Winter is the time when many bass fishermen, including the fishing guides, switch to minnows or other live bait. There is no question that when the water gets cold, fishing with live bait can be more productive than using artificial lures.
For example, the local fishing guides switch almost exclusively to jumbo minnows during the winter months for the simple reason that their clients can catch fish. Let’s face it; a client doesn’t want to pay $500 for a day on the lake and not catch fish. He/she wants to catch a lot of fish. Most of the guides say their clients catch 10-20 bass per day using live bait and only a few bass when using artificial lures.
Fishermen have known for years that live bait catches three times as many bass as artificial lures, but many don’t know why. Today’s modern technology has resulted in most of the lures closely resembling the real thing. For example, the modern swimbait mimics a live minnow down to the smallest detail. Even so, a live minnow will still catch more fish than a phony one. There is a reason that all the bass tournament organizations don’t allow live bait and that’s because live bait catches more fish.
One local guide told me that once he located a school of bass and when he dropped a live minnow down, a bass would grab it. However, when he used an artificial minnow or plastic worm, he wouldn’t get a bite. The bass would swim up to the artificial lure, look at it or even nudge it and then just swim away. It was just the opposite for a live minnow, which the bass would aggressively attack.
Bass locate their prey using several methods. The primary method is by sight. However, they also have excellent smelling abilities as well as a lateral line running down their side that senses movement. In an experiment done a few years ago, researchers released minnows into a tank that was holding several largemouth bass that had been blindfolded with eye patches. The bass were able to easily locate the minnows through vibration alone and intercept them one by one. This could explain why a bass can feed so successfully at night or in extremely dirty water.
One reason live minnows are so effective is that a live minnow suspended beneath a bobber probably gives off some kind of distress signal or odor which the bass intercepts. Studies have shown that a bass can instantly pick out an injured or sick minnow from a school of minnows. This could be nature’s way of not only providing an easy meal for the bass, but also keeping the minnow species healthy by culling out the sick and weak ones.
Of course, it’s not just live minnows that are effective on bass. Live crawdads are equally effective. Years ago I did a simple experiment. I observed a bass on a spawning bed and cast an artificial replica of a crawdad to the fish. The bass ignored it. I then tossed a live crawdad to the same fish and he gobbled it up. I repeated the experiment several times and got the same results. The bass would ignore the plastic crawdad but grabbed the real thing.
Another factor is that bass are considered one of the smartest of all fishes. In a controlled experiment, bass were placed in a large tank and were exposed to a number of lures. Initially the bass would readily strike at a lure but after being hooked a couple of times the bass would ignore the lure. That could explain why the fishing gets so tough right after a major tournament. This is especially true at Clear Lake because of the number of tournaments held on the lake.
All the local tackle shops carry live minnows and they cost about $15 per dozen. It’s not unusual for a fisherman to use up to two dozen minnows for a day’s fishing.
All this goes to show how little we know about one of our favorite sport fishes. Whoever can design a lure that a bass will consistently take as a live minnow or crawdad will earn a gold mine.
