Every angler, no matter how successful, has experienced times when the bite is nonexistent. So completely shut down, it is as if some kind of off switch was thrown and the bass have simply disappeared. If you’ve spent any amount of time on the water, you know just how quickly the bite can change. Week to week, day to day, even hour to hour.
For decades now I have given bass and walleye seminars across the tri-state area, sharing tips and tactics on a wide range of scenarios, most of which are based on probability and personal experience. But what about the times when those tactics fall short ? The age-old adage, ‘a bad day of fishing, is better than a good day at work’ hardly applies when your line of work is putting anglers on fish. Lock jawed bass is what makes my team of guides less than thrilled with our 10-bass guarantee.
So, what should anglers do when nothing seems to work? Let us break out some workable options.
Change It Up
Most anglers have their go-to fishing tactic and many of us are too slow to change it up. Likely for good reason, these go-to tactics have worked 95% of the time, so why change? During these rare moments, a single tactic is generally not going to work. There are generally two knee jerk trains of thought when fish turn off. 1: Stick with it until the fish respond or 2: Throw the kitchen sink at them. I would like to propose a third, more systematic approach.
Sticking with a favorite lure and changing the presentation by size, action and color has generally worked to turn the light switch back on. If you are a finesse angler, this might look like completely changing the color by choosing the complete opposite. If dark, go light, if using a natural muted color, go bright and bold. Often, this is enough to turn the day around.
On one particular day, my client Ken was having an unusually slow day. After watching this, I made suggestion after suggestion that he put the curl tail grub down and throw something else. But he would not hear it.
Now I must confess, even though I have seen a 3-4” grub jig work a thousand times, it is not one of my favorite baits. You will not find one on my boat, even though I know they catch bass. That said, the more I pushed, the more he resisted. After no success, he relented enough to change to a different color and with that, changed the way he was fishing it.
Rather than slowly reeling the jig back to the boat, he started to snap-jig his presentation. Casting it out, making bottom contact and sharply lifting the bait so the grub would sharply snap up off the bottom and slowing flutter back down. This produced strikes and a day where there were only a few bass the first four hours, finished with well over 80 bass. Changing color and presentation turned the day around.
What if simply changing color and presentation fails?
Size makes a difference. Going larger or smaller is also a way to get bass to eat.
I go back to another trip nearly 20 years ago. A good friend Jason who was visiting from the Pittsburg area and had the weekend free to fish with me. On Saturday we couldn’t keep the fish off the line, fish after fish were caught with rarely more than a few casts without one on. The following day however, we could not buy a bite. Same levels, water temp and locations, but nothing to show for it.
Jason questioned me about the day prior asking me if I remembered seeing all the small crayfish these bass were dislodging (puking) while we were catching. These were considerably smaller than the 4” tubes we were throwing. He reached in his box and pulled out a teaser size tube, maybe 2.75” long, tied it on and threw it in. Same color, same presentation, just significantly smaller in profile.
Seconds later, his line tightened and he was hooked up. Five fish later, fishing the same area with no results on the larger tube, I swallowed my pride and asked to try one. First cast with the smaller profile, and I was hooked up. As for why they ate larger baits just one day earlier, I could only guess. We just knew hands down that the only change we made was size.
Location, Location, Location
There are clearly times when bass are in specific kinds of water. This is especially true on rivers. It is summer and we all know bass are in oxygen rich current and likewise, in colder months like December, bass are pooled up in a slack water pool or pulled tight to structure in the softer side of current flow, fairly removed from swift current. Every article, book or seminar on seasonal fishing states the same.
On a particularly cold December day with my buddy Todd, I had the rare opportunity to fish off the back of his boat. Honestly, I rarely fish on someone else’s boat. On this day we didn’t have a bite, not as much as a maybe. Neither of us were strangers to fishing 38-degree water an we were just about to make a major move when I had professional overrun (aka backlash/birds nest) on a long cast. My jerkbait was out and helpless as I worked the mess on the spool free. In what took minutes, the lure eventually made its way through the protected area we were targeting and drifted well into the current seam down river. Before I completely cleared the tangled line, the rod snapped and a sizable bass was on.
After landing the bass, we looked at each other and said, they can’t be in that current right? He threw straight down into the fast water and hooked up. We were in the right location, just fishing the wrong kind of water. Our success was purely accidental, but the lesson was not lost on us.
As a general rule when experiencing a slow bite is the 10-cast rule. I will have each angler cast 10x and then move. I may move from shallow to deep, slow water to fast, or move to significantly different water. This has been the difference between catching and not catching more times than I can admit.
It all comes down to finding success and repeating the steps. Even if anglers have a tried and true technique, if the results are not there, change it up. To rephrase Albert Einstein’s famous quote, doing the same thing and expecting different result on lock-jaw days is insanity.
Author Chris Gorsuch is a licensed charter guide in the state of Pennsylvania. He started the Reel River Adventures guide service in ‘07 and spends 225-250 days on the water annually. His home base is on the Susquehanna River. Follow his daily fishing reports on Facebook ‘Reel River Adventures-RRA’ & Instagram @Chris_Gorsuch
