Bass Food Sources (6 of 12)

Tom: Your powers of observation can help a lot with this. When you wade into a river and notice lots of small crayfish along the bottom, it's a pretty good indicator the bass will be keyed into eating them. So a crayfish pattern will be best. Bass love crayfish. It also means that you should be casting to rocky shorelines where the crayfish are most likely to be living.

Man: You can get it to sink straight on it. Good, he's got it. All right. He ate that crayfish pretty well.

Tom: They love minnows. They love leaches. They love insects, big insect larvae. But crayfish are their number one prey. You can never go wrong fishing a sunken crayfish fly to a small mouth.

Beautiful fish, don't have to handle him at all, and away he goes. Oh, a small mouth bass. Although we'd like to catch these small mouths on the surface, in the middle of a bright day, fish are in pretty deep water. So we're fishing a crayfish fly, and you've got to be careful when you fish a crayfish fly. You want to throw it beyond, where you think the fish is, and then strip it back and let it drop. Strip it back, and let it drop, and watch the tip of your floating line. Because that fish took it on the drop, as they usually did, and all I saw was that line dart forward. Then I did a strip-strike and there was the fish. Flight out the hook, and away they go.

On the other hand, if you see minnows jumping from the water, pretty good indication that they're being chased by predators like bass. If you see this, it's a good idea to switch to a streamer fly that imitates a minnow, and it should be roughly the same size and shape as the minnows you saw jumping. Cast right into where you saw the minnows jump. You might be in for a surprise.