August is an interesting month for bass fishermen in North Carolina. It takes a lot of time and dedication to really hit ’em hard, and it can be a feast-or-famine month — but I like it.
The key is being able to judge the quality of the water in the reservoir you’re fishing.
August has always been called the “dog days” of summer and for good reason. The weather can be miserably hot — no wind, no rain, no fun. Everything can be so still.
If the water in your lake is still — the power company or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers isn’t pulling it through the dam — then the bass are going to be at certain places.
If somebody is making electricity to keep your air-conditioner running, or if there’s been plenty of rain in the watershed, the water will be pulled through the turbines on a regular basis and some kind of current will be present. And that will put bass in an entirely different areas.
In general, if it’s been a rainy summer and there’s been a lot of water flowing in a reservoir, bass are going to be deep — but catchable. If it’s been a dry summer and the power company isn’t moving any water, bass are going to move up because there won’t be enough oxygen in the deeper water.
I’ve learned that lesson the hard way in a handful of Bassmaster Classics, especially the one at High Rock in 1985 — the one that Mark Davis won.
When we had our week of practice, the bass were out in deeper water, but when we came back in August to fish, they’d moved up into about 5 or 6 feet of water.
I didn’t really fish shallow enough until the last day of that tournament, and I wound up finishing third.
When I launch my boat in August, I’m thinking deep water. If you’ve got good water flow, you need to look out in that water between 15- and 25-feet deep, in that range.
If you’re at a lake that doesn’t get that much current flow during the summer, similar to High Rock or Tuckertown, you can fish 12- to 16-feet deep. But you need to put your trolling motor down and check different depths.
The old chart recorders we used to have on our boats could almost always show you the thermocline, where the warmer water with the better oxygen stopped and the cooler water with less oxygen started.
You knew if you could find the thermocline, all the fish would be above it. Sometimes, you can still see one if you have a flasher and turn the sensitivity way up.
But a better way to determine what’s going on is to use your electronics to look for baitfish. Most of the time during the summer, when you find most of your baitfish at a certain depth, that’s where the bass will be.
If you’re out there looking around in 15 to 20 feet of water and there’s no bait, there isn’t going to be any bass, and you need to move shallow.
If you find evidence there’s been a good amount of moving water, and you feel like bass are out in deep water, there are a couple of things to look for.
First, in August, bass have seen so many baits and lures the pressure has started to get to them a little bit. They move off those sharp drops and ledges where they’ve been for two months because there’s so much fishing pressure on those spots. They tend to get on little contour breaks of 2 or 3 feet, little places where they aren’t as likely to be bothered. A lot of times, they’ll get on flat points and flat humps.
Current plays a big part in getting these fish to bite.
You’ll never find ’em up in pockets because there isn’t any current there. They’ll be somewhere else where they’re close to water that’s moving.
If you can imagine a big flat that’s got 100 bass on it, if the current starts moving, it makes them pull up behind some kind of cover to feed, because they want a place where they can ambush something.
When the current kicks in, the baitfish will start moving — it’s a lot like a natural river situation.
As far as cover is concerned, you’re looking for single, isolated pieces of cover. A single stump or a single brush pile that’s out by itself is likely to hold a big fish, or a concentration of three or four fish.
If you’ve got 10 bass on the end of a flat and 20 stumps, they can get scattered out and hard to catch. But if there’s just one stump, they’ll all be relating to it.
At Lake Gaston, where you’re fishing grass all the time, a single grass bed off by itself often holds a lot of fish, and they’ll be easier to find and catch than if there were four or five grass beds right close together.
During the late summer and early fall, you’re going to have more success if you can find cover on a harder bottom. You don’t want to fish a point that’s got silt all over it. You want a shell bottom or a shale bottom — something that’s a little harder. Red-clay is good, but it isn’t as good as shells or pebbles or shale.
If fish have moved up because there hasn’t been much moving water and there’s not enough oxygen out in deep water, you’re going to be looking for shallow brush and stumps.
At Lake Norman, for example, you’ll be fishing docks with brush or shallow brush. And if there isn’t a lot of cover on a bank, you might find three or four fish in a single brush pile.
The other thing about fishing in August is that you don’t necessarily have to be on the water at daylight to catch ’em. A lot of times, the power company won’t start moving water until after lunch; the fishing can be great then.
In fact, if you could get a schedule of when they’re going to start moving water through a dam, you’d want to be there an hour after they get started; that’s when the fishing would be best.
I’ll have a variety of baits tied on when I leave the dock in the morning. I’ll probably have a couple of rods with Rapala DT-16 crankbaits, and a couple with DT-14s. That’s what I’ll use to cover the deep water, along with some of the bigger worms you can throw — a Zoom Big Dead Ringer or Mag-2 — with big weights on them to Texas-rig.
I love to fish big worms at brush piles because the later you get in the summer, the closer to September, the more fish will bury up in the brush. If fish have moved up, I’ll use the same worms, but I’ll probably fish DT-10 crankbaits.
As far as color is concerned, blue is a great color, but I’m also going to be fishing some chartreuse. The chartreuse/brown baits start to really get good, and the Clark Gable color — green tiger — starts to do really well.
As far as plastics, depending on the water clarity, I like plum and Junebug, watermelon and green pumpkin.
If fish are deep, you need every little advantage you can get. I usually use 10-pound Rapala line, but I’ll go down to 8-pound test, if they’re really deep.
And that’s when I’ll break out my really long cranking rods, the 7-foot, 6-inch and 7-foot, 11-inch rods I designed for American Rodsmiths.
I can probably get an extra 8 to 10 yards on my casts with those rods, and that can be worth an extra foot of depth when I’m retrieving my crankbaits.
David Fritts is a 50-year-old professional bass fisherman from Lexington. He won the 1993 Bassmasters Classic, was the 1994 Bass Angler of the Year and won the FLW Tour Championship in 1997. He is sponsored by Ranger boats, Evinrude outboards, MinnKota, Zoom, Rapala, Bass Pro Shops, American RodSmiths, Solar Bat and Chevrolet.
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