Looking for favorite ones or top threes. When and were do they work the best? How do you fish them?
I’ve been targeting Bluegill and Red Ear but I do pick up the ocasional LMB and I think that I’d like to start targetting them when the opertunites present themselves. Include pictures if you can but not nessarry.
What has got me started is that a couple bait casters were fishing about 30 yards down the bank from me last Sunday and poth picked up five LMB each. One was using minnows and the other a soft plastic crawdad. I threw the fly box at them and the only take(I think, night have been a rock) was on a crawdad fly. I can’t help it but I took it as a personal insult and I need revenge!
I just had a blast with deceivers the other day. Using a 1/0 hook made it minnow sized and the bass were fooled. I also like Hornbergs as a goto fly for almost anything in freshwater.
Dont forget large poppers. My experience is the size and action of the popper is more important than color, but Im sure many will disagree. If I can sight fish a larger LMB, I will thow a popper to match…i.e. the bigger the better. Off-hand Im guessing a size 2. Big fish want a big meal. However, if your seeing more typical 12" one pounders more than the big guys, I will thow a medium size popper ( to better represent a small frog vs a damsel fly, for instance) Id guess size 6. When I have sight fished, it seemed the LESS action the better. Letting the popper sit, counting down from 5 or even 10, small twitch, counting down again…worked better than making a huge commotion on the surface. They didnt scare away, but they didnt rush it either. This was early spring, so that may have had something to do with it.
Then for a hoot throwing size 12 poppers and making the panfish go bzerk is almost more fun
Im heading to a private pond tomorrow where the bass have been caught at over 10lbs. Im going to try some divers with a small amount of split shot in front of them. I havent had any luck with clouser style flies yet, but will continue to experiment. In the end, I always revert back to poppers and land fish.
I use a very simple bunny strip (6" or so) tied on a circle hook with 3 turns of lead wire. It almost suspends, & I just twitch the rod tip to make it undulate with an infrequent strip to bring it in & up a little. That’s been most effective for me.
Mike
1, Chartruese Beadhead wooly bugger
2, Black wooly worm
3, Dumbell eye weighted black bunny leach.
4, Cactus chenille worm in purple or chartruese. 4-6"
5. Weedless foam body popper later in season when weeds are up.
Richard Komar’s incredible Hard-Hackle Worm. Any color works as long as it’s purple. Let it sit on top, then twitch it slightly. As it slowly sinks, twitch it gently, and hang on!
Clouser Minnow in OD and white, with a black lateral line. Fish it as a regular streamer.
Richard Komars Texas Bullfrog in 3/4" size. Twitch it gently near cover and be ready for explosive hits.
Thank you everybody. There are some new and interesting patterns for sure. I really enjoy top water action but I’ll fish any method including spinning and bait casting rigs if that is what the water condions offer me. Lately my local fishing hole has been very muddy from the rain over the last two weeks. Saturday morning I got up early and headed down to the lake. I took a spinning rod along so I could toss my Hummingbird Smartcast around and see what there was to see. After an hour and a half and only one little 6" Bluegill to show for it I got out the fish finder and went to work. The lake is a lot deeper han I thought and there were quite a few fish showing up. So I Texas Rigged a 6" Blue Crawdad and went back over the same areas that I covered with the fly rod. I ended up catching two very nice large mouth bass which left me with two assumptions. 1) The water is too muddy for fly fiching and 2) The bass are spawning. and they can be caught. I hope that the rain holds off for a while. I want to try the Hard Hackle Worm soon.
From the description in your original post, it sounds like the bass there like minnow and crawfish patterns. Doesn’t matter what works for other folks on other lakes…go with what YOUR bass are expecting.
I fished some private water yesterday where the bass really like frog poppers (size wasn’t critical) and olive wooly buggers (with or without beadheads).
That water has plenty of frogs on it (hence the frog poppers) and lots of damsel flies (I think the wooly buggers were being taken as a damsel nymph pattern since other minnow patterns were being ignored).
You don’t have to exactly match the hatch but it does help to consider what their local foods are and get close. If crawdads and minnows work for baitcasters, then trying similar patterns should work on the fly.
Sinking lines will help you get down to the deep fish…
Here is one that I think would kill LMB chart or white clouser tied with a rattle and sili legs tied on the back. I tied a few of them but didn’t get a chance to try them yet. Very similar to a spinnerbait. Size 1 or 1/0
