by Bruce Middleton, May 07, 2009

Large lakes hold the promise of bigger bass…

I once read an article that stated that a large lake or “big water” as he put it, was anything over 2,000 acres and that most big bass tournaments take place on water that is at least 20,000 acres with some covering 40,000 plus acres. Now at the time this seemed a bit arbitrary to draw a line in the sand and say that 2000 surface acres was the cutoff point for big water. I myself would have said that 500 or 1000 acres would be considered big water. But any way you cut it, there are only a few lakes and three rivers in this state that qualify as big water. Here on the west side of the mountains in my home state of Washington we have Lake Washington and maybe Lake Union and on the east side we have the pot holes lake, the lakes created behind the dams on and next to the Columbia river, Moses lake, Lake Chelan, Banks lake, the Columbia river itself, the Spokane River and the Pend Oreille River. Now I grew up on the Pend Oreille River (pond-der-ray) and its claim to fame is that it is the largest north flowing river in the Northern hemisphere. This river is so big that it has three huge dams on it. It is actually bigger than the Columbia River where they meet but since it is shorter and has a starting point in a lake, they called it a feeder river to the Columbia, which is longer and starts from a creek up in Canada. It really is a huge river. It also has some of the best fishing for Pike in the state as well as large and small mouth bass. And for those of us that love a good perch dinner this river just overflows with them.

Now I have often stated that threadfin and shad done exist up here in the Pacific Northwest. Well we do have a saltwater shad that migrates up the Columbia but it is no way related to the small freshwater versions we would use as bait for bass fishing. They are not the little 6 inch baitfish you think about but rather they average about 16 inches and larger and are not very good to eat in my opinion.

These are the big waters that can be found in our state and therefore should have the best chance of finding the largest bass in the state swimming around in them. Now currently the state record Large Mouth Black Bass weighing 11 pounds and 2 ounces and came from a lake in central Washington on the big water list called Banks Lake which is an off shoot of the Columbia River that feeds lakes all the down to Moses lake and the Pot Holes Lake. A dam at both ends forms the lakes boundaries.

Now the first question that people ask is what makes a big lake better at growing big bass than a small lake. The answer is food, the amount of it and its availability year round. Rivers and lakes that are fed by rivers have a huge influx of fresh oxygen rich water year round where as small lakes don’t. Big lakes have huge amounts of feed in the form of small fish, migrating up and down the rivers and small lakes don’t. Big lakes and rivers also have vast amounts of food in the form of worms, insects and other goodies that small lakes just don’t get. All this gives the big water bass a huge amount of food to eat every day all year round. They grow faster than their small lake counterparts and they seem less effected by smaller cold fronts because of the size of the lake and or river. This means they feed more often than do small lake bass.

Bass in cold water verses warm water like in Georgia and Florida, live twice as long as their warm water counterparts. This means that these cold-water bass have a chance to put on some real weight. But unfortunately the bass up here don’t have the large schools of shad and threadfins to gorge themselves on. This severely limits the growth of the northern bass. They usually reach 8 pound at old age with just a few growing past that size. But they do have Salmon fry, shad and other migratory fish in some parts of the Columbia River which they take full advantage of.

Now as a lot of anglers know the Great Lakes has some great large and small mouth bass fishing. They also have a small baitfish call a Golden Threadfin that lives in this water too. They grow to about 6 inches and can live in water that is iced over for several months a year. These bait fish prefer to live out in the open waters of the lake and only venture near the shoreline to spawn and to eat when the light conditions are in their favor. A cousin found in northern rivers is the Blue Herring, which is another small baitfish that bass feed on. But I think if someone were to introduce this baitfish into both large and small lakes up here in our state, they would cruise the shoreline in order to find the amounts of feed necessary to sustain them. This would give our northern bass a baitfish to gorge on to rival the southern shad. It would double the size of the bass we have in our lake in just a few short years. This is a feeding program that should be introduced to the Washington Wildlife Commission for review to see if this is a viable option. A couple lakes could be chosen as test lakes to trail the baitfish and bass to see what happens. At worst nothing would happen and we would have no change in the size of our bass. At best, we would be like California, with 20+ pound bass being caught on a regular basis.

Big lakes and rivers have such a vast variety of cover, structure and places to hide that it becomes important to have a really good map of the area you are fishing so you have a chance of using the right lure in right place. Yes you can use search lures all the time but a lot of the time you are going to want to pick apart some sort of cover in order to pull out any bass hiding in or around it. A map to show you things like points and steep drop offs that you may want to fish differently than you have been fishing. A good map is essential on these big waters but a lot of the time, especially on rivers there just isn’t a map to be had in this state. But here in this state we don’t host major bass fishing tournaments and so no serious attempt has ever been made to map even a single lake or river here. This is a crying shame and needs to be addressed seriously so we have decent maps of the states lakes. What we have now at best is home made maps and stories from other fishermen and very basic contour maps like those found on map sites and fishing sites like washingtonlakes.com.

