Need some suggestions. I have been fishing warm water for whatever will bite but really am on a quest for LMB. I have tied wholly buggers, deep clousers, hoppers, mickey finns, zonkers etc. in multiple sizes. I am bank fishin although I have purchased a tube to fish from next spring. I have caught gills and carp, mostly with a popper/dropper. The LMB continue to elude me even though I have thrown everything I have have at them for many hours. My conclusion is that my technique is somewhat lacking or I would have caught at least one LMB by sheer luck. Any suggestions as to how to fish various flies for LMB will be greatly appreciated.
Okieflyfisheman,
It sounds like you’re not fishing where the bass are. I’m not trying to be a wise guy, it’s just that from what you’ve said, you should have been catching bass all along. In the spring time, the bass move to the shallows and a black leech pattern works great for me. As the move into their summer feeding patterns, I switch to a charturese over white minnow pattern tied similar to a baby bunker saltwater pattern or topwater in low light conditions. In the winter, you have to fish low and slow. I have a pattern called a Carter’s Sculpin that works well for me on large bream, crappie and also picks up some nice bass as well. Send me your mailing address and I’ll send you a couple of them to try out.
Good luck.
Jim Smith
Jim:
Thanks for the offer. I believe that you posted the recipe in another forum. I will tie a couple and try to get a picture for you to critique. Your recipe calls for dumbell eyes. Can chainlink be uesed or does the fly need the additional weight of the dubmell eyes?
Jim:
Imagine black dumbell eyes and bleck chrystal flash beard. Does this look anything like the Carter’s Skulpin? If not, I may have to impose on you to send me one for a pattern. I would reciprocate in kind 
Thanks 
Actually, the dumb bell eyes are very important to give it the weight it needs to get down in the water column and to give it the jigging action. The receipe is as follows:
Hook: 1X long hook size 6 to 12 (your choice)
Thread: Black 6/0
Tail: Small bunch of black rabbit fur ? 2 pieces of silver Krystal Flash on each side
Body: Black chenille
Collar: Hackel, either black, grizzly, olive or silver badger
Beard: Black Krystal Flash
Eye: Black or silver dumbbell eyes
Larry,
Jim Smith’s 1st post is, IMHO, right on the money. I would also suggest trying a Sneaky Pete…Jim sent me one in black that is just dynamite!
I am lousy at tying flies, but I tied up a simple black bunny strip with a red bunny strip head on a circle hook, weighted with just 2-3 turns of #2 lead wire…sinks very slowly & I work it with just tiny twitches of the rod tip & an occasional 6" strip…just enough to keep it undulating. Works for me.
Mike
okieflyfisherman,
I have the same dilemma with LMB. You have no idea how many different flies I tied in attempts to catch them. The only thing I can catch them on is poppers. One time this summer they were rising on this excellent lake in Maine, they were huge rise forms do you think I could latch on to one of them, absolutly not. I missed one and caught a chain pickeral. I still can’t figure out what I did wrong that night. I tried every color and size popper I had including black. I think they were hammering dragonflies. When you figure them out let me know. I didn’t think bass were suppose to be that hard to catch.
A black Gill Buster (hourglass tied Clouser style with a black zonker tied down over the top with a short tail) seems to grab LMB time after time. In MO this weekend I let it settle for several seconds, then used very short, two-inch or so strips, very slowly. The take was slow, meaning when the line started to straighten I raised the rod tip. Nothing worth taking pictures of for the cover of Outdoor Life, but a lot of fun. JGW
Okie,
I’ll second what James said. It sounds to me as if you are fishing in an area without many LMB present. If you get a fly in front of LMBs, they will hit it----sometimes. You want to try working heavy cover including downed trees, weeds, points, humps and my favorite spot boat, launch areas with lots of rip rap. Try to do what the guys in bass boats do; cover a lot of ground until you find bass. Fishing one spot all day will get you a lot of brim but not many bass. Sample an area for a while and then move on. Some people recommend carrying a spinning rod with a plastic worm in order to locate fish at first.
Time of day is also a factor. Bass can hit anytime but I have always done better in early mornings or toward dusk. This is particularly true on large lakes with heavy fishing pressure and boat traffic.
I also prefer large surface flies like Gurgle Pops and Crease Flies tied 4-6 inches long. From early spring right through the late fall, I always start out on the surface and work my way deeper if I have to.
Especially when the fishing pressure is heavy, stealth and long casts are helpful. Don’t give up, once you get your local patterns down, you’ll score regularly. Talking to the guys in the bass boat is also very helpful. Most don’t fly fish but they are more than willing to share information about successful depths, structure and time of day. Some of their tactics can be adapted to the fly rod very nicely. Good luck. 8T
My best LMB success is to keep mobile and fish lots of areas very slowly with large unweighted subsurface flies and give them time to sink. Small flies work just as well I just happen to like big ones. I like to fish a 4 inch white wooly bugger like a rubber worm. Cast it out and let it sink to the bottom then give it a couple twitches then recast out in a different spot. The bass would hit the fly on the initial drop more than on the retreive. I would only use weighted flies if I were fishing in heavy current or needed to get really deep in a hurry. Twitching the rod tip and tiny strips (kind of like shaking the stripping hand) give the flies life without really moving them out of potential bass hangouts. Leading a fly into a spot with the rod using different directions is also a good technique.
