THE PROS' TACTICS TO TAKING FLOOD WATER BASS
Paul Elias on Flood-Water Bass
EDITOR'S
NOTE: Editor’s Note: Some people think that the
only time to have a good day of bass fishing is when
the lake is down and clear. Well, this is just not true
for the bass fishing pros with whom I’ve talked.
This week they’ll tell us why they love to fish
in flood waters from Florida all the way to Texas. Here
are some new tricks to find the big bass.
Paul
Elias of Laurel, Mississippi, won the Bass Masters Classic
in 1982 and still actively fishes the pro-bass-fishermen
circuits. Living in Mississippi and having fished numbers
of swamps and oxbow lakes in the river delta areas,
Elias is well-acquainted with finding bass during floods.
"I key in on flooded fields when the rivers get
out of their banks," Elias says. "I look for
little drainage ditches, small streams and low spots
that run through agricultural
fields. I've learned that bass will use these ditches
as highways to the newly impounded water because they
want to be in that warm, shallow water to feed and to
spawn. But if the water begins to recede out of these
fields, the fish want to have deep-water access close
by."
Like Grigsby and Klein, Elias also will depend on a
spinner bait and the pig and jig to catch these bass
in the edges of these ditches. If Elias can't find fields
and ditches, his second choice for catching bass when
the water's rising is points coming off newly-inundated
land. "But one of my favorite, high-water fishing
patterns is to fish sweetgum trees," Elias reports.
"Although I don't know why bass seem to prefer
to hold next to sweetgum trees, I've noticed when I
fish under high-water conditions and can locate sweetgum
trees in forests that just have been flooded, I consistently
catch more bass around those sweetgums more than I do
any other type of tree." Elias believes that some
of the biggest and best bass caught during the spring
of the year will be taken by anglers willing to risk
scratching their boats to go into newly-flooded areas
and fish the rough cover where the big bass hold.
TOMMORROW: BILL DANCE ON FLOOD-WATER
BASS
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