Now if you were on the East coast and went out to fish a large river or lake it would be no trouble at all to find a very intricate map showing every little lump and bump, point and flat in the lake. They have done a very thorough job of mapping almost every lake on the east side of the Mississippi. But if you were to try and obtain the same map with that kind of detail for one of the big water lakes here in this state you would find yourself doing and exercise in futility. That is because we have no detailed maps of any of the big lake west of the Mississippi except for a few in Texas and California. Now this isn’t right. We should have just as good a map as the East coasters do. So how did we fall through the cracks? It’s because we don’t host any major tournaments up here, that’s why. Or at least that is what I think it is. At any rate we don’t have any lakes up here with anything but the most cursory of details if any at all.

In this case I would ask the locals if they know of any backwater sloughs or other places where the bass are found. Local people fish the river and or lakes, all the time and know where to go for each type of fish they are interested in. i.e. if they want a perch dinner they know a great sand bar that produces good sized perch every 29 seconds and if you want a bass they know exactly where to go or the best places to go for a trout or sturgeon.

It would seem a good bet that the biggest fish in a dammed lake, where a dam is at both ends of a lake, would be found at the end of the lake where the incoming water is at and not where near the dam where the dam is letting water out of the lake. This is because this is where all the fresh oxygen is being supplied from, where all the surface and submerged food flow into and where the lake is shallowest. Because it is shallowest it will have a great long riprap wall on one side of the spillway. This is a great place to fish. It seems to attract many species of fish over the course of a year and it also seems to be more river-like than the other end of the lake. This is because of the current and shallow water. It would also be where all the food would be concentrated and disbursed from into the lake.

Big water is where all major fishing tournaments are held on and they are held there on purpose. This gives the 400+ contestants the most widely varied set of covers and structures possible. Instead of having 75 of 85 acres to fish in, an average tournament has 25,000 acres to fish in. This gives you so many places and depths to fish that luck is taken out of the equation and three day of skillful fishing in the right places at the right times gives each fisherman an equal chance to win.

Big water too has the advantage of offering more than one species of fish to try and catch where small lakes and creeks don’t. It is not uncommon to stop bass fishing and start to fish for Walleye or Pike or Sturgeon. Other major fish species like perch, blue gill, Catfish, Salmon and Muskys are also fished for here to. This makes large lakes and rivers much more attractive to anglers because of the variety of fishing they offer and the size of those fish.

Now you have to admit though that if you are one of those anglers who are out to catch the Washington state record, then you are going to have to fish one of the big rivers or lakes in the state. This is where the biggest are always found and if you want one then that is where you have to go. Now the middle of our state is a great place to fish and hunt. But from the City of Moses Lake as its center if you were to draw a circle 100 miles in circumference you would find the best fishing in the state. Now some readers might think that 100 miles is a long way, but you have to remember that Washington is a huge state and takes up over 1/4th the west coast. It is not a small state by any means. This hundred-mile circle won’t even get you up to the Canadian border.

Now inside that circle is the Pot Holes Lake, Moses Lake, Banks Lake a goodly portion of the Columbia River and a lot of lakes behind 4 of the dams on the river. So you have a great deal of water to fish. I would think it safe to say that if you were to fish the shoreline of all that water, say 4 miles a day, 350 days a year that it would take you 64.325 years to fish it all. Now that is what I call big water.

The advantages to fishing big water include mile after mile of shoreline of raw land with no houses on it. This means that the trees have not been removed from the bottom nor have the brush piles. This gives you vast areas of untouched shoreline to fish with the best possible bass habitat. Up near the dam will be long stretches of riprap walls to fish. There will be back water sloughs where the river has flooded a low lying area next to the river that has no current but harbors huge numbers of fish who for what ever reason have moved there to get out of the main river. High water may have driven them there and they never left or some other reason, but these backwater sloughs are perfect bass fishing areas.

Sand bars in the river proper may have shifted so as to have created a small quiet pool behind the bar. Again a perfect place for bass. They can move up to the point of the sand bar and feed and then slip back to the quiet water to rest. Log jams and trees with their stumps can and do pile up on the outside corner of a bend in the river forming a perfect hiding place for bass and other fish.

Lakes can form when the river channel changes and cuts off the flow of water to a certain section of the river. This new lake will have all the logs, brush piles and untouched areas it had as part of the river before being cut off. What a great place to fish. The whole river area is dynamic, changing constantly and forming and reforming new places to fish. Only big water can do this is a time scale short enough for us to see.