Sometimes when using a surface popper or bug I would only get strikes after I let it sit there motionless for a minute or two then give it a tiny bump, just enough to make the water around it ring/wake. At other times I couldn’t strip it in fast enough not to get a hit.
There are no rules so try all different kinds of retrieves and no retrieves at all. Try and get out of the habit of only casting out and just constantly stripping back.
The one answer that I have learned to any fishing question is sometimes yes and sometimes no, never always yes and never always no. It is up to you to figure out wether the fish are saying yes or no today
Not an expert or anything close, but reading Micropteris’ post reinforced that I too have my best LMB success while fishing slow and with unweighted bugs. The simplest one of which is a #4 3x long streamer hook, 4 to 6 of the longest black chicken feathers I can find (I pay so little attn to feathers, I don’t know hen from rooster, neck from saddle,…almost) tied in at the bend, trailing straight back then simply palmer 3 or 4 more forward, leaving room for a medium bulky tapered head, whip twice then just enough cement of choice to make it somewhat shiny, red or orange thread seems best.
If I decide to get fancy with it, I’ll add a few strands of crystal flash back aft and dab the red head with a black sharpie to simulate eyes…I think that’s to impress those I give that bug to though.
Tough to cast, yep…once it soaks up it’s not so bad though and I don’t cast for effect until it is. I’m using a 9wt when casting this bug so it’s not a problem. Drop the bug next to steep banks or cover and scan all around and under it as it slowy sinks. You might get a surprise, especially in the spring. Just before dark is a whole 'nother story !
Cheers,
MontanaMoose
Here’s an easy solution to your dilema.
Tie on one of Richard Komars Hard-Hackle Worms (purple is the best color) http://www.flyanglersonline.com/, find some lilly-pads, brush or other structure, and HANG ON TIGHT!
This is pretty much fool-proof. If there are bass there, you will catch some.
Good Luck,
Gig
8 Thumbs and others have said as much.
It sounds like you have panfish patterns figured out, but they are not the bass you want. To avoid problems, treat LMB and SMB as two different species which they are. And neither one is a trout.
For LMB, large is the key for your flies-3"-6" and no smaller. They like to get something to fill that large mouth. To get into the brush and weeds they call home, flies with weed guards are a must. It is fly fishing’s equivalent of flipping and pitching. You need to be flexible about depth and speed to always have a chance of getting one.
Read up on your quarry. The In-Fisherman book once called Bass in the 1990s is still one of the best I have seen for covering the habits of the fish and characteristics of the waters they live in.
All of this is for LMB. There is a parallel universe for SMB. E.g. 2"-5" flies. That is a separate topic where I have only limited experience.
Good Luck
Good question, no single answer…
I’ve got two methods I love to use. Wading the shallows and casting to any sort of structure that’s available, be it lilly pads, deadfalls (trees), rock piles, etc. And my favorite, trolling a large popper behind my float-tube. I get to cover a lot of water that way, and when I find fish I can stop and make a dozen or so casts to see if I can bring any more to the surface, if not, I continue on. When I troll in the summer time it’s in the shallows, deeper water in the winter with some sort of a streamer and slow way down.
The trick is, as has been mentioned before, use a large popper, you’ll catch a few bass on the smaller stuff that brim and crappie love, but put something big and ugly on and look out!
I hope this helps,
Thunderthumbs.
Like the guys have mentioned, if there are bass there I’m not sure how you are keeping them off. 
I like to fish for big fish and to do that I like big baits. Most of my flies are tied on a Gamakatsu SC15 1/0 hook. I especially like Kent Edmond’s Stealth Bomber
http://www.flyfishga.com/stealth.htm
(that’s me in the pic - blatant self-serving plug - blush- blush) on the surface and 6" Bunny Leeches (worms?) subsurface. Takes a fairly substantial hookset to drive it home and I throw around a lot of junk so I use an 8wt with a 12# tippet.
When I drop down to the 6wt I like Rabbit Zonkers on a #4 hook.
Bass tend to be up close to the bank, often in pretty shallow water, and close to laydowns and stickups.
Good luck - Stay with them - you’ll find them - or they’ll find you
Okieflyfisherman, I live in the southwest corner of Mississippi and had been having real good results with a wooly bugger. Well I went tuesday of this week and nada on bugger. So I went to an old standby of mine that I found on the internet several years ago. It is called a stayner ducktail. I am not even a good amateur fly fisher but this has been a very dependable fly for me. I cast it out, let it sink for a couple of counts, make 2, or 3 or 4 as short of strips as I possibly can make and stop it. If he is close, (lmb, gill, or crappie) he or she is going to nail it on pause. Like I said, I went tuesday of this week and I caught 18 lmb and one large gill. I also had my line broken 3 times by fish and one time I broke it myself because of ignorance or poor casting skills. Try this stayner ducktail, it is a real fish getter for me. Hope this helps. mathcarver
spipn deer hair bass bugs all winter. store them up, and first hint of LMBs in shallow water for spring, break out the float tube and an eight weight! Trust me, I did it last warm season and doubled 2005s catch rate and size. Lord I wish I could find a provider to post this many pics!