Beginner’s Guide to Bass Fishing

Where to find bass

Whether you’re hoping to catch largemouth bass in a reservoir or smallmouth bass in a river, there’s one consistent key to finding the fish: Use your eyes and your boat’s electronics to find likely-looking structure to cast to.

Structure is something that stands out in the surroundings, like a point sticking out from the shoreline or a tree laying in the water. But things like water temperature barriers or current seams can also be considered structure. Structure may provide shade, give fish a place to hide from predators or congregate prey species for easy hunting.

There are some exceptions to finding fish around structure, such as during spawning season when the bass may be located in nests on otherwise featureless flats or coves. But you’ll usually catch fish where you’ve located structure.

When to fish for bass

Most anglers agree the best time for bass fishing is whenever you can. That said, you’ll catch more bass if you focus your efforts early and late in the day. Most species of fish, bass included, are most active as the sun comes up and right before it goes down as opposed to midday hours.

How to catch bass

There have been plenty of books written on this subject, but when you boil it down to the basics, success is a matter of offering the bass a lure or bait that mimics what they’re feeding on.

In lakes with large populations of shad, this may mean choosing a plug or a spoon that imitates shad, and in a river rich with crayfish, it may mean choosing a crayfish-colored offering. While the specifics will differ from one body of water to the next, the old “match the hatch” saying almost always holds true.

Many beginners find it easiest to catch bass by fishing with live bait or a simple rig, like a bobber suspending a hook baited with a live minnow or a night crawler. As you become more advanced, you may gravitate toward casting lures.

As you begin to recognize where structure makes your fishing particularly fruitful, you may want to explore different areas of the lake in your Lowe fishing boat, and then move to different bodies of water and different types of waterways.

Whatever stage of this process you may be at, however, one thing is for sure: once you do battle with a bass, you’ll be hooked on fishing for them forever.