Quote:
Originally Posted by Travis C.
Just add to or expand a little on the water temps from my experience as well. Most people think the water has to be in the upper 50's to mid 60's before you can fish anything like cranks, lipless or any moderately fast moving bait. Water temp in my opinion is an over-rated factor unless it is directly relating to the spawn. I have caught bass in shallow water on crankbaits in the low 40's and on the flip side in water above 90. You want water temp to be a factor you consider but what you want to look for is a "change" in temp.
Don't be afraid to pick up those shallow crankbaits or lipless bait and search for them like you would in the pre-spawn. It is not a jig or big worm only time of year. Once you find them then you can focus in on your drop-shot, shaky or jig if you want.
Also, you can put on a bigger crankbait like a DD-22 or DD Fat Rap and put the bait on the bottom then crawl it. They are so bulky that you can really slow them down but still cover water effectively. Plus, they will off a big meal for that fish who don't want to move very fast or far for a bite.
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Great point Travis!
Your post made me think....so I went back to the models and data to see if temperature "change" idea was true. I am using the TWRA creel survey information from 2001 to 2009 for all lakes in TN and all of my model predictions to estimate environmental conditions (in this case water temps for the 7 day prior to the creel survey). There are almost 30,000 interview of bass anglers so the results are pretty strong.
Here are the results:
For Water Temperature stability (or the total amount of change up or down over the prior week) there is a strong relationship between stability and catch rates for largemouth bass.
You can definitely see that catch rates are higher when the past weeks weather has been stable.
Well, what about the trend in water temperature? Is it better to have cooling, stable, of warming water temperature?
Again from the same dataset, stable temps are better than cooling or warming waters.
This surprised me a little as I alway like to see warming water, but this is really showing strong warming or cooling trends where the water temp is changing fast. This probably makes the bass move and harder to catch.
One other thing I see. While the catch rate may be not as good, people are still catching bass when the conditions are bad. So there really is no bad time to bass fish, only better times
Something to think about.....
Jim