Hot-weather fishing requires finding fish

FALLS LAKE -- Under the sharp glare of the North Carolina sun, Jerry Lucas threw the kitchen sink at the largemouth bass.

But the morning after storms had dropped the temperature out of the 90s, the heat was rising, and reestablishing a pattern was no easy task.

Summertime bass fishing in North Carolina can require trial and error to find fish, which can be complicated by weather fluctuations. But through the process of elimination, fish can be found.

Lucas, a software engineer who also runs Outhouse Tackle in Rolesville, took the morning off and he set out from the Upper Barton Creek boat ramp early July 21 in his 20-foot Ranger bass boat.

Lucas noted the water temperature at 85 degrees - seven degrees lower than a week before, when he caught several bass weighing up to five pounds.

Then, with the sensitivity turned up on his depth finder, he noted the thermocline, where colder, denser water sits on the bottom. The thermocline exists only in deeper water, and on this morning it was a few feet thick in water deeper than 20 feet. Despite the thermocline being cooler, bass tend to avoid it because the oxygen levels are lower, Lucas said.

In recent weeks, Lucas has found bass in warm, shallow water - water shallower than what is typical for this time of year.

Although bass are motivated by oxygen levels, Kirk Rundle, the state fish biologist whose district covers Falls Lake, said the location of bait fish is probably a greater factor.

"[Bass] may be suspending in mid-level depths that have cooler water but slightly less oxygen and then moving a bit shallower to feed, which if they are biting at this time of the day, it tends to say they are feeding," Rundle said in an e-mail.

One of the first things Lucas did was look around for schools of baitfish on his depthfinder.

He switched back and forth between a mid-depth diving crankbait and a Carolina-rigged bait, but two hours of fishing had turned up no fish.

"We should have caught a few small ones by now," Lucas said.

But Lucas likes a challenge.

"To me, this is the fun part of the day, trying to figure it out," he said. "I learn more from not catching fish. It's more satisfying when you finally find them."

Lucas caught his first fish, a small bass, around 9:20 a.m., roughly three hours into the trip on the Carolina rig. Another fish, which would turn out to be the day's best fish, came 15 minutes later on a Texas-rigged plastic worm.

The boat was positioned over about 20 feet of water. The baits were cast toward the banks, and the bites came in about 10 to 14 feet of water.

Lucas knows Falls Lake well, including the location of submerged but still-standing stumps and trees that poked through the thermocline. This is where most of the bites came.

"This is what they've been doing," Lucas said. "They just haven't wanted to do it today. I think they're starting to go."

Largemouth bass can be hard to predict this time of year. It's generally accepted that the biggest fish take the territory that allows them the quickest access to both shallow water and deep water, which gives them a sense of security.

When that deep water is void of oxygen, the fish can be harder to find.

"They move around a lot this time of year," Lucas said.

That's because oxygen levels and temperature levels fluctuate, and bait fish move.

Throw in the intense storms that tend to roll through this time of year and all these factors can make patterns go haywire. The proof is on the barometer. Sometimes those sharp changes in barometric pressure can start a feeding frenzy, but that often happens as a front approaches.

"I was hoping we'd be on the right side of those storms," Lucas said, after the morning produced only a few more small fish and several short bites. "We should have more fish in the boat. A lot of those bites should have put fish in the boat, but they're biting short."

As the sun in the cloudless sky radiated and reflected off Falls' surface and the water temperature already rose back to 90 degrees, the morning fishing session was called just before a bass exposed a roving school of baitfish by busting the water's surface on the school's ranks.

"They'll turn on again soon, maybe this afternoon," Lucas said.