BassBlaster

You May Be Fishing Around Baitfish Algae for Bass Plants

Look at all those minnows!

Stumbled across a recent  first-person account of fishing California’s Clear Lake with an underwater camera. Interesting! Bottom line: What you think are baitfish and bass on your depthfinder may not be. Highlights:

> On Saturday, I accompanied a good friend and expert bass fisherman, Mike Rothstein, with the sole purpose of seeing if we could locate any fish. We didn’t plan on fishing, just looking for indications on what was going on.

> Rothstein has a modern bass boat with all the latest in electronics, including a new fishfinder. I was only equipped with my underwater camera. We started checking the docks just past Library Park in Lakeport. Like most of the local fishermen I thought most of the structure was the docks themselves. I also was under the impression the bottom out in front of the docks was basically flat and consisted mostly of silt. I was completely wrong.

> When we lowered the camera, we found huge rocks and other structures a good 100 feet out from the docks all along the Lakeport area. There were rocks the size of bowling balls as well as wood beams and even piles of brush. There was everything a bass would need for habitat. We also checked many of the docks for active fish and only found three

> Near Rocky Point, we met a fisherman who said he was metering baitfish on his fishfinder but couldn’t get any bass to bite. Rothstein’s fishfinder also picked up the ball of baitfish, but when I lowered the camera into the ball it turned out not to be baitfish but small globs of algae. This was repeated several times throughout the day.

> Rothstein’s fishfinder also picked up what appeared to be bass holding near the bottom. In other words, the screen showed a familiar arc that represents fish. But when I lowered the camera it turned out to be small individual weeds growing up from the bottom.

> After leaving Rocky Point, our next stop was the Aurora Club in Nice. The steel pilings there have long been a favorite hangout for bass. A pair of anglers who were fishing in a tournament were working the pilings with plastic worms and jigs. They said they had only caught one fish. I lowered the camera down to the pilings and large bass appeared everywhere. In one short stretch we saw at least seven bass.

> We continued on down the line and checked a number of docks. At one dock we spotted more than 20 bass, most holding in 10-12 feet of water at the end of the docks. The camera picked up bass at a number of docks. We never saw a single fish [by itself]. There were either five or more bass or nothing.

> We didn’t see a single catfish, bluegill or crappie. We also didn’t see any baitfish, which explained the lack of grebes and other fish-eating birds. In all we figured we saw at least 60 bass, just about all of them in the Nice-Lucerne area.
_____

Huh. How ’bout them apples. Anyone else out there ever done this?

2 Comments

2 Comments

  1. Ronald J. Lindner

    January 28, 2011 at 8:14 am

    I was on the Board of Directors of Aqua View (Nature Vision) when they first introduced the underwater camera. We (the whole Liindner gang) did a tremendous amount of experimentation with the cameras. And of course all the filming we still do for our commercial and production work, we spend a lot of time underwater. Early on we realized that the readings that you are getting have to be interpreted . This is why we went to went to Hummingbird and encouraged them to enhance their product with side images and downviewing. There are things on the drawing boards right now that will help us get a much more precise picture of what is hidden under the veil of water.

  2. Brian

    January 28, 2011 at 11:45 am

    Had a friend who sent me some graph shots of what looked like balls of bait hanging near the bototm of his local lake. Never could catch any fish around them. When he lowered the camera down on them one day he figured out why – they were clouds of silt being wafted up by feeding carp.

    Also know a guy who had the living daylights scared out of him when he came across a body with his camera on the bottom of a local lake. Fortunately, upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a dept. store mannequin.

    I’ve got a camera myself, but have not found anything quite as intriguing just yet.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Gitcha Bassin' Fix

To Top