When bass hide in vegetation as thick as your back yard, take the game to them by following these experts’ advice.
Grass equals bass. Now that’s an angling axiom you can take to the bank.
However, fishing grass does not necessarily ensure catching bass. Plain and simple: Fish utilize grassy cover for purely selfish reasons. However, anglers who show these fish the right looks can find a gold mine of opportunity hiding beneath the salad.
First, a quick look at why bass utilize grass environments:
- Shade: Lacking eyelids, bass instinctively seek shelter from sunlight, and the shadowy realm of aquatic grasses fits the bill nicely. The fish will adjust their positioning based on the day’s conditions, so look for them to tuck deeper into the cover when skies are mostly to fully sunny. Cloudy and overcast days or the low light of dawn and dusk often finds the fish venturing out from the grass to roam the edges in search of food.
- Shelter: Gators, otters, herons, eagles and ospreys have a harder time spotting and catching bass when their green-and-black markings keep them well hidden amid the grass.
- Ambush: On the other side of the predator-prey equation, bass know that remaining hidden greatly improves their chances of nabbing a careless bluegill, shad or crawfish.
- Oxygen: Plants take in carbon dioxide and exude oxygen. Hanging out in the grass is like sitting under the AC vent.
- Water clarity: Plants inherently filter water by nature of their stalk and root density. This is especially relevant on tidal waters, as outgoing water is always cleanest around grass edges. Also, after heavy rains, look for the water to clear up the quickest in areas dense with hydrilla and other grasses.
Armed with the knowledge of why bass inhabit these environments, gear up with a strategic arsenal of baits and you’ll put yourself in position to leverage the bounty of aquatic vegetation.
Specific lure selections might vary by water body, but here are six strategies that will cover most grass scenarios you encounter:
Swimming plastics
Streamlined swimbaits like the Berkley Havoc Grass Pig, Reaction Innovations Skinny Dipper, Yum Lil’ Suzee and Yamamoto Swim Senko offer a lot of versatility for grass fishing.
You can rig them weightless and buzz them across the tops of scattered grass, slowly swim them over denser cover for the sputtering presentation that deeply buried bass can find, or add a small bullet weight to make the bait swim subsurface around grass edges or through lanes and guts of large grass areas.
Screw-Lock hooks that hold the bait with a free-moving coil affixed to the eye minimize wear and eliminate the need to frequently reposition the bait.
Also, in grassy habitat these swimming baits also work well on the back of a ChatterBait. If the full bait is too much, bite an inch or so off the front end.
In addition to traditional swimming-style plastics, the undulating motion of a big ribbontail worm can be highly effective when fished horizontally across grassy cover. Resembling a slithering snake, ribbontails present a different look that might trigger another bite if the fish get tired of seeing a swimbait.
“When it’s Texas-rigged, it can be very weedless, so you can bring it through the thickest type of cover,” Bassmaster Elite pro John Crews said. “But when the fish bites it, because of the long, skinny design your hook-up ratio is extremely high.”
Spin cycle
Combining flash, vibration and a large profile, spinnerbaits should always remain an active part of the grass angler’s lineup.
Work the edges of contour changes, points and any laydowns protruding from the grass line. Water depth and wind speed will guide your size choice, but a 3/8- to ½-ounce model will serve most grass applications. A combination of Colorado blade for thump and willow for flash is a good bet.
Making contact without bogging down is the objective, so gauge your retrieve to the grass height and density. If the grass is thick and reaching the surface, you’ll want to burn the spinnerbait around the edges and over the lane between major grass clumps.
For deeper or sparsely spaced vegetation, slow-roll the spinnerbait just fast enough to keep those blades turning.
Hop to it
Is there anything more dazzling, spectacular or spellbinding in the bass fishing world than a big mossback monster blowing up on a topwater frog? It’s kind of like fishing’s Jack in the Box — can you hear that tune in your head? Da-da, da-da, da-da-da-da-da (“Pop Goes the Weasel,” if you need to Google it).
OK, play that tune as you picture you frog walking, sliding or twitching over a grass mat, amid peppergrass leaves or between emergent grass stalks. You know it’s coming; wait for it, wait for it, wait for it ….
Well, maybe it’s not gonna … BOOM! Thunder crashin’, lightning flashin’, earth shakes and the whole 9 yards. Rarely a warning; always an adrenalin rush — you can see this 1,000 times and it never gets old.
On Toledo Bend, FLW pro Jim Tutt often starts his warm-season mornings by checking bank grass stands for bass that stroll up to the shallows for an early feed.
“These bass will drop off into deeper water once the sun gets up, but first thing in the morning, this can be on fire,” Tutt said. “It’s hit or miss, but when you find the right stretch of grass, you can really catch them.”
Bassmaster Elite Series pro Shaw Grigsby puts his Strike King KVD Sexy Frog to work whenever he finds a nice stretch of matted hydrilla with lots of contour features and interior holes.
Any break in the cover, he said, indicates some type of hard-bottom feature — rock, stump, break — that interrupts the growth of vegetation. Bass will certainly tuck themselves deep into the hydrilla when they need some “me” time, but those looking to feed will utilize any edge, nook or opening to watch for prey.
