It’s officially summertime. If you’re a river angler looking for lunker bass and haven’t noticed it yet, the bites are getting as hard to get as an uber ride in the Antarctic. In the lakes, bass become slow to bite and finesse fishing is the go-to technique but not the rule. They go deep, follow their food and look for cooler temperatures to survive.
However, on a river this is not necessarily the case because river bass act a lot differently due to environment. The fact that bass need oxygen to survive makes them no different than people. In the rivers, moving water provides that oxygen and tends to be cooler than still water. Bass are easier to find on rivers because unlike at the lake bass do not go great distances or run for Davey Jones’s locker. The water current will determine where you will find them.
If you put this knowledge together with proper dinner presentations of your bait, you, too, can get the most out of your day and not leave with empty tales of the one that got away. There are a few places you can key on when out on your boat or kayak that yield good results. The first one is an outside bend in a river where the water seems to be the strongest. Bends sometimes have drop offs and eroded tree roots that are especially a favorite of big small mouths. The fact is the current brings the waiting bass food, kind of like the drive through at McDonald’s for humans. The outside bend with a fallen tree is one of the best situations for catching bass and if it has big rocks, it is all the better. It is set up for winning the bass lottery on a river, the perfect storm so to speak. If the cover is here and there, a crankbait or spinnerbait is a good go to, but if it is a thick treetop, then go upstream and let a jig or a worm dangle just outside the top and get the bass to come out.
The second situation is a creek that empties into the river. You can’t overlook these spots especially if it drops off into deeper water quickly. Small mouth bass love going up into the creeks to feed on chubs and their favorite meal, a crawdad. Sometimes when the river is down, they will stay outside the creek waiting to go back in to feed or simply wait for the food to come to them. It is a good idea to fish down the bank from a feeder creek because bass are predators and lie in wait. Once again, they are creatures of habit and don’t veer too far away from those habits on a river.
The third place on a river that sometimes gets overlooked is manmade cover. On the Elk this would include docks and drainpipes where the water drains on a drop. In the middle of most rivers there are situations called bars and the bass love to belly-up. So, if you dare to go out into the heat, hit the river for some lunker bass and have some fun while sweating.
