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 It's summertime … and the
bass fishing is not easy
By ARNOLD MARKOWITZ
Waterfront News Writer
You like bass fishing, right? Oh, right, not in July.
Weather's too hot, water's too high. So stay home, sleep late, watch television, but take a look around. See any fish around the house? No, they're out in the Everglades, and
you're not. Some are still in the canals, under those thick green spatterdock pads with the yellow flowers, but 'way back in the densest shade, against the bank as far as they can
get. Many more are spread out over the sawgrass flats where the water, though not as deep, feels cooler under cover.
Where did you think they went? The mountains in North
Carolina? They're harder to find now, but not that hard.
A few fishermen are out there looking for bass and finding them. They're the 10 percent of the fishermen who
you've heard catch 90 percent of the fish. In times like this, they have to explore more, be more patient and persistent than at any other time.
When the weather's dry and the water is low, they stick to the canals, same as you. Not now. Look for the
green signs marked "Marsh Access," identifying airboat trails. Tilt up your outboard, turn on your electric
trolling motor and in you go. Got a backup battery for the troller? A 10-foot mast and orange warning flag to
avoid airboat runovers? A GPS to prevent getting lost? You need those. "There's three to four feet of water back in there, and gator holes," tournament pro Bob Miley told me. "Those bass will be back up in there."
For all his good qualities, the largemouth is a loafer. He expects you to be a waiter and bring the bait to
him. Sometimes he'll get off his butt to grab it, but it had better be a slow bait and a short chase on an overcast day. Ol' bass doesn't like bright sunlight and won't come out from under his shade.
Most of the time, even when weather's cool and water's low, you have to place your lure under his nose
to get him interested. In mid-summer, you almost have to drop it into his open mouth when he yawns.
Not exactly kidding there.
"They yawn all the time. You mean nobody ever told you that before?" So says local tournament star John Pate, one of the experts I asked for tips on mid-summer bass fishing.
His observation of wide-open fish mouths may not be yawning as we know it, although that would be in
character for the lazy largemouth. Pate, when he gets close enough to see one in clear water, says he often
notices what may be just the flexing of jaw muscles. But calling it yawning makes the story better. To you, that
might mean Pate's a good storyteller. To me, it means he's a good fish-finder. He ought to be. Pate, 46, is a swamp bass fisherman's son, peering into Everglades waters since he was three-years old.
Expertise
Between tournaments Pate's out there scouting as many as four days a week, often using hookless lures
to entice harmless strikes. He just wants to find the fish, not catch them until tournament day. Bass are
territorial, so they'll probably still be there when he and fishing partner J.P. McKay, an expert in his own right,
return. McKay owns an engineering business and takes Thursdays off to pre-fish the tournament territory
with Pate — whose vast experience he credits for their consistent success. When I met them, they were on a hot streak. Their latest success was winning a tournament staged by SAFER, the combo of bass clubs that
sticks up for fishermen's interests in the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Project.
I fished that tournament with Miley, who notices bass behaving like humans, and uses what he sees to
catch them. "If I'm catching a lot of small fish, sometimes I'll go to a bigger lure — same lure, same color, but
bigger," he said. "The theory behind that is big bass like hors d'oeuvres. When you go to a party they've got the hors d'oeuvres tray sitting out front and everybody's picking at it.
"Bass do the same thing. Fish will sometimes tell you what they want. If they're hitting it pretty hard, that
means you have the right color. If you're getting tail bites on the back hooks, or fish are throwing the plug,
they're in the mood but your lure's not the right color or it might be too large and you have to downsize. Just a slight change or a slower presentation might make the difference."
To put it another way, if you have faith in a lure, stick with it and change color before changing lures. Fish
slower. If your lure lands on a lily pad, leave it there for a little while before twitching it into the water. On a sunny day, the fish can look up and see it from below.
Pate, whose patience may be exceptional, says he'll stick with a lure he likes through 10 or 12 color
changes before switching to a different lure. The lure he likes best, especially for tournament fishing, is a huge
plastic worm he designed himself and keeps locked in a hatch on the boat. I caught a look at one he stuffed
into his hip pocket. It was easily a foot long, with a ridged surface like a cross-section cut from alligator hide.
"They love those big snakes," McKay said. "Basically we just swim snakes on top of the water. You want big fish, and they eat those big snakes. I'll give one color about a half hour or 45 minutes before changing."
Miley doesn't wait that long. He and I share a fondness for the popular soft plastic Zoom super fluke in
the watermelon-seed pattern. It wasn't producing much that day, so Miley changed to one just like it, but with
red flakes added. That worked for a while, and when the action slowed again he switched to a stubby plastic worm, about the same color.
At last he tied on the ugliest lure I'd ever seen, a leprous-looking thing in jalapeno green, very fleshy,
with an aggressively ridged body, two rear-end fins that must have been copied from a sea turtle, two twist
tails between the turtle fins and red specks that look like spattered paint, or maybe a contagious pox. A 4/0 hook, rigged weedless, made it look bigger, even more repulsive.
Had Saddam Hussein hidden weapons of mass destruction in Bob Miley's tackle box? Oh, how fiendish!
Squeamishly, I picked one up. "If I were a fish, I'd swim away from this," I said. Of course the bass loved it.
Miley caught fish after fish. The lure is a Gene Larew Hoo-Daddy Jr. A few days later I bought some, but I'm
afraid to open the package. What if one escapes? John Pate's foot-long worm doesn't look scary, though the
size is radical. He and McKay, tournament partners for 11 years, use them up to 16 inches long. The fish aren't called largemouth for nothing.
Where the bass are
If only that were the only solution to hot-weather bass fishing. Fact is, the snakes wouldn't do Pate and
McKay much good if they didn't know where the bass are. If they have a number one secret for mid-summer
success, that's it. "You have to scout more and travel less," Pate said. "We find little pockets holding a few
fish in one spot, a few in other spots." We never, hardly ever, have to run in a tournament. We find fish during
the week and we know they're there. "We'll work a small area for two hours, back and forth. In that SAFER tournament we spent six hours in a 200-yard hole, going back and forth."
Pate and McKay don't knock the notion that the more territory you cover, the better your chances are,
but these winners refine the technique. In his nearly daily scouting runs, Pate notices that in certain spots the
fish feed actively for a short span of time, and the time varies from place to place. "I look around and stare, and
move and move. If you know what's happening, you can pick up and move and hit those areas that change with time," Pate said. "I learned that by accident."
On tournament days he and McKay change locations to coincide with those feeding periods.
Subject to the fickle will of the fish, I like using hard-body floating lures. About half the fish I raised that day
with Miley struck at a Rapala, the color of a gold shiner, with weed-guarded trebles that I subbed for the original hooks. I have a lot of Rapalas, and always switched colors randomly, but Miley taught me a smarter
way.
If you think about the color of daylight, you know it changes as the clock turns. Bass probably don't
intellectualize that, but they react to it. "From about 11 to 2, the sunlight is straight up and down, with no
shadows," Miley said. "If you're catching fish early in the morning, keep the same lure on but change to a lighter color around 11 o'clock. It presents a better silhouette, so the fish can look up and see it.
"The darker lures cast a darker silhouette in the morning, so use a darker color in the morning and a lighter
color in the later part of the day. On overcast days you can use dark-colored lures pretty much all day. On real
bright days, I'll go more with silver and on overcast days more of a gold, because the gold color will reflect more on overcast days."
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