The Fourth of July weekend was full of festivities but I chiseled out some time to get underwater on a local lake and figure out what July has brought us!
The word of the day is transition. As the summer has wore on, the fish have been slowly become less concentrated, and obviously harder to find! I started my first dive off a rock shoreline drop-off that transitions into sand at about 10 feet. This was a spot I had seen walleyes and SMB (Smallmouth Bass) earlier this summer. This spot has no weeds on it, simply softball to basketball sized rocks. Not a fish to be seen, it was a dead zone. Zero, Zip, Zilch, Nada!
The next spot was my hotspot for early summer bass fishing, hundreds of bass if not more called this area home during April, May and June. It’s littered with sand, mixed rock, and as I came to find out, man-made brush piles galore. I was able to pin down a few bass in the area but nothing under 10 feet deep unless it was directly relating to the brush piles. Still the fish I was seeing were very small
I followed a cabbage line which transitioned to sand and found a few SMB’s lodged up in the weeds and cruising the edges of it but again very scattered, a few larger fish. I did have a pair of smallies follow me around for a couple hundred yards, obviously content with my company.
My third dive was in a new area. It’s a steeper drop from the shoreline, to about 30 feet. From 10 feet to shore it’s weeds, and as you get down deeper to the 10 foot area it becomes more rocky. I found a few brush piles which were holding fish but the majority of them went poof! Honestly, the most fish I found not related to the piles were sub-12 feet, with the shallows being dead.
What really shocked me was the lack of LMBs (Largemouth Bass) in the weeds. They were beautiful looking green cabbage beds, some really thick with Coontail mixed in, others less dense with just cabbage. Not one green bass to be found. Earlier this summer they were loaded into these weed beds, one cast and you would be hooked up. I was perplexed to say the least!
I finally wised up and headed to some mid-lake structure, I knew fish had been hanging out on from previous dives. It’s a beautiful hump topping out in 12-14 feet with a mix of all sizes of rock, sand and weeds. Taaadaaaa! The lake was alive again. Bass everywhere, both green and brown ones, with the sporadic Walleye mixed in. It was very apparent to me, this is the structure one needs to be targeting. The SMBs were spending the majority of their time cruising the tops of the rocky reefs in that 12-14 foot range while the LMBs hung right off the edge where you could find a mat of weed growth on the bottom in about 16-18 feet.
SMB fry were quite abundant, being in gigantic schools about 4 feet off the bottom. Little bass (4-10in.) were also everywhere. This is where the big boys were hanging out too, I saw a bunch of really nice SMB’s and LMB’s.
The walleyes I spotted were between 16-20 feet of water and they were just cruising around the scattered sand and rock. Granted this was at 1 in the afternoon. Earlier that day I took my brother with a group of their buddies for a quick fishing outing, and one of them tied into a upper teens Walleye within 15 minutes around 11am in 20 feet of water on the same sand and rock flat.
The trick to catching bass was to get right up on top in the rocky mix because there was hardly a bass to be found on the sand and rock flats, you had to be in the really rocky areas to find SMB’s and the weed/rock transitions to find the LMBs.
I also cruised the shallow areas and found a number of Bluegills still on their beds in a sandy area with pencil grass. Thousands of 1-2 inch gills mixed in trying to pester the larger ones protecting their beds. Pretty fun to watch!
The video will be coming sometime this week, mostly discussing the transition time period, comparing underwater footage from a week ago to now.
Also, I have come to the conclusion people often forget to time their anchor to a rope. The tally so far this year for recovered anchors is at 6…..So as an IDO Public Service Announcement….please remember to tie a rope onto your anchor for effective use.