Change With The Conditions

If you are an angler and you haven’t already made plans to hit the water for your first outing of the year than you need to do so. As the end of winter nears, the days will now work on becoming longer causing more daylight / sunlight. This extended sunlight will slowly begin to warm your favorite body of water and pull the bass out of their winter slumber into a pre-spawn pattern. The first to begin the move will be the bigger fish, so if you are ambitious about trying to catch the “lunker” of a lifetime than now would be an ideal time to do so. Your deep southern waters have already hit this transition.

I have steadily been on the water throughout the winter so my equipment hasn’t really enjoyed any time off. With that being said, neither have I. That is sort of an “oxy moron” though. For me to enjoy my time off, I need to be on the water. But just because I have been on the water doesn’t mean that I am always successful on the water. This past weekend I fished a National Bass Circuit tournament out on Lake Anna, which is one of my favorite local lakes because I always seem to have them dialed in pretty well, or at least I thought I did. I boated a few fish and my partner lost a nice one right at the boat. A couple of mine were short (under 14 inches) and we wound up weighing in one fish that I caught just under 4 lbs. Needless to say, a bad day of tournament fishing by my standards. The tournament was won with a little over 15lbs. Awesome catch considering the over night front we got

            Nagged enough by a disappointing day, I went out to afterward to try and figure out what I was doing wrong throughout the course of the day and was finally able to begin to put a pattern together, but details on that are for another time. What I did want to hit on was this. The tournament was Sunday and the Saturday night before the tournament, we got a ton of rain with high winds. My water got really stained and changed my pattern. I didn’t make the right adjustments to deal with change in the conditions and the bass. For some their pattern didn’t change, but my pattern in the area of the lake that I was fishing did. Sometimes an adjustment can simply be a color change on your bait. Other times it can be a change in presentation or location. With that being said, do not allow yourself to sit there and attempt to force feed the fish doing what worked yesterday. Always be thinking about the current situation and use basic pattern principles such as time of day, time of year, wind speed, wind direction, water clarity, and cloud clover (to name a few) to help you adjust. Hopefully it never becomes that complicated, but if you don’t have them figured out, get to figuring.