Reeling in August
By Ross Hagemeister, meisterguideservice.com
It’s already August! Man—nice weather and fishing makes the time fly by! Soon it’ll be September. The leaves will turn, the crops will ripen and the fish will abandon their summer homes and enter into fall patterns. But we still have a few weeks of summer fishing to savor. The beauty of summer fishing is that the patterns are constant and consistent.
If you found fish and a good pattern a few weeks ago, chances are good that the pattern is still functional. That holds true for all species: crappie, sunfish/bluegill, walleye, small and largemouth bass. The only species that has continued in a downward trend (activity wise), is the northern pike. They’ve been tough unless you get right in the cabbage. The common denominator for the summer of 2020 has been the exceptionally warm water! We may be at the later portion of our summer fishing and patterns—which are strong if you’ve found one—but it doesn’t imply that fishing has been easy. The summer of warm water has redirected lots of fish to station themselves in new spaces. Some folks have been trying to eke fish our of last-year’s holes and it’s just not working.
For some, it might be safe to assume that the fish are all gone, but they’re just in different spots. For the most part, fish seem to be staying within a fin length of weeds. I attribute that necessity to the amazingly warm water, and the only thing that will shake those fish out of their summer homes is a reduction in water temps. And this season it’s going to take a good stretch of cruddy weather and shorter days to get those temps down.
For now, keep on picking at the fish. And the best way to do that this season is to keep around the weeds. For some species, you’ll want to fish absolutely right in the weeds, but for others, you’ll want to tickle the edges of the weeds. If you choose to fish directly in the weeds—fish vertical or with a bobber.
A great weed-fishing strategy is to skim the tops of weeds by either casting to them and retrieving at a moderate to fast speed, or to troll the tops with spinners and other flashing baits using a long-line approach. The perfect trolling speed is dependent on weed height, the water depth, and the weight of your lure—you’ll just have to fine tune them until you’re catching fish rather than weeds. If you elect to fish the the shallow or deep weed edges, you can get away with varied speeds and lure weights and sizes as you don’t have to worry about hanging up in the weeds. Good Luck fishing Otter Tail Lakes Country this week! Happy summer.