Fishing Report June 27 2015

Target Species: Largemouth Bass Location: Northern Massachusetts Depth: 5' to 18' Air Temp: 55-65 degrees Water Temp: 75-78 degrees Wind: Light Baits: Jig/Pig in Black/Blue color pattern and black colored craw trailer Finally the waters are warming nicely and having a surface temperature of mid 70's gets me excited as the spawn is over and the fish are starting to relate to offshore structure. I am not a big fan of running the shorelines looking for aggressive fish but more of dissecting deep water structure for the bass that I am fishing. Many of the lakes here in New England have their shorelines pounded on a daily basis and while I was fishing I was watching that unfold from the anglers on this particular lake. Many anglers here either don't know the deeper structure is here, or, they may not be confident enough to fish these areas. Key to fishing these types of areas is having good electronics that are telling you what is going on at that location and also GPS for keeping you there. As every season begins, you never know what the weed content is going to be like as they seem to turn over on this lake quite regularly. From this fishing trip I found that this year we will have to deal with the very stringy thin grass that if you work through it too fast, this will gum up your bait and presentation very quickly. The lakes that we have to fish here, are small in comparison to other parts of the country as they are typically from 100 to 350 acres in size. These sizes of lakes affords you the opportunity for fishing a majority of the lake and also you can come back to key locations time after time trying to pattern the fishes movement patterns. This lake for me has never really been a numbers lake but the quality is of a much better size once you figure out what and where the fish are and want. Typically I fish here with a Carolina Rig and work that through the grass at a slow pace, but the fall fishing here has been fantastic for fishing jig/pig so that was going to be my bait today. There were only two locations that yielded bites and the first one was the front of a cove that had somewhat of a hump before going in that would top off at 4 feet deep. There is some sparse milfoil here and also a majority of the area is covered with the fine stringy grass. There are also pockets in the weed patches that will be void of vegetation but there weren't any bites from those. I did have a few solid bites, but they were also buried deep into these weeds. You had to make short casts so that you wouldn't waste half of your cast clogging the jig with the weeds. You had to work the jig ever so slowly back towards the boat with small and short hops and also creating a faint dust trail in the bottom sediment. There was one spot on the hump that had a small saddle in the middle of it and that is typically where the bites were coming from. Concentration was key, if as soon as you weren't, that is when the strike would come and in these thicker weeds you needed all of the hookset power for getting them out. I wasn't able to get any of these fish at this location to the boat but I made sure that I didn't leave any bites behind before moving on. Moving to a true off shore hump, this area had a smaller hump at the beginning that would top out at 10 feet deep and was fairly clean of weeds. Only took a few casts and set the hook into a nice largemouth bass on the jig/pig keying on the slow movement of the bait. This particular structure was the only area that offered a number of fish to be caught and most were towards the weed edges at this location. I had targeted a few other similar areas around the lake, but the weather conditions were changing rapidly and you could tell that from the fish as well. The winds were really starting to pick up and did some fan casting of a shallow crack bait over a spawning flat but wasn't able to connect there. The early morning bite was the best for this outing and this is fairly typical for this particular lake. Also, offering the fish a bigger profile bait and working it pain staking slow, I felt that is what the fish were looking for instead of working a fast bait. By going deeper into the weeds as well was crucial for finding these fish and if you take your time and move your bait slowly through there, you will be able to dig some very nice fish out.