This Week @ Bass Edge

Early-season, late bite

The sun was threatening the pines that lined the little East Texas lake. My host for the afternoon, Troy Cooper of New London, suggested we hit an area out of the stiff wind that was persisting. It wasn’t long until a stocky 4 ½-pound bass snatched a bream-colored swim bait, boiling the shallow water next to the protected bank. As Troy released the fish, I smiled; it was just as Rick Loomis had been saying earlier in the day.

The weather around the country has been sort crazy this spring, and as a guide of Texas’ Lake Fork, Rick has had his share of it to deal with. It’s made fishing tough at times, but he has dealt with the whacky weather by applying a bit of patience. It makes it easier knowing that as the water temperature rises during the day, the fishing only gets better.

“Weather controls what they do,” Rick explained. “You and I control our environment; we can come inside or get in our truck and turn on our heater. If you have ever been outside when it’s cold and walked into your house with the heater on, you say, ‘this feels great.’ The fish feel the same way. When they get the sun on their back, they’ll get more active. When the early water temperatures are cold, and there have been cold nights, the best bite is usually between about 1 p.m. and dark.”

At no other time of the year is it more important to keep your eye on the temperature gauge, and to seek out the warmest water, than in the early spring.

“If you have water temperatures in the low 50s, and in the afternoon the sun pops out, that temperature might jump up into the 60s. When those fish cruise up into that 60-degree water, they feel so much better and are so much more active.”

Not only will fish tend to seek out the warmer water, their cold-blooded nature makes them more active and likely to feed aggressively in higher temperatures

“You can throw a spinnerbait or a Sinko and get them to actually move to go get that bait.”

As morning begins to grow into afternoon, Loomis looks for areas that are to most likely to warm quickly.

“You really want to look for areas where the wind is not hammering the cold water into the pockets. Here at Lake Fork, this year it’s been strange because we have been getting two days of south wind and then two days of the wind coming out of the north. We’ll get some areas that will warm up and then a north wind will come in and cool them off. You can find areas that are little more protected from that cold water being pushed into it that may have the sun beating down on it, you might pick off one or two fish in the morning. But a lot of times you can come back in there at 5 p.m. and catch 15. They have moved up into that warmer water and they are a little more aggressive.”

The pre-spawn in Texas is a time of fluctuating water temperatures, and Loomis looks at some of these same protected areas for fish to spawn first.

“When the afternoons warm and the water temperatures warm up, here comes the males cruising up out of eight or 10 feet of water. There may be three to four degrees difference between that deeper water and the shallows. And the females will follow them up there. They might not necessarily be ready to spawn, but once those fish start migrating up into that shallow water, and they see it’s warmer, they are going to feel a lot better.”

Troy and I had already agreed it was about time to get off of the water. Real world obligations were calling. On one of those last casts that seem so much more important than all of the others, into the wind-protected water next to a small island that had benefited from the afternoon sun, a fish slammed into my swimbait. It teased us with one wallow on the surface before spitting the hook – enough to for both of us to see that it was a huge bass. I would be seeing Rick the next day, and looked forward to telling him about our early-season, late bite.