KINDERHOOK — Wayne “Buck” Leazer is a bass fisherman, and a good one. But Leazer likes to have an occasional fish fry, too, and, like most bass fishermen, he doesn’t keep ol’ Micropterus. So he fishes for panfish whenever he gets the urge to for a fry up.
But Leazer doesn’t abandon his bass fishing techniques. He just downsizes his tackle, switches from artificial lures to live bait, and gets after the bluegills and redear sunfish much the same he way he bass fishes: He just covers water and keeps on casting.
I met up with Leazer recently on Lake George, which straddles the Indiana/Michigan border. We went directly to a long flat on the northern (as in Michigan) bank and started fishing in shallow water, in anywhere from a foot to about 4 feet of water. And we started catching them.
“If they’re up on this flat good we can often catch 20 to 25 of them and get a good start on ‘em,” said Leazer, a mostly retired mason. “Then we can pick away at them and get our 50.”
It didn’t work out exactly that way as the fish weren’t swarming the flat. We caught one here, one there, and an hour into it we had about a dozen. So Leazer fired up the outboard, we ran about a half mile back toward the launch ramp, and went back to it.
It was pretty simple stuff; we moved along in about 5 feet of water — the lake here is bowl-like and doesn’t have any steep drop-offs (at least where we were fishing) — and cast red worms, on a small hook (size 6; he prefers a gold hook) with a split shot pinched on the line about a foot above it, toward the bank.
“It’s just like bass fishing, just cover water and keep casting,” he explained. “Every once in a while we’ll run into a pod of them and catch six or eight in one spot, but mostly it’s just picking away at them.”
That’s how it went down. We’d pick up a fish here or there, often around a dock or a boat lift, or around any sort of cover — rocks, sunken logs, whatever we could see to throw at — and every once in a while we’d catch five or six from one spot. And as the morning went on, the fishing improved.
“I like it when the sun gets up because that’s when you see everything that’s going on,” Leazer said. “You can see all the stuff on the bottom and sometimes you can even see the fish.
“Like that one,” he said, making a long cast up into about a foot and a half of water off to the side of boat dock.
He set the hook and cranked in an 8-inch bluegill.
The key to the pattern, Leazer said, is picking the right banks to fish. Areas where there is a lot of vegetation are not good for this kind of fishing as pulling an open hook through the weeds just doesn’t work. Small weed beds are fine as you can cast to the edges, but anytime the weeds got heavy, Leazer just kicked the trolling motor on high and moved us along.
We were the only anglers fishing the shallows. There were a handful of boats on lakes, but all the other fishermen were well off the bank fishing, what I imagined, was the outside edges of deep weed beds.
“You can catch fish out deep, lots of guys do,” Leazer said. “But often it’s a lot slower and you catch a lot of small fish. The weed beds are loaded with small fish. When you get up shallow you don’t find many small fish because the bass are up there eating them. So if they’re brave enough to get up in a foot of water, they’re usually too big for the bass to mess with.”
(And just for the record, we caught about two dozen largemouths, mostly sub-legal — i.e. less than 14 inches — though there were few good ones mixed in, too.)
It’s not like there weren’t any small sunfish shallow; we caught a handful that we had to throw back (unless they swallowed the hook and we couldn’t extricate it without tearing them up and they wound up in the ice chest). But for the most part they ran about 7 ½ to eight inches with an occasional 9-incher (which was usually a redear) thrown in. We stopped at around 9 a.m. — when Leazer figured we were getting close to our goal — and counted. We had 42 — eight more to get.
By that time we’d covered enough water that we back to where we started.
“I imagine we can crack eight more out of here,” Leazer said.
He was right. It took about a half hour to finish up and we had the boat loaded back on the trailer were and ready to hit the road by 10 a.m. And that’s how Leazer likes it; he wants to get off the lake about the same time the water skiers and jet skis are getting on.
There’s no magic to Leazer’s approach. It‘s just persistence. And he doesn’t always get his limit, though he does more often than not.
“The way we started, I thought maybe we’d only get about 35 today,” he said. “But we picked away at ‘em and we got our fish.
“Just cover water and keep casting,” he concluded, “just like bass fishing.”
The Link LonkAugust 21, 2020
https://ift.tt/2QdjTnI
Bob Gwizdz: Bass technique nets 42 fry-up fish by 10 a.m. - Traverse City Record Eagle
https://ift.tt/35JkYuc
Fish
No comments:
Post a Comment