I have a guilty pleasure to confess: I get a bit of a kick out of outfishing guys in expensive bass boats when
I’m fishing from the bank, sneaking up on largemouths and spotted bass. I’ve always thought it’s ironic when you see your classic conventional-gear angler on a bass boat rolling up on a spot with waves lapping the shore and a trolling motor that makes a constant noise — then they pull out an ultralight rod with 3-poundtest line and a “finesse” worm. Why not just start with being stealthy and then go from there, instead of announcing your arrival before making the first cast?
Obviously there’s plenty of gray area in here — a lot of bass anglers fish really well off boats. But from what I’ve observed, those who can fish well and also use a boat to their advantage are few and far in between. Bass can be much spookier than they are often given credit for. Many times, early in the morning, when I’m sneaking up on a school of white and spotted bass that are boiling on shad, the bite will be wide open until the first bass boat blows through the middle of the lake, not even close to where the school is. The noise from the boat is enough to put the majority of the fish down for 5 to 10 minutes. Then they start feeding again. This is largely why my watercraft of choice is either a float tube or a kayak. Both are quiet and get you into all sorts of spaces other boats won’t. The downside, however, is that they won’t quickly cover distance the way motorboats will, and that is a hugely limiting factor on waterways such as the Delta and on large lakes.
I’m not trying to convince you that fishing for bass from the shore is always the best option, but in a lot of situations, having your boots on the ground can pay off, not just in numbers of fish, but in bigger fish that fall to a stealthy approach and to shore-based angles of presentation. And if you are able to hike, you can cover a surprising amount of water from the shore. On pressured fisheries, I’ve found this can often be the key to success when other anglers are struggling. Fly fishing from the shore for bass species can be a great way to get an advantage in certain situations.
Approach and Stealth
Stealthily moving around the shoreline is much less invasive than arriving in a large boat with a trolling motor, and it can allow you to get close to and even into the structure where the fish are hiding without alarming them to your presence. This can be especially useful when fish are chasing baitfish and using bluff walls, drop-offs, and other structures to pin the baitfish against the shoreline. From the shore, you can sneak up on these aggressively feeding bass, which are often right up beside the shore, and make a cast parallel to it, allowing the fish to trap your fly against the bank. You often can follow these schools of fish as they move along the shoreline, while on a boat, you risk the school being aware of your presence, since the positioning of the boat or the sound of a trolling motor can spook the school. In some instances, there can even be wind or wave action that prevents you from keeping the boat as close to the shoreline as needed to put the fly in the spot where the fish are ambushing their prey.
As an angler chasing bass on the fly, you already have an advantage from the fact that most bass in California are not used to any sort of noticeable pressure from f lies, and they also see far more pressure from anglers in boats than from people on foot. If there is any angling pressure from the bank, it’s usually limited to a radius of about 50 feet from where people park their cars, which is good news if you’re willing to hike a bit farther than the folks fishing from camp chairs.
Also, in a pressured fishery, the fish get used to seeing lures that they come to realize are artificial and not real food items. If the average angler casts and retrieves a lure used by other anglers that day, the fish can become accustomed to following it for a certain distance before committing to biting it. This means that if you’re fishing from a boat, they may see you and then turn away from the lure. From the shoreline, you can make a long cast and keep the fly in play without ever giving away the fact that you’re there. When you get a big bass following your fly, you can use your rod tip either to give the fly a figure-8 movement right along the bank or just to jerk it side to side in random directions up and down the bank. This will often trigger a strike when in a lot of cases from a boat, a wary bass will scoot off and not show itself again. Another advantage of this approach is that you can pick up the fly and cast again, because the bass following the fly hasn’t seen a boat, and if you’ve been stealthy, hasn’t noticed you. Making another cast after a bass denies your fly often proves too much for it to resist, but doing so requires that you be stealthy.
