Bass fishing in July across North Carolina can be a pretty tough chore unless you settle down and realize you’re forced to do certain things, such as:
• Fish deep.
• Fish slow.
• Fish “big” (in more ways than one).
• Fish a river.
For fishing deep water, July is probably the best month in North Carolina. Still, it depends on where you’re fishing, the water clarity and flow in the lake you’re fishing, and the time of the month you’re fishing.
Bass may get really deep in July, then come back up a little as the water gets even warmer. I think that’s either because a thermocline develops or the deeper water starts to lose its dissolved oxygen.
How deep bass go depends a lot on water clarity. At clear lakes, such as Lake Norman and Lake Wylie, they’ll get pretty deep, 20 to 25 feet. At the other end of the state, at Kerr Lake (Buggs Island), you’ll be looking at 15 to 18 feet of water, while at High Rock, about the deepest they’ll get is 15 feet.
Bass still will be pretty aggressive in July, especially if you’re at a lake where a power company is generating a lot and moving a lot of water. Fish will move shallower and get more aggressive.
Sometimes, it takes a little more agitation of the fish to get ’em to bite. Instead of them being aggressive, you’ve got to do something to make ’em aggressive. At a lot of lakes, fish will be more aggressive during the early morning hours.
What makes them difficult to catch is they get spread out and more isolated. You might get lucky and get three bites off one spot, but most likely, you’re going to be catching one fish here and one fish there.
It’s a matter of finding the kinds of places they’re using, what points they’re on, at what drops, and how deep.
I’m not saying you can’t sit at a spot all day and catch a limit, but it won’t be anything like June when you can pull up to a spot and catch two or three limits without moving. More than likely, if you want to catch more than one fish on a spot, you’re going to have to visit that spot several times in a day, like making a milk run between a dozen or so spots you might have.
July is a time when fish can be at flats or points or drops — they just get in deep water. They’re hard to find because they can be at real subtle “breaks,” places where there’s as little as 1, 2 or 3 feet of difference in the lake bottom.
July is also a real good stump month.
Stumps often out-produce other types of cover. And remember, you can almost always find stumps near channel drops because when a lake is built, they can’t always get the bulldozers or earth movers down there close to the channel, so they wind up leaving a lot of stumps along a channel drop.
Near the first of July, you’ll find a lot of fish that are still close to creek channels. By the end of July, they’re starting to move out onto contour breaks and some of the deeper structure closer to the main river.
So you have to cover a lot of water. That’s one way you “fish big.” The other is to fish bigger baits.
This is when I get out my 7-foot, 11-inch American RodSmith cranking rod and make super-long casts with a DT-16, or Texas-rig an Ol’ Monster worm with about a half-ounce worm weight on it and get it out there.
Once you start, then you have to go real slow. That’s the key. A lot of times, you have to make a lot of casts to one spot before you can get a fish to bite. You have to aggravate him.
I will fish a crankbait and a worm. As far as colors go, my favorites for worms are probably blues, purples and watermelons — translucent colors. For crankbaits, it’s a good blue or green month, but it’s also the start of when your chartreuses get good, your Homers and Clark Gables.
If you don’t like to fish deep, you have one other option in July, and that’s to move up in the upper end of a lake, to the river section, and fish shallow.
A lot of times, July is a better month than June to go shallow and fish the upper section of a lake. It’s not gonna compare with June in any other part of the lake, but you can go up there in July and find fish shallower, because the water is a little cooler and the spawn is usually a little later.
The spawn may not end at such places until June, but some bass at the upper end of a lake still may be relating to shallow cover.
Editor’s note: David Fritts is a 49-year-old professional bass fisherman from Lexington. He was the 1993 BASS Masters Classic champion, the 1993-94 BASS Angler of the Year and the 1997 FLW Tour Champion. His sponsors include: Bass Pro Shops, Evinrude Motors, Ranger Boats, Chevy Trucks, Minn-Kota trolling motors, American Rodsmith, Rapala crankbaits and fishing line, Zoom plastics, Solar Bat sun glasses, Mountain Dew, Gripper (ECS Anchor Supply), VMC hooks, Pro Pocket and Blue Fox.
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