Gray morning bass

Drive out to take a slice of some early morning summer water under cloudy conditions. This has to be one of the few times where the weather forecast actually matched what the talking heads said was going to happen. Rather than being a near 100-degree scorcher like the day before, the weather was a fall-like 60-degrees to start the day.

By 6AM I was on the water with the tooner after an hour drive. Circles formed on the water from smaller fish cleaning up some of the bugs that had fallen during the night. Most of these fish were bluegill, sunfish and even small bass. Occasionally there would be a large boil of a predator fish attacking one of the smaller baitfish. If this happened close by I would give out a toss and wait for the strike. Buzzbait was used the first thirty minutes before switching to the spinnerbait. Second cast with the spinnerbait got clobbered. That is kind of shame as I really wanted to land a big fish on the buzzbait this summer. Spinnerbait buckets on a gray morning will just have to do.

This particular lake has a decent population of aggressive bass in various sizes. In this situation to avoid wasting time in dink city it helps to start with oversized baits and downsize only if needed (I have more or less the opposite view on heavily pressured water at times). In this case I am throwing 1/2oz spinerbaits and 5-6 inch plastics. A few swimbaits in the 4-5 inch section are ready to go if the other stuff fails. Luckily enough hits came on the yellow\green double blade keeping me from having to reach for other options.

By noon the morning clouds of gray surrendered to the now fully risen sun. The circles on the top of the water ceased and the boils vanished as well. Moving to the shady areas was a likely place to search but this came up empty as well. It was as if the fish had moved to deep shelter to await the next feeding shift. Just like the gray clouds of the morning…I chose to surrender as well.

My name is Matt and I’m a fishaholic.