Welcome to August—the walk from the truck to the water’s edge will have you sweating, it’s a chore to breathe, and if you don’t apply sunscreen liberally you’ll soon look like a piece of overcooked bacon. Even worse, getting those bass to bite has become a whole lot more difficult than it was a month or two ago. How can you ensure your drag will do more burning than your skin? You can’t. That’s just not how fishing works. Follow these tips through the course of a full fishing day, however, and you’ll boost your chances of hooking into a bucketmouth.
Bass Fishing at Dawn
Pole Position – Let’s start with the obvious: your best shot at getting bites will occur in the very first hour of daylight. The second hour isn’t bad either, but as soon as the sun breaks the horizon and gets higher and higher in the sky your chances of hooking up get lower and lower. This isn’t the time of year to sleep in, it’s the time of year when you need to get up way before sunrise and be ready to cast at the very first hint of daylight. Tactical Maneuver: tie on topwater, and dog-walk, buzz, or pop alongside shoreline laydowns, brushpiles, beaver dams, and similar structure.
9 a.m.
Made in the Shade – Once the sun is up and the daybreak bite is over, it’s time to start looking for shade. Docks, bluffs with shade trees, and anything that casts a shadow on the water is well worth prospecting. Tactical Maneuver: Choose a lure you can skip long distances, like a fluke, plastic worm, or frog. Then don’t just cast to the edge of the shade but instead skip your lure under whatever is creating it and get deep into that cool pocket. This is the go-to maneuver whenever there are docks or overhanging trees.
Bass Fishing at Noon
Search the Depths – During the heat of the day bass will move deep in many bodies of water, to look for a cooler climate. “Deep” is a relative term, and it can mean 10’ in a pond or 30’ in a reservoir. You’ll have to identify their depth with prospecting or electronics, but either way, be prepared to make an offering that gets down to where you find the fish. Tactical Maneuver: If you’re on a boat, locating fish with the meter and jigging a resin spoon can be a midsummer killer. From shore it can be surprisingly effective to simply put a shiner on a hook, weight it down with a split-shot, and cast it out near deepwater structure. Deep-running crankbaits and creature baits you can fish on bottom can work well, too.
4 p.m.
Crawl Before You Walk – Ledges and sharp drop-offs where there are major-league depth transitions are a good zone to work during the late afternoons, though you have to recognize that it’s often hard to buy a bite at this time of day during August. But keep on casting, because the later (and cooler) it gets the better your chances of getting a strike. Tactical Maneuver: Working big swimbaits for big bass has become a thing in recent years (see BIG Swimbaits for Bass if you missed the article last month), and these can be run deep to trigger afternoon attacks. Use a weighted hook or jig head of half an ounce or more, and work the lure very, very slowly up and down the drop-offs.
Bass Fishing at Dusk
Light Up the Action – As evening hits you get another window of opportunity for a shallow water bite, but often it’s a fraction of the action sunup provided. Don’t give up hope—stay out after dark. Yes, we know you’ve fished through every moment of daylight at this point but during the heat of summer bass often bite even better at night than they do during the day. The trick here is often finding lighted areas, like docks or bridges. As is true in many very different aquatic environments, lights draw in bait and bait draws in predators. Cast along the edges of the light-lines where the illumination fades to blackness, because this is where hungry fish usually lurk as they wait to make an attack. Tactical Maneuvers: Tie on a lure that draws attraction via means other than sight. Spinnerbaits, buzzbaits, ploppers, plugs with rattles, and other offerings that throw out vibrations will help the bass home in on that lure in the darkness. Also, always remember that the color black can be a killer at night.
Whew! It’s been one heck of a long fishing day. Hopefully, after being up this long you’ve had your fair share of bites. There’s just one problem: that sunrise bite is usually the very best of the day and it’s about to happen all over again. Can you really throw in the towel as the first hint of light hits the horizon? We didn’t think so…