A Lake Where 100 Bass Per Day Is Possible...But There's a Problem

Most of the fish won't make the 14-inch minimum legal size limit. The body of water in question here is Lake Travis, a reservoir on the Colorado River in central Texas.

Travis suffered a drought for a few years. During that time, a lot of bushes grew up on the dry land. Then, heavy rains refilled most of the lake. And, today, there are lots of little bass interspersed with some really big ones.

As reported by KVD Outdoors, when you get that much new habitat in a body of water, it triggers incredible spawns, with lots of small bass that are eager to bite anything, and they will get to the lure before the bigger ones can react.

So what do you do? The most obvious answer is to use bigger baits, but that isn't the only solution. In the KVD Outdoors article published earlier this year, they tried a number of lures in practice and caught small bass on some larger lures. They also tried drop-shotting with the larger-than-normal Fat Baby Finesse, but even it wasn't attracting the bigger fish.

The lures with the most success was a 6XD crankbait, a Strike King 6 1/2-inch finesse worm with a nail weight in the nose (Neko rig), and a Rage Cutter Worm, also Neko rigged.

The lesson here is if the situation calls for finesse baits, up-size your plastic. Or, if you're jig fishing, use a much bigger trailer, like a large creature bait, instead of a frog or craw style. The key is to create a bigger profile. But when upsizing your baits, remember it's a risk/reward situation, especially if you're a tournament angler. It's just as important to catch keeper-size bass, too, so you have to show them a little of both.

Fishing location is another consideration. As explained in the KVD Outdoors article, Travis anglers keyed on those areas with deep water nearby. If the area offered extremely heavy cover, that made it better. Deep docks provided the best cover in most areas, but it could be bridge pilings, standing timber, stump rows, etc.

And finally, one of the biggest keys to drawing bigger fish in a lake dominated by small fish is the presentation. Using a standard presentation on Travis, an angler would hook a 12-incher and see 3 and 4 pounders following the bait.

Only after changing the speed of retrieve and making it more erratic could you get bigger fish to bite. Fishing the 6XD, for example, if you burned it as fast as possible, then stopped and snapped it a few times, then burned it again, you would have success.

Bigger fish also could be caught with a Sexy Dawg topwater by doing the same thing...speed up the pace, stop it for just a second, then speed it up again. Doing that multiple times on each cast, you would see the same thing when fishing the soft jerkbait Caffeine Shad. You simply had to impart some erratic action to finesse presentations to trigger bigger bites.

As advised in the KVD Outdoors article, when fishing waters that contain a lot of small fish, you can improve the quality of what you catch by fishing big-fish areas, upsizing when you can, and experimenting with different retrieves to trigger a stronger reaction from the bigger fish. It's all about the attitude!