For those who don't feel like reading my book, the jist of what I'm getting at is whether you assume that bass are in an area where you've found other predators, pike in my case, or whether you figure the predators are dominating an area / running the bass off.
Now for the background:
I've really been working on my offshore game a lot lately. Growing up in WV where the only lakes are those made by damming up rivers and where good depth is usually only a few feet off of dry land, I never had to do it. Living in MN and trying to figure out the bass here has, not surprisingly, made it a necessity.
I'm always absorbing as much as I can on the topic, so I appreciate the information being shared in that realm lately!
I ran into a situation the other day while out looking for offshore bass and wasn't quite sure how to approach it. It was the morning after a pretty substantial cold front had gone through. We had daytime highs into the 90s for several days with dew points into the high 60s. That day the high temp topped out at like 79 with a dew point in the 40s. Absolutely BRILLIANT day to be out and about, but high pressure city, no doubt.
I spent a lot of the morning graphing likely areas, and found what I thought was a gem. I had been graphing and dragging all morning on a lake that's mostly silt/sand. While checking out an especially nice looking point that juts out into the main lake, EUREKA! Out past the main outside weed edge was an isolated area of rocks and shells (I only found out there were shells as I managed to hook a giant mussel shell when fishing it later). It was flanked on both sides by some scattered weed growth which I believe to be coontail. On top of this, though I still can't quite get the settings right on my Hook 7, there were definite fish relating to the bottom. Really just textbook.
So I fished it. Hard. Tried quite a few different techniques there. The only success I had was with a deep diving crank bait, but it wasn't with bass. I caught 4 pike over 30 inches off that one spot including a personal best 38 incher and several smaller ones as well. I never did catch a bass on that spot, though I did have a couple light taps on a Carolina rig.
As I reflect, what I'm really wondering is whether I should've turned tail and left once I caught that first big pike off that spot (the 38 incher was my first crankbait cast) instead of wasting my time trying to fish it for bass. I've ice fished enough to know that when a flasher screen full of fish suddenly goes dark, you're about to catch a pike. Do they have the same effect on the bass? Or should I instead look at it from the perspective of the pike are there because there's food and that means the bass are as well?
Generally it's not such a big deal - just keep moving. But this was such a nice, isolated spot, I really felt like it should've been game on. Maybe I could've finessed them with a wacky worm or something? Ordinarily I might think I have my answer, but the high pressure that day had the bass really finicky overall, and pike are immune to fronts. Really looking forward to everyone's thoughts on this!
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Originally Posted by Snickers89