I have yet to meet a fish that responded negatively to my being stealthy, so I tend to approach every fish as if it is the spookiest fish around, and with bass, that tends to mean I assume every piece of structure holds fish and treat it as such when approaching it. On your approach, make sure you aren’t kicking a bunch of loose rocks around or stepping on fallen branches. Be aware of your shadow, too. If the sun is at your back and your shadow is cast onto the lake or river, try to minimize the effect that it has. Crouch down when you need to, or use existing shore structure to hide your profile. Use trees on the bank, tall boulders, even bridge pilings — anything you can f ind that shields your shadow from reaching where the fish are or where they might follow your f ly. Always be aware of how your shadow falls on the water — not just the structure you’re targeting, but the whole path the fly takes back to you.
Presentation and Line Management
Bass fishing is largely about angles. The angle at which you lay your line down relative to the shore, where you place your fly, and the path that the fly takes back to you are probably the most important aspects of chasing bass, whether with a fly or with conventional gear. When you work your fly from a boat, you are usually casting from open water to the bank, whereas from the shore, you are working your fly from the water to the bank. This allows you to present the fly much differently than the people fishing from a watercraft, which can work to your advantage, especially on pressured fisheries.
Fish get used to certain kinds of presentation, just as they become accustomed to certain lures. The advantage of presenting the fly in a way that the bass normally don’t see an artificial lure presented is huge. You can work that fly into all sorts of pockets and corners, areas that are impossible to work the fly into from a boat. Working the fly from the lake toward the bank and parallel to the bank can lead it through many potential ambush points. When fishing from a watercraft, the fly generally moves into deeper water during the presentation, which means only a part of the cast is in prime ambush areas. Predatory fish love to trap baitfish against structure and shallow water, and the shallows are the prime feeding area, so when you fish from the shore, your fly is in the prime strike zone for possibly the whole cast, which gives you more chances for fish to hit it. A big part of chasing predatory fish is just giving them as many reasons as possible to want to expend energy chasing and eating prey. Having your fly in a vulnerable spot for a longer amount of time means a greater likelihood of success.
Managing your fly line is a huge aspect of fly fishing in general, but I see a lot of anglers struggling to reap the advantages that a fly line offers. Mending seems to largely be limited to anglers on rivers, and a lot of fly fishers on lakes don’t mend the line at all once they’ve made their cast. This is a huge missed opportunity, because you can alter the path of the fly by mending your line, bringing it around corners to turn the fly in midretrieve or make other variations that can trigger a strike from a fish following it. You can’t do this with conventional gear, because the line is for all intents and purposes weightless and can’t be manipulated in the middle of the retrieve in a way that significantly changes the path of the lure. Fish don’t swim in straight lines, and a fly that moves in an erratic fashion fools more fish than a fly that moves in one direction only.
What this means when fishing from the shoreline is that you can cast around trees, rocks, cattails, or any structure, but still mend the line in a way that keeps the fly in the strike zone throughout the retrieve. There are often pockets, such as a little opening in the branches of a sunken tree, that are at first hard to fish from the bank, but a lot of the time, you can cast into these areas with a straight cast, then, midair, just before the fly lands, give the line a quick mend so the fly lands in the opening, but the line lands clear of any snags, so you can fish the fly around the corner and show the fly to every other fishy-looking area on the way back to you.
A saying I often heard when I first started fly fishing for bass is that most of your casts will be short. That’s true, but only to a certain extent. From a boat, you are usually making short casts into the structure, but from the bank, it’s useful to be able to make long, accurate casts, as well. There might be multiple holding areas and ambush zones in the fly’s path of travel back to shore, allowing multiple fish to see the fly during a long retrieve. Also, a long retrieve can give a wary bass time to make up its mind and attack. Longer casts can produce results that a shorter casts cannot.