These big lakes have one other factor to consider when fishing them, they are deep. This is not your average small lake where the bottom is 23 feet deep. These lakes can be 65 to 185 feet deep and sometimes deeper. This is because the river that made them is that deep now that it is dammed. It will take centuries before the silt can fill in the lake. Also to the vegetation in these newer lakes is much shallower that in a typical lake. This is because it bottom is hard and vegetation doesn’t grow well on hard bottoms. You can use more Carolina rigs in this type of lake because of the lack of weeds and grass. This means too that you are looking more for structure to fish than weed beds, rock piles instead of lily pads and elevation changes instead of windfalls.

The middle of our state is pretty barren of trees but it has huge old lava flows. The Columbia River has cut its way though a lot of layers of this type of rock and has created some of the most intricate caves, hollows and formations along the banks of the river. This makes for a lot of places for bass to hide in. And on gentle sloping banks the bass swim along slowly looking for minnows and frogs that inhabit the shorelines. There are some huge 17 pound bass that you can see in just three feet of water, but every time you are just looking and don’t have a rod and reel within a 150 miles of you. You just stand there frothing at the mouth and jerking your arm back and forth like you were throwing a spear and muttering some unintelligible words like “fish, kill, fish, kill” drool, drool. It is a sad picture to see but it does happen even to the best of us.

The good news about all these big rivers and lakes is that there is a lot of access to them. You can get a boat into the water at almost any place along the river and at accesses at the lake. Almost all access points have plenty of parking and boat ramps that are in great shape. Camping facilities are usually near by so it makes it easy to spend a long weekend camping and fishing all in one place. You should of course read up on the site you intend to use and get as much information as possible before you go. Making a short weekend trip to the site you wish to go to later is always advisable. And if you are going in the summer be sure and make a reservation as school is out and most all campsites are full up. You may find yourself sleeping on the side of the road or on an off ramp because there was just no other place to go. If school is still in session you can stay just about anywhere you like especially during the week. The weekends may or may not be crowded so again do some real homework before going. And if you know of someone who actually lives over there then so much the better as they can give you a real time image of what these sites look like and current fishing reports. You can also go to this site and look up info on current fishing in the area.

Other than that what I have already stated, big water holds the promise of big bass. But remember that a bass has an olfactory gland that grows twice or three times it normal size by the time it is ten pound up here. That means that you have you have to completely remove any human scent on your lures and baits. Use scents as a add attractant but not as a cover up. Start off with clean hands and contaminate free rods and reels. This is the way to catch those big bass.

Like smaller lakes it is important to know what kind of baitfish are found in that body of water so you know what colors will probably work the best. Matching the hatch is so important. Now to be honest a few bass anglers use colors that don’t reflect the baitfish found. They rationalize this choice by saying that if your lure looks too much like the baitfish it will be hard for the bass to pick them out. However with a different color it makes it easy for the bass to key in on that lure or bait. There are merits to both ways of thinking. But I think trial and error will show you which way will work best under that days fishing. Also too while deciding which color to choose it is utterly important to match the size of the baitfish. If the baitfish are an inch long throwing a six-inch lure probably won’t get you very many bites. But again those who use big baits say that it attracts big fish and this is true. But even big fish will strike a smaller bait and so with it you are more likely to catch many more bass. These are just some of the things that make bass fishing so dynamic. Things change every day and you, as the fisherman must make a lot of decisions as what to use and where to use them.

Lastly is the subject of current in these big waters. Rivers of course have currents and so do big lakes near both ends where the water comes in and leaves the lake. You need to understand that a bass will always orient itself facing upstream. You as an angler must cast far up stream and either drift of reel so as to bring the bait or lure come up on the bass headfirst. If you cast the other way the lure will come up from behind the bass which has a way of scaring them or they ignore it all together. It seems such a small thing to remember but many don’t. Now when it comes to fishing around a sand bar or other point where there is current you will find that bass tend to stay just inside the lower bend where they have to exert as little energy as possible to stay in place. It is also a great place to watch to see if any food item goes by that they can dash out and grab. So you can see right away they will more than likely be on the backside if the point or bend in the eddy or lea of the bend. Swim baits, crank baits and spinner baits are all good choices to use here but don’t forget to reel fast enough to make these lures work right. They will have no action and that will never draw a strike. Don’t just let them drift unless you are using plastics that need to be fished that way. Current is a place to find both large and small mouth bass in and this can lead to some exciting fishing.
Enjoy!

Bruce Middleton

bpmiddleton@peoplepc.com