8. Summer largemouth in rivers. (8 of 18)

- [Tom] Summer's generally defined as water temperatures of 75 to 90 degrees. Bass change their habits and habitat during the summer, so you need to adjust how, where, and what you use for bass fishing. They change where they live, how they feed and what they feed on when the water gets warmer.
In summer, largemouth and smallmouth bass go to different places to feed and you need to adjust your tactics accordingly. Oh, yeah. There we go. In the salad, wow. It's quite a long time you know. Fishing surface flies in the middle of summer for largemouth bass is not the easiest thing in the world to do but we stuck at it and we finally got this nice bass out of this salad, here.
He smashed it. Yeah, he inhaled that one. He wanted that little diving frog. Get this out of him carefully if we can. Oh, beautiful. Came out. And then, away he goes.
So let's have a look at where to catch bass in rivers and lakes during the summer. So yeah, we're fishing a river today for largemouth so we've got a current. Where do you look in a river for largemouths?
- We're going to look for cover that's going to break the current. Anything that those fish can get in behind so that they can still have food coming to them.
- So any kind of current breaks like back at ease and things like that.
- Exactly. Exact kind of thing that you would look for if you were trout fishing almost, something to kind of break that current. And they're going to kind of sit in behind it and just ambush, ambush bait.
- Okay. And you said the stronger the current, the deeper they're generally going to hold to get away from the current?
- So when the current is strong, they're going to actually…it's going to suck them to the bottom with less current in the system, they'll come up. And, that's going to depend on the system that you're fishing now. So some systems will have a seven-mile an hour current that might be strong for that system. That's going to suck those fish down. Whereas another system three-miles an hour might be a strong current so three miles an hour will suck them down, so it's all depending on the system that you're fishing.
- In rivers, largemouths will seek slack water and heavy vegetation well away from the current. Generally, this will be in water less than 10 feet deep. Yeah, you know it really helps to talk to a professional bass fisherman if you can because they study bass. They know so much more scientifically and behaviorally about largemouth and smallmouth bass.
And, really if you're going to fly around for bass, pay attention to the conventional fisherman.