Terry Bates cranked a buzzbait past a cypress tree and a ravenous sow bass smashed it! Bates drove the steel hooks home and the bass exploded through the surface and slashed the top while tail walking all the way to the boat.
After having a down year last year, Lake Washington is showing signs of resurgence. I joined Terry Bates, from Greenville, on Lake Washington on Feb. 27 and the conditions were not conducive to good fishing with 20 to 25 MPH winds and gusts from 35 to 40. Things started slow, but Bates followed up that first bass with another buzzbait bass in short order.
Bates worked the cypress trees and root systems like the seasoned pro that he is, looking for the right lure and pattern. Before going too much further the old pro picked up a speed craw and quickly caught another bass on the cypress knees.
It takes more than one bite to make a pattern, but Bates quickly established a pattern of the bass holding close to cypress trees that had root systems in water 3 feet deep or less. We fished Texas rigged speed craws and creature baits around any shallow water structure we could see.
I missed a bass on a buzzbait when it ate my lure and went behind the cypress tree and tore off the hook. Switching to a Texas rigged crawfish I followed up with a big bite too. As the temperature warmed up the bass bit more aggressively and Bates continued to get bites on his speed craw.
Thump Gel
Things slowed down for a few minutes, so I put a little Thump Gel on Bates’ speed craw to see if that made a difference.
Wham! On his first cast after applying the Thump Gel a 4-pounder struck hard and swallowed the lure. The bass wallowed wildly and slashed water spraying the boat as Bates swung him into the boat!
I followed Bates’ lead and quickly boated a couple more bass of my own after rubbing a little Thump Gel on my lure too.
If you’ve ever been to Lake Washington, you know that it is full of cypress trees, and they all look the same on the surface but beneath the water the bottom is different, and the bass prefer different trees for whatever reason.
We finished our day in tough windy conditions, but the bite just got better the later the day got.
“This is the best day I’ve had on the lake this year,” Bates said. With over 200 tournament wins to his credit since he arrived in Greenville, this retired fisheries biologist has seen more than his share of good days and bad and he knows how to catch them during tough times.
Crappie bite
During our bass fishing trip we saw many anglers catching crappie in shallow water less than 3-feet deep on jigs and minnows. David Cooksey caught one massive crappie on a minnow, while his fishing partner was fishing jigs and catching fish too. By midmorning they had an ice chest full of big crappie.
“My partner was fishing jigs, so I wanted to try the minnows and they are really biting them,” Cooksey said.
They were fishing around the cypress knees and structure in water less than 3 feet deep in the same area that we were catching pre-spawn bass.
Several anglers we talked to reported catching good numbers of crappie and many had 20 to 25 by midday. With water surface temperatures hovering in the low 60s, Lake Washington is on the verge of an all-out spawn if the weather stabilizes and cold weather doesn’t return.
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