Last week, I let the waters I normally fish recede, and fished some farm ponds. And though they were all full, the bass didn’t seem to mind. If you want to catch a good-sized bass from a pond or small lake in the present situations, use big spinner bait, something with a 2- or 3-inch blade, a white or yellow skirt. I used a 3/8ths-ounce spinner bait, with a big gold willow-leaf blade and a white skirt. Bass were moving into the shallower end of the ponds, away from the deep water, even though they were not actually shallow. I just let it sink down out of sight and retrieved it slowly enough to feel that blade vibrating, and the bass were nailing it.
You could catch a few on a shallow running crank-bait as well, but in most ponds, there’s so much algae on the bottom you can’t run a crank-bait very deep. You can use a suspending rogue, and jerk it and catch bass that way. The muddier the pond however, the more I like a spinner bait. I have fished ponds in April that were as muddy as they can get, and caught bass one after another on a spinner-bait as big as your fist. One thing about an Ozark farm pond, some of them hold bass up to eight or nine pounds. If it has the right combination of bluegills and minnows, a farm pond that isn’t large at all, and sometimes very muddy, can be the home of a monster bass or two. There’s no better time to catch one than April and May.
Of course, the major Ozark reservoirs, has some April fishing that is spectacular as bass move up around submerged bushes and brush in murky water. Sometimes with these conditions, it is best to don some waders and leave your boat, walking the banks and trying to cast around water that is hard to reach otherwise. Again, big spinner bait, or a suspending rogue is a good way to find big bass in that high and colored water.
For years I watched my late uncle, a lifelong Ozark fishing guide, walk the banks in early spring and catch huge bass. Most of the bass he caught in the Ozarks over ten pounds, (and there were a total of six of them), were taken when he was out of the boat, wading and fishing high water. One of those big fish he remembers still came from Greers Ferry Lake, and he talked about it in his book “Ridge-Runner”.
In the spring back in the 1970’s in he had two clients on a fishing trip to a lake in Texas, and it hadn’t been a good trip because of bad stormy weather they didn’t want to endure. On the way back, he took them by Greers Ferry Lake in north Arkansas, and they checked into a little lakeside resort just as the front came through after the storm.
It was getting late, and it was too blustery to take a boat out. It was cold too, even though the lake itself had been warming nicely, and was high and murky. So with his clients looking for a good meal, my uncle grabbed his casting reel and a red Hauser Hell-diver, one of the first spinner-baits made, and headed for the lake in his waders. He recalled there was a flooded bramble bush of some kind out in the water off point, and he kept casting into it and around it until he felt a hard jolt, the strike of a big, big bass.
Uncle Norten didn’t fish for bass with light tackle, and he was accustomed to hauling them out of brush with 20-pound line. But that evening, there must have been a nick in the line, because it broke, and he was left there wondering how big the fish might have been.
The next morning dawned cold, somewhere in the 30’s. His fishermen wanted to wait until it warmed up some, so just after daylight, my uncle returned to that same spot with a white Hauser hell-diver and after a few casts he hooked another big, big bass. This time the line held, and a minute or so later he hefted a nine pound largemouth with two spinner baits in it’s jaw, one of them the red one from the night before. Uncle Norten says he never saw that happen ever again.
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