Looking back, I can think of three species of fish that have surprised the heck out of me: steelhead, tarpon, and largemouth bass. I am guessing that seeing bass on this list might puzzle some folks. Sure, they leap, but they rarely run more than 30 feet. What could possibly make them worthy? Let me sum that up in two words — instant torque. Big bass pull very hard, very fast. You won’t know just how hard until you connect with a chunky one.
I suppose I should clarify what I mean by “big” bass. While my hardware junkie friends might disagree, I consider any bass over four pounds big. The good news is that unlike steelhead and tarpon, it’s more than likely that there are big bass in a lake or pond just a few short miles from where you live. If you’ve had a rough week and need to go fishing, but can’t make a long trip, bass might be the perfect antidote.
Fly fishing for big bass is not as simple as many folks might think. Brash online videos of loud guys in sparkly boats suggest that these fish are little more than eating machines: throw out a lure and hook a bass. This oft-repeated narrative may work well for getting hits on YouTube, but it’s far from accurate. Sure, you can throw a fly into a lake or pond and get small bass without too much trouble. You can also catch small trout by dragging a Woolly Bugger behind a float tube or pitching an indicator rig into a stream. But things get much more interesting when you deliberately target bigger bass. Getting these fish to take your fly can be every bit as challenging as fooling steelhead, though the odds of success are higher, since we haven’t run bass to the edge of extinction — yet.
Electricity
As has been said countless times, largemouth bass are very structure oriented. Ledges, weeds, docks, and submerged timber are well-known places to find bass. These places become even more attractive to big bass when they are associated with some form of cover, such as emergent vegetation or overhanging trees. This point was driven home for me back in 2015, when I was managing a small lowland lake.
It was mid-June, and yet another grant-reporting deadline was looming. This meant pulling together and interpreting hundreds of pieces of complex and often confounding water-quality data, running the project’s expenses through a less-than-intuitive spreadsheet, and writing a compelling story about what we had done over the past three months. There were at least two solid days of work ahead of me, and it was already Wednesday. Then I got a call from Gary, who was handling an electrofishing project I had managed to wrangle through a different grant. One of the biologists who was scheduled to assist on the stun boat was sick. Could I help out? Of course I couldn’t. There’s no way I could spend two full days on a boat and meet the reporting deadline.
The following morning found me standing at the bow of the boat, holding a landing net large enough to swallow yard-long carp. This lake is typical of countless small lakes and large ponds throughout the state — warm, shallow, and surrounded by a wall of tules and willows. I had managed (and fished) this lake for almost a decade and believed I knew it well. We were after carp, but bass inevitably got caught in the electric field. While I wasn’t keeping a detailed count (the combination of water and electricity tends to focus your attention), I estimated that every 100 feet of bank held at least one bass over five pounds. Several stretches held twice as many. Every so often, a fish nudging double digits would surface by one of the umbrellalike anodes. We were stunning carp, but these were stunning bass.
Mission Impossible?
While some of the bigger fish were holding below mats of downed tules, the majority preferred spots that had a combination of overhanging trees (usually willows) and submerged timber. Partially downed trees, half in and half out of the water, were especially good spots. Gary would goose the outboard to push the anodes as far as possible into the thicket of twigs and branches. Occasionally, a big bass would float to the surface, where it would remain quite motionless. The fish would plunge back into the submerged branches as soon as the electrical field was switched off.
Working late, I managed to get the grant report submitted on time, though I’ll admit it wasn’t my best work. I also started to obsess about those big bass. They lived in spots that would have most (sane) fly fishers shaking their heads. For some strange reason, this was a challenge I felt compelled to take on. To be successful meant delivering a fly into openings not much bigger than a T-shirt. Exceptionally weedless flies would be highly desirable, if not essential. And last, but by no means least, if I was going to have any hope of getting the fish out of the branches and into open water, I needed a rod that had some backbone. This was absolutely no place for a 5-weight.
Accuracy and Proximity
Most of us cast with greater accuracy at shorter distances. The closer you get, the more likely your fly will land on target. However, there’s a limit to how close you can get. There can’t be many fly fishers who haven’t seen bow waves as a trout bolts for safety because the angler got too close. The same thing happens with bass. After years of screwing up, I have come to the conclusion that a minimum distance of 20 to 30 feet is about right — 20 with a float tube and 30 with a boat.
Snagging Scenery
Like most folks, I began bass fly fishing with 9-foot rods and lines designed for big, heavy flies. I caught fish, but my fly often got hung up in the vegetation. Much of the time, I was fishing from a float tube, since there’s no easy way to get a boat onto some of my favorite ponds and lakes. Paddling a tube backward into overhanging tree limbs or tules to retrieve a fly is more drunken square dance than classical ballet. If you aren’t careful, a piece of unseen structure is going to skewer the back of your head or sneak under the tube and spear submerged anatomy. Not surprisingly, extracting flies from snags every 15 to 20 minutes quickly becomes frustrating and counterproductive. I found myself casting too timidly, just to avoid snagging. This really helped reduce the number of fish I caught and almost certainly explained the lack of lunkers.
Geometry
In distance casting, you typically direct the forward cast at a slight upward angle. This gives the line time to go a long way before gravity pulls it down. Nine feet of graphite lever really helps in this situation. But things are reversed when you are throwing flies into tight spots at short range. Your line needs to be directed down toward the target, not into low Earth orbit. This is when the standard 9-footer can become a bit of a handicap. To get the fly into the right spot, instead of burying it in a jungle of fly grabbing twigs, you need the line, leader, and fly to follow a shallow flight path. Ideally, you want the fly to pass over the last couple of feet of water with just inches to spare.
One way to do this is to use a sidecast technique, such as the style popularized by the late Lefty Kreh. The rod tip follows an almost horizontal path over the water, causing the line and fly to take a shallow, descending trajectory. This is a very good technique, but it isn’t foolproof, at least not for me. The fly travels about nine feet to your right or left side, which makes it hard to trace a line between the rod tip and the target. Maybe other folks have the mental processing capacity to do this. I don’t. I needed a more overhead cast, but with a shallower angle of descent than is provided by a 9-foot stick. Simple high-school geometry suggested the only way to do that was to use a shorter rod. The question was, how short?
Downsizing
I dug out an old 8-foot 6-inch fast-action rod that had served me well in the Everglades and took it to a nearby pond, where the banks are festooned with downed trees. I got fewer snags, but it was clear that a shorter rod would have been better. Shortly afterward, Sparky, the ever-cheerful UPS driver, left a 7-foot 10-inch rod at my front door. A few days later, I launched my float tube into “my” lake and began attacking the banks. The shorter rod really did help. I quickly became more confident and began casting to some of the really good spots, places I had formerly written off as fly suicide. I even started getting the attention of some sizeable bass. One fish hit the fly so hard that the front of my tube plunged down a few inches. I was so surprised, I didn’t have the wits to react quickly enough. Driving home, I wondered, “Would an even shorter rod be even better?”
Six-Six
I was pretty sure a rod under seven feet would be more effective at getting my flies into the prime lies. But as far as I can tell, none of the major rod makers sell 7-weight or 8-weight rods that are that short. If I was going to go down this path, I either had to make my own or talk to some custom rod shops. I did both.
Conversations with a couple of custom rod builders suggested that making a fly rod on a shorter blank was no problem. In fact, it was clear these guys quite liked the idea. Thanks to the popularity of spin fishing, there are loads of one-piece and two-piece blanks that have the right strength and flex for a 7-weight or 8-weight line. These blanks can easily be fitted with fly-rod guides, handles, and grips. Depending on the type of blank and hardware selected, prices for a custom rod should run between $200 to $300. Compared with the cost of a typical fly rod, that’s a pretty good deal.
If you are relatively proficient with your hands, building a short fly rod is pretty straightforward. So far, I have built three shorties — all based on 6-foot 6-inch blanks. The most expensive one used a one-piece, medium-fast-taper bass casting blank with a full Wells grip and single-foot guides. All told, it set me back about $125. These rods are great for use with float tubes. I can easily strap all three of mine (loaded with floating, intermediate, and fast-sinking lines) onto my float tube.
You’ll find these short rods perform better with a roll cast or constant tension (Belgian) casting stroke. I rely on roll casts to pick apart structure from 20 feet. With a smooth roll and crisp stop, the fly will drop into some very tight spots, and it will do it quietly, which can be important on heavily pressured waters. The Belgian cast comes into play whenever I need to reach out to 30 feet. Many of you will have already learned how to make this cast to handle heavy flies, sinking lines, or leaders loaded with shot. If not, you can find videos online that show the technique. Thirty minutes of practice should be all you’ll need to get things dialed in. Joan Wulff’s Fly Casting Techniques refers to this as an oval cast, and she specifically recommends it for short fly rods.
Lee Wulff loved short rods, and I can see why. Even in these days of superlight graphite rods, they feel much lighter and more connected to the line and fly. With a precise stop and tight loop, these rods will get your fly into some incredibly tight spots. You won’t thread the needle every time, but the odds of success are way higher than you’ll get with a typical 9-footer.
I wish I could tell you there’s a surefire way to get big bass out of these spots, but so far, I haven’t figured it out. The shorter rod does help you quickly winch down on the fish and force it into the open, but any bass over four pounds is going to react powerfully and quickly. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t.
Lines
For top-water flies and anything less than six feet deep, a floating line is the way to go. Bass tapers, with their heavy, front-biased tapers, make throwing bigger flies a lot easier. By late summer, though, bass will likely be holding in deeper water. That’s when you’ll want a sink-tip or fast-sinking line. If money is tight, just get some shooting heads. You’ll seldom be casting more than 30 feet, which means a typical 30-foot head isn’t even going to be out of the tip-top.
One line I would recommend you try is a head made from 30 feet of T-11 tungsten line. This stuff drags the fly down quickly (which can induce reaction bites from bass) and allows you to crawl it through submerged tree limbs or along the bottom. You’ll find yourself “seeing” every twig, weed, and rock through your fingers. The effect can be quite fascinating, especially when the line tugs back.
Leaders
Perhaps not surprisingly, you’ll generally do better with short, heavy leaders. Six feet of 20-pound mono or fluorocarbon gets the fly into and out of the maze of roots and tree limbs while providing adequate abrasion resistance. My hardware friends swear by lighter mono when the water is clear. Eight-pound test seems to be OK, as long as you replace the leader when it shows the first signs of scuffing or you manage to wrap it around a branch.
Flies
One thing that makes a huge difference when casting into a jungle of twigs is having a weedless fly on the end of your tippet. Flies tied with nylon or wire weed guards work well and are easy to find online. Hud’s Bushwackers (sold by Umpqua) are tied on bass worm hooks, which makes them very good at slipping through gnarly structure. The hook design puts the point directly in line with the eye, which means they don’t require a conventional weed guard.
If you tie your own flies, you might want to try some Fearless Flies (California Fly Fisher, November/December 2015). This is a pattern I developed for throwing into the very worst kind of cover and structure. It’s my go-to fly when fishing downed willows or thick kelp beds, both of which have an almost insatiable appetite for flies. Like the Bushwacker, it uses a worm hook, but has the added insurance of a section of scissor-split silicon tube covering the hook point. The tube exposes the point (through the split) when a fish clamps down on the fly. I have posted a short video of me testing the fly on YouTube (“Fearless Fly Thrown into Willows and Tules,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYKaFb3etDU). In this case, “testing” involved deliberately casting the fly into a willow and then yanking it out.
If you are looking for fishing that is both challenging and rewarding, but don’t have the time (or means) to jet off to some far-flung corner of the planet, fishing for big bass in small waters can be a total blast. There’s more than likely a suitable pond or lake just a short distance from your home. Get a short rod and go pay them a visit.