“You always want to make sure you hit both sides of those holes,” Grigsby said. “You never know where that fish might be sitting.”
Louisiana’s Greg Hackney agrees, noting that warm-season weed mats can become quite dense.
“You might get one to come up through the grass,” he said. “It’s not that they don’t hear it or feel it moving overhead: It’s just that it takes a lot of (effort) to push through a grass mat that may be a couple feet thick.”
Heavy handed
Similar to the jig approach, but tailored for reaching deeper into the slop, punching enables anglers to scare up some mean grass action.
Essentially the beefed-up version of flipping/pitching, punching drives a Texas-rigged plastic right through thick weed mats to reach bass that have wiggled way back into the fortress de flora.
Weights are massive, ranging from 1 to 2 ½ ounces of lead or tungsten escortomh a 3/0 to 5/0 heavy-gauge straight-shank hook with something that will penetrate the mat quickly.
Thick-bodied Beaver- and craw-style baits are your common punching plastics. You can’t go wrong with the conventional wisdom of darker-colored baits for dim days and/or stained water and brighter colors (or at least bright reflective flecks) on sunny days.
However, Florida pro J.T. Kenney finds most of his strikes occur as soon as his bait penetrates a grass mat, so color plays a minimal role in these reaction bites.
One thing’s for certain: Getting that bait through the mat is critical, so experienced punchers use bobber stops to peg their heavy weights. Unrestrained, the weight separates from the bait upon breaching the mat and the bait often gets hung up in the vegetation.
Keeping the package together ensures unified movement.
And when mat thickness is simply overwhelming, Kenney switches to a more-aggressive variation that puts his bait in the toughest of neighborhoods.
“Crashing,” as it’s known, is the ultimate grass invasion, but when it works you might find a really big and really angry bass more than willing to crush the intruder.
“Punching is the preferred method,” Kenney said. “That’s when you can lay the bait gently and quietly, and let it slip right through the mat.
“Crashing is when the mat is so thick on its own, or it’s compressed by wind that you have to throw the bait high in the air to give it momentum to fall through the mat.”
The jig is up
Hackney’s approach for warm-season grass jigging is all about forcing the issue: He’ll flip the ¾-ounce version of his signature Strike King Hack Attack jig with either a Rage Craw or Twin Tail Menace Grub trailer, targeting those edges, points and gaps where fish will be looking for easy meals that don’t require much effort.
Even for those that may not be particularly interested in feeding, a big profile that zips past their faces usually meets with violent responses.
Hackney points out that this tactic is more about quality than quantity.
“With the jig, you eliminate a lot of the smaller fish,” he said. “The jig is an aggressive bait, and a lot of times those little fish will shy away from it.
“With a jig, you don’t normally get as many bites as you would on a piece of plastic, but the ones you get are usually your better fish.”
Bass legend Denny Brauer’s jigs get a thorough inspection and preparation before he flips them anywhere, with one of his most important tests being hook sharpness. Sticking a bass is always important, but particularly so in heavy cover where a solid hook set is essential to keeping that fish buttoned up.
“I’ll take the point of that jig hook, hold it against my thumbnail and try to pull it,” Brauer said. “If it sticks, it’s sharp enough, but if it drags across my nail, it needs sharpening so I’ll hit it with my hook sharpener.”
Getting cranky
Now, tossing a hard bait with two exposed trebles into the middle of a topped-out hydrilla bed is little more than an exercise in futility.
However, run that wobbling presentation along the edge of the grass and you’ll likely coax someone to reach out for a bite.
Cloudy, even rainy days afford great opportunities for grass cranking, as fish are more likely to be roaming the edges as opposed to hunkered deep.
Experiment with bait sizes and diving depths until you consistently hit the strike zone. Go too deep and you’ll run under the fish; too shallow and the bait zips over their heads. Unlike open water cranking, bass holding in grass aren’t likely to run very far to grab a bait, so dialing in the sweet spot is key.
Lipless crankbaits like Strike King’s Redeye Shad, Spro Aruku Shad or the classic Rat-L-Trap excel in this game, as do squarebills.
Guided through the grass
At the Bassmaster Classic in Tulsa, Okla., the Fan Expo saw TWA Sports introduce an interesting new product with strong potential to benefit anglers fishing grassy areas.
The Weed Guard is a conical plastic cap that fits over the head of most any worm or soft plastic to serve as an escort and a bodyguard. Smooth grass penetration, weedless operation, and less wear and tear are the benefits.
Made of medical-grade silicone, the Weed Guard fits snugly against the soft plastic to create a single profile. With a narrow leading end, the rig glances off cover and crawls across objects smoothly with practically no hang-ups.
Interior space accommodates a bullet weight, but TWA is working on a weighted version.
To rig the Weed Guard, push the nylon threader (included) through the hole — bottom-to-top — run your line through the threader and pull it back through the Weed Guard — just like threading a needle.
Tie the line to your hook, add the soft plastic bait and then snug the Weed Guard against the bait’s head, where internal threads ensure a solid fit.
More information can be found at twasports.com.
