How to-Bass Fishing Tips - How to Fish Largemouth vs Smallmouth Bass

Bass may come a lot easier if you treat them as separate species and cater to their respective habits in your choice of tackle, lures, and fishing methods.

How to Fish Largemouth Bass - Locate largemouths by reading the shorelines. Old stumps standing at the waterline often mark the location of submerged trees and underwater brush piles, always hot spots for bigmouths. Look for brushy, overhung banks and shoot your plug or bug far under the foliage, as close to shore as you can put it. Investigate coves and pockets; surface debris accumulates in these places and makes excellent largemouth cover. Beds of lily pads may shelter bass, so give them a thorough combing, paying special attention to the edges and open pockets.

Largemouths tend to move out into deeper water during the heat and brightness of midday. Go down for them with deep-running plugs and bait--frogs and large minnows held just above the bottom growth with a bobber, weighted plastic worms drug slowly across the floor of the pond, a weedless spoon with pork rind, or just a big gob of nightcrawlers. Toward evening the fish move back toward shore again. Follow them in and pepper the shoreline with surface lures--floating plugs, pork chunks, bass bugs, and fly-rod poppers.

How to Fish Smallmouth Bass - Smallmouths prefer a different kind of environment. Look for them in deep water over a rocky bottom. Probe with a sounding weight to locate reefs. When you locate one, fish just over the drop-off. Explore water off stony points and rubbly shores if the bottom drops away sharply.

You can frequently locate a good spot with this method: Fish ten minutes or so in one spot, raise the anchor and drift or row a few yards away, fish again, drift, and so on. If the anchor suddenly drops, locate the brink of the chasm and fish over the edge of it.

Use deep-running lures for smallmouths and stick to the smaller sizes; in general, largemouths like bigger baits than smallmouths do. Fan your casts out like the spokes of a wheel to cover bass surrounding water. On calm evenings, try bass bugs along the shores and off the weed beds and rock piles.

Lay in a variety of natural baits to match everchanging tastes of smallmouths. They may like hellgrammites one day, minnows or crickets the next. Offer smallmouths a tasty snack; treat largemouths to a hearty meal. They really don't have much in common, except for the family name, and quarrelsome nature.

1. When casting for bass from an anchored boat, toss out a live bait on a bobber, and then cast around and beyond it. Fish that follow the lure without striking will often take the bait instead.
2. Try this sometimes when fishing for bass in very clear water, on a bright day, or wherever or whenever the fish are playing hard to get. Cast your lure as far as you can, let it sink to the bottom, and leave it there as long as your patience lets you. Ten minutes so none too long. By the time you start to retrieve it the bass will have forgotten the disturbance it made, and may pounce on it the instant it moves.