Martyn White | Thursday, 19 May 2022
A lot of my fishing here is for smallmouth bass, I really like them and have a pretty decent success rate and often outfish conventional anglers I see on the rivers. Largemouth bass are a different story though. I do catch them, but not in the numbers I'd like and I'm certainly no threat to the gear guys. With largemouth being so popular pressure is an issue here, but I used to catch more largmouth with conventional gear than I ever have on fly.
Part of it is down to the limitations of fly tackle, there are bass catching presentations we just can't make a fly rod. There's just no way to replicate a punch rig, when the fish are hiding under beds water hyacinth you might pick one up from the edge, but there's no way to get to the fish deep in the cover. You can get him with and ounce of tungsten and a creature bait though. I always do best with flies when I can get them in open water, this time of year can be good for that when the bass are focused on the spawning bluegill. Otherwise it's weedguarded flies and trying to find fish in sparser weed or hanging around hard structure like docks, riprap and walls. The fly does sometimes offer an advantage over the conventional gear here especially with topwater flies. I find it's much easier to slow them right down and just bend the legs on a topwater fly, I just cant fish a spook or propbait that slowly.
The flies also play a part in this too. Unlike smallmouth there hasn't been much progress on largemouth flies over the years, there still seems to be a heavy bias towards topwater flies. This is fine as it's great fun when they're working. Streamers can be good for open water fish when cover isn't a problem. Then we have the worms and creatures and this is where I think we, or at least I am missing a trick. There are a lot of these types of fly around but most of them seem to be more focused on looking like a conventional angler's soft plastic than functioning like them. Take worm flies, there are loads but they mostly fall into 1 of 2 categories; the senko copy or something that works like a texas rig. These flies do work of course, but I've recently been thinking that we could do with some cross pollination from the world of soft plastics, moving towards copying-as far as possible- the presentations that the fly allows rather than just the shape of a successful plastic. After all, a chenille or furled dubbing loop senko does not behave like a plastic one. The Dill's Pickle is a pretty good attempt at this, it's the only fly I've seen that actually behaves something like a wacky rigged worm because it's stiffened just enough to resist the water as it is retrieved. There are still plenty of other soft plastic bait presentations to copy with our flies such as the Ned rig, nekko rig, dropshot, carolina rig or shakey head to name a few. A lot of this is probably possible with the right application of weight and buoyancy combined with different fly lines, but will almost certainly take a bit of messing around to get right. It's an interesting project for me to work on this, but I don't think I'll be getting rid of my baitcasters just yet.