This Week @ Bass Edge

Understanding spring bass dynamics

It’s early on a late April morning on Lake Fork, and Kelly Jordon, who several days earlier had captained his four-man team to victory in the Toyota Texas Bass Classic, is holding court while he ties on a new crankbait.

“This year, the spring spawning season has really been mixed up,” he explained. “In most places, including here at Fork, the spawn is late – they’re just now coming shallow – but on other lakes we’re well into the post spawn and on the verge of seeing summer patterns more than a month earlier than normal.

“At Falcon where BASS set all those catch records the first week of April, we hit the post spawn absolutely dead-on, but just up the river at Amistad a week later, the fish weren’t on beds, but dropping water probably pulled them off. And at Clarks Hill (S.C.) where we’ll be the first week of May, the spawn hasn’t taken place at all.”

Jordon’s comments come as no surprise to serious bass fishermen anywhere: the spring spawning season – all phases of it – is not always predictable, and to really understand what is happening with the fish requires understanding other dynamics that play a major role in bass behavior. It’s not just about lure or location.

“To me, the entire key is water temperature,” the Texas pro emphasized, “and even more importantly, stable temperatures. Nights must be warm enough so they don’t chill the water after a warm afternoon.

“At Fork during our tournament, the water temperature was 55 degrees. The bass wanted to move shallow but the majority were still deep. That’s why my team concentrated in deeper 17- to 20-foot depths, but we checked the shallows repeatedly each day just to see if the fish were starting to move.”

“This is exactly why you can find big schools of bass staging in deeper water just before they move shallow,” added Mark Davis, former Bassmaster Classic winner and guide on Lake Ouachita. “In the earliest stages of the pre-spawn, bass are more grouped, and this is when you tend to catch a lot on Rat-L-Traps and other reaction baits. As the temperature continues to warm, the bass begin roaming, looking for spawning beds. The reaction bite disappears and becomes a slower soft plastics bite.

“This can be a narrow window of time, too. When bass do move shallow to beds, it can and does happen very fast, and a lot of fishermen have experienced this. Down at Lake Toho when Dean Rojas set his one-day catch record of 45-2, those bass were not there until the last afternoon of practice.”

“Absolutely,” Jordon agreed. “What happened at Fork was that we cranked deep water but were only catching one bass every 20 minutes or so. That’s what told me the bass were beginning to scatter and move shallow, and it’s why we kept checking the spawning flats repeatedly.

“Water temperature is the most important dynamic in the spring in determining when bass move shallow. I’m convinced it’s more important than the moon phase. When Rojas caught all those fish, the moon was almost dark, not full.

“And bass do move fast to the beds. When I won the Santee Cooper tournament in 2004, I was catching males off beds, and getting about 15 pounds the first two days. Then the females came in overnight and the next two days I had more than 32 pounds each day.”

Falling water or unusually low water, in combination with colder nighttime temperatures, will also keep bass from moving shallow. These two dynamics played a role in the 2007 Bassmaster Elite tournament at Clear Lake during which angler Steve Kennedy set the tournament weight record of 122-14 (since broken).

Believe it or not, still another dynamic played a role in that particular tournament and is one every bass fisherman must consider in today’s world: fishing pressure. In a word, heavy fishing pressure slows the bite after a time, and will even eventually move fish. At Clear Lake the pros lost two full practice days because of extremely rough water, so when competition began the fish had not truly been bothered.

“Even when bass have come to the beds, certain dynamics can move them back to deeper water before the spawn is complete,” Davis pointed out. “Falling water levels and sudden cold weather are two of the most obvious factors. We saw falling water, at least six inches per day, at Amistad, so most of us fished deeper water. The easiest way to find bass under these conditions is by moving deeper from the spawning areas and casting to the first major cover or break line.

“During that Clear Lake tournament, with most of the shoreline tules high and dry because of low water, the bass concentrated at the ends of deeper piers where Kennedy and others found them.”

Once bass do leave beds after spawning, anglers can enjoy what is probably the best topwater bite of the year with poppers and buzz baits. The larger females are the first to leave, and they’re hungry. Some lakes, like Sam Rayburn and Kentucky Lake are generally better topwater lakes than others because of their abundance of shallow water.

“Again, this is a narrow window,” Jordon said, “and it’s not temperature related. After the topwater bite ends, the bass move deep and again, they’re grouped. We see this at Fork, normally between mid-May and late June. And this is exactly what we found at Falcon. The lake had not received hard fishing pressure, and we hit absolutely perfect post-spawn conditions.”

While the dynamics of lake conditions and fish movement in spring may seem confusing, especially to less experienced bass fishermen, on many lakes it is actually possible to choose which part of the spawn to fish, says Davis, but again, the choices fall into a relatively narrow time frame.

“You choose the phase of the spawn by picking different areas of the lake to fish, and this is where you honestly see how the different dynamics work,” he explained. “For example, bass spawn later in the lower end of any lake, which tends to be deeper, clearer and cooler, so this is where you can look for those grouped pre-spawn fish. The upper end of a lake may be as much as a full month ahead of the lower end, largely because it warms quicker. The upper ends of most lakes tend to be shallower and also more off-colored so they are going to warm faster.

“The questions you have to answer for yourself in this entire process are first, are the bass coming shallow or going deeper? Next, which of these are the most active, and finally, which fish offer the best opportunity for you to use your own strongest technique?

“In the spring, lure and location are obviously important, as they are anytime in bass fishing. But understanding how the dynamics of what else is happening around you influence bass behavior is more important now than at any other time of the year.”