Professional Bass Fisherman Mark Davis Tells Us How to Improve Our Fishing
Mark Davis Fishes the Rage Lizard at Clarks Hill and Davis’s Video Names Three Favorite Baits for Muddy Water
Editor’s Note: Mark Davis of Mount Ida, Arkansas, had the worst year in 2009 of his fishing career. But this year, he’s returned to professional bass fishing with a vengeance. In the last two Bassmaster Elite Series tournaments, he took two 8th-place finish checks home with him, one at Clarks Hill and one at Lake Guntersville. Mark has made one of the biggest turnarounds in his professional fishing career that anyone has seen. All of us go through slumps. We all get down on ourselves about bass fishing. We’ve asked Mark Davis how he’s come back from a lousy fishing year to having a great fishing year.
Question: Mark, you went to Clarks Hill in Georgia. Tell us about your fishing there, and why you did so well on that lake.
Davis: Clarks Hill is what we call a herring lake. The primary forage there for the bass is blueback herring, instead of shad, like you find on most of the lakes we fish. It’s a very-challenging lake to fish because the herring move around quite a bit, and the bass tend to move with the herring. So, trying to keep-up with where the herring are can sometimes be a battle for a fisherman. To make the lake more challenging, when we arrived at Clarks Hill, the herring were holding in deep water, and the herring spawn was over. When the herring are spawning in shallow water, the bass fishing is really good, and catching them is fairly easy. But once the spawn ends, the bass will go with the herring to those deep-water haunts. To make the situation even worse, the bass weren’t very active. Most of the time I was fishing a lizard on a Carolina rig to catch them.
Question: What lure did you have on the back of your Carolina rig?
Davis: I had a 6-inch green-pumpkin Rage Lizard, and I dipped the lizard’s tail in chartreuse dye. Green pumpkin is such a good color on soft plastics just about anywhere you fish in the country. The fish at Clarks Hill bit that color really well. Strike King’s Rage Lizard is a great lizard, because it not only has that Rage Tail on the end of the bait, but it also has the Rage action on the legs of the bait, making it a much-more active lizard than other plastic lizards. I felt like 6 inches was the perfect size for this lake, whether I was fishing the Texas-rigged lizard or the Carolina-rigged lizard. I had to fish really slowly and grind each fish out. I was fishing it in 5-12 feet of water using a 3/4-ounce weight up the line, a barrel swivel below the line and a 4-foot leader with the end of the leader tied to a No. 2/0 hook. To be honest, the leader length didn’t really seem to matter. The real secret was to fish the Rage Lizard really slowly. Most fishermen believe that the faster they fish, and the more water they cover, the more bass they’ll catch. But sometimes fishing slowly can catch you a lot more fish than fishing fast will. What made this tournament even-more difficult was that we never continued to catch the bass on the same spots we’d caught them on previously. I never could fish the same spot on 2-consecutive days. I had to continuously be on the move.
Question: On what types of places were the bass holding?
Davis: They were on main-lake humps on the bottom, just outside the spawning coves, which is exactly where you’d expect the bass to be holding after the post-spawn. They hadn’t moved out to the really-deep water yet, but they were close to deep water.
Question: Mark, how do you set the hook when you’re fishing a Carolina rig like this?
Davis: I don’t get in a hurry when I’m fishing the Carolina rig. When I get a bite, I take-up the slack in the line and then use a sweeping hook set. Instead of jerking like you’ll normally do when you set the hook, I just pull hard. Using this technique, you won’t miss many bass.
