YOUNG HARRIS, Ga. — Duplicate a rotation of tactics, lures and locations that put bass in the livewell and you have a pattern. Whoever scores with the best pattern this week will win the Toyota Bassmaster Angler of the Year Championship on Lake Chatuge.
There is a hitch. Before the winner patterned the bass, he will likely have patterned the bait. The old adage “find the bait, find the bass” rings more true here than most tournament fisheries.
Bass are so adaptive to a given lake environment they will favor whatever forage is most plentiful and easy to prey upon. The prolific and fast-growing blueback herring fit the bill on many lakes, including Chatuge.
Throughout the 7,500 acres of the north Georgia impoundment is an overabundance of the landlocked saltwater baitfish. By their open-water, nomadic nature they stay on the move. Coincidentally so do their primary predator. That is the spotted bass, also an open-water species that spends a lot of time searching for their favorite source of food.
Committing to fishing specific spots is risky business on a herring-dominated bass lake. Keeping up with blueback herring movements is the wiser approach. And that is the hitch. Pattern the herring and you will likely pattern the bass.
“When they are not spawning blueback herring are deeper than most baitfish, and they roam even more,” said Davy Hite, a native South Carolinian and analyst for Bassmaster LIVE. “That makes them tough to find, and keep up with, but that can be your only choice when the bass are in a feeding mode.”
They are this week on Chatuge as days shorten, temperatures drop and the fall season nears. Blueback herring and South Carolina bass fishing are synonomous and Hite is an expert at both.
Finding blueback herring with an electronic fishfinder is a given. So is being keenly aware of the environmental factors that influence their movement. Highest on that list is current. There isn’t much of it on Chatuge. The annual fall drawdown is underway, although the schedule sped up last week with the effects of Hurricane Florence. That leaves the wind, and on Thursday there was little of it.
“Any wind will be better than none at all,” explained Hite. “Wind-driven current stimulates the baitfish activity and the bass feeding.”
Little help is on the way. The weekend forecast calls for calm winds until the slight chance for a thunderstorm on Championship Sunday.
Threadfin and gizzard shad are plentiful on Chatuge too, and Jacob Wheeler is searching for those and the herring. On Thursday he moved into second place with 15 pounds.
