierre Part has received a crash course in doing something different since he first started fishing at such a high level of competition. And while he would love to provide some off-the-wall professional secret about some kind of strange bait that he throws, the truth is that he throws the same basic baits that you and I throw. Only, he throws them in a different place.
“The first thing I do in a crowd is look for the heaviest cover I can find,” Crochet began. “Thick, hard and heavy — like Cataouatche for example. There’s grass everywhere out there during the summer, and boats are all over the grass. Well, some of that grass is intimidating because it’s so thick. That’s exactly the kind of grass you should want to fish.”
Crochet theorized that all the noise from boats fishing the easy-to-fish outside edges of the grass mats pushes bass back into the thickest mats where people just don’t go. Not only are these kinds of places hard to get to, but they’re hard to fish and hard to drag fish out of as well. But if that’s where the bass feel most protected, that’s where you can bet Crochet is going to be.
“Sometimes it’s just running my trolling motor on high and cleaning it out two or three times to finally get somewhere,” Crochet added. “Sometimes it takes running my motor hot where the alarm is going off.
“Whatever it takes is whatever it takes. I don’t worry about making noise going in, but I do let it chill a while before I start fishing once I get back in there.”
The first baits Crochet reaches for when he first fishes such thick, inaccessible mats of grass are those he called “stupid baits.” Not that a Horny Toad or Ribbit are stupid baits, but they are baits that a stupid bass that hasn’t seen too many lures will attack with reckless abandon.
“And when you get back in a thick place, you’d be surprised at all the little subtle things you’ll find like a hole in the grass or lilies mixed in,” Crochet said. “Subtle changes in thick grass mats that intimidate other anglers are just the ticket if you’re looking to do something different than everybody else.”
Purchase the May 2011 issue of Louisiana Sportsman magazine to read about other techniques that produce when bites are tough.