As useful as long casts are, they’re useless when they’re not accurate. Find a lawn to practice hitting targets with a large fly. You can either cut the hook off an old fly at the bend or tie a big piece of yarn onto your leader. Fly fishing for bass usually involves either big flies or heavy flies, so make sure you get used to the feeling of casting a fly with some weight and air resistance. A Belgian cast, or oval cast, is especially useful when starting to cast bigger flies, because you open up the loop of your cast by bringing your rod back sideways, then directly over your shoulder on the forward cast. This puts the fly and the line on different planes. Learning this cast is quite easy — it’s more of a tweak in your casting than a wholly different cast, and it will mean fewer tangles and fewer flies hitting the back of your head, or worse, your rod tip.
Another thing to realize when stalking the shoreline is that a lot of lakes and reservoirs have steep banks with little casting room behind you. A good cast to learn is a steeple cast, which basically angles your back cast upwards, over obstacles to the rear. To perform this cast effectively, it’s helpful to look behind you on your cast so as to guide the fly through and above the obstacles, then present the fly on the forward cast as you would normally do. Once you get this down, you will be able to cast just as far or accurately with a steeple cast as you would when casting regularly with nothing behind you. Maybe you’ll even surprise yourself and cast farther.
Gear for Shore Bassin’
The gear used when fly fishing from the shore isn’t a whole lot different than what you’d bring out on a boat. You’re still using the same rods and reels as you would on a boat, but keep in mind that the bottom is sloping up toward you in most places, so you’re retrieving into the shallows. This won’t change your line choice when you’re fishing intermediate or floating lines, but full sinking lines become harder to fish when retrieving into the shallows. The end of that retrieve will have your fly and your line on the bottom, which isn’t ideal for a variety of reasons. If your line is on the bottom, you might not feel soft takes, and the fly can easily snag on something. A better option for when you need to go deep is a sink-tip line. In the water, the line’s down-sloping angle between the floating section at the back and sinking section at the tip is a better match for the curve of the bottom when you’re fishing from the bank. It gives you better contact with your fly, reduces the chance that you’ll hook bottom, and gives you more time to fish the fly effectively.
For line management, I like to use a stripping basket, which keeps the fly line from wrapping around rocks and branches on the ground. It also makes for better mobility, because you can walk with a lot of line out and not have to worry about the line hanging up somewhere or stepping on it. You can make your own stripping basket for cheap with a belt and an inexpensive plastic container, or you can spend a little more and get a basket that’s made specifically for fly fishing. Once you get accustomed to using a stripping basket, you may find its benefits so addicting that you bring it on every trip.
Clothingwise, most of the reservoirs in California don’t involve much wading, since the bottom often drops off quickly. If you’re specifically targeting fish on the flats, you could wet wade or wear waders, depending on the temperature. The banks of reservoirs are often composed of slick rocks, unstable rubble, or just pure mud, so most of the time, when I chase bass from the banks of the reservoirs of California, I wear hiking boots. The specific kind doesn’t matter. Just make sure they have a good grip, and waterproofing doesn’t hurt for those times you stand just on the edge of the water. I wear long, quick-drying pants, mostly for the ticks.
Boots on the Ground
One of the main attractions of targeting bass from the shore is the simplicity. You don’t need much in the way of gear. As long as you have a rod, reel, line, flies, and food, you’re good to go. I love the boots-on-the-ground aspect of it all. I started fishing bass from the shore simply because fly fishing from boats isn’t really a common thing where I’m from in Iceland. Now I choose mostly to fish from the shore, because I’ve experienced just how productive it can be, and because I love being embedded in the element with the fish. The expensive bass boats popular on many of the fisheries here don’t embody the spiritual aspect of fly fishing that I love. I like to slow it down, sit on a rock, look at the water, make a few casts, take a break to have a beer and change tactics, then go at it again. I learned through trout fishing growing up that just making a thousand casts during the day is useless if they are a thousand wrong casts, and taking the time to rest the water, watching it and using your casts effectively, is much more important than hammering away uselessly. Boats have their time and place and are often necessary in some areas, but it’s good to walk the shoreline every now and then and maybe learn a piece of water more intimately than if passing by on the lake’s surface. You might even fall in love with the slower tempo of fishing from the shore and maybe even catch more bass.
