Bass Fishing Tip of the Week 12/29/08: How to Catch Bedding Bass

Locating bedding largemouth bass can be a daunting task but catching them is another. Let's say you've done your homework in preparation for the upcoming tournament and have located several nice spawning areas laden with sandy bottoms and ample overhead cover like lily pads and grass. In the spawning grounds you've spotted several nice females with their mates tight to the beds. To verify their willingness to hit you toss just about everything in your tacklebox on the beds but come up empty. Here's some tricks to get the bedding bass to strike and how to properly hook them once they take the lure.

1- In clear water you need to back the boat away from the beds. The largemouth will see you and this will inhibit their natural instinct to pick up a lure from their bed. Memorize the location of the bed by picking out the specific piece of cover near it and pitch past the bed working the lure towards the center of it.

2- Use as light of weight as possible while maintaining precise location of the lure in the bed. This makes less of a threatening splash as the lure enters the water on the pitch.

3- For smaller bass (the bucks) in the 3 pound or less category use smaller lures like tube baits or trickworms. Make sure these baits have some glitter in them as it seems to help aggravate them.

4- When you near the center of the bed, try lightly quivering the rod tip especially with a tube bait.  When doing this, try not to move the lure from the center of the bed. Often the bass will nose dive your lure and start moving it off the bed.

5- Be quick on the hook set. Any movement of the line indicates the fish has it in it's mouth and you need to slam the hook home right away. The main reason for this is that the fish will spit it out as soon as it clears the bedding area.

6- For larger fish try crawdad plastics, sweet beavers, brush hogs and larger worms or tubes. These lures offer more bulk and set off the killer instincts of the female bass and they often just hit them out of anger!

If you follow these bass fishing tips I'm sure you'll be doing more catching with less fishing during the spawning season : )

Update- The Largemouth Herald with a nice female from a bed caught on 01/02/09 with a sweet beaver- Fish was released to spawn.

Some More Fish that Anna and I Caught on Apac in January

The Largemouth Herald