02/14/05

Winning the FLW Tour Stop at Florida's Lake Toho,  Georgia pro, Tom Mann Jr. established perhaps the classic "textbook" pattern for pre spawn bass.  The lessons learned here will play out again and again on just about any lake that has bass.

"When we got to Toho, for the second time, (BASS fished Toho in January,) there was a warming trend taking place and there were many male bass up on beds.  These male bass were typically smaller fish, certainly not the kind that you could win a tournament with.  Instead of getting mixed up fishing for smaller fish, I spent most of my practice trying to find staging areas, where large females would be waiting for conditions to be perfect before they would move to the shallows."

"Male bass will go to the shallows and start the process of finding a place to build a nest, and actually begin building a nest before the females will move in.  Often when a cold front passes, it pushes the males back out to deeper water and slows the spawning process.  It has been my experience that the biggest females are not coming into the shallows until the weather has stabilized.  The key for catching the bigger fish is finding where they stage before moving into the shallows."

"At Toho, I found bigger, staging females on the clumps of grass that were furthest from the shore.  My key area was about an 800 yard stretch of bank that had grass out to about 75 yards off the bank.  In practice and in the first two days of the tournament, the grass clumps that were isolated way off the shore is where these big females were hanging out."

"Another real important lesson here is what happens to the bass when a cold front passes through.  We always watch the weather, so I knew that a front would come in and when this happens during the early Spring, it can really send everything into reverse.  That is why during the final round, so few limits were caught. Even counting on the small males to be on the beds is kind of a sucker's bet because if a front comes through, at let's face it, it is Winter, the drop in water temperature and if the water gets dirty, you had better know where the bass will move to, because they will not be on the banks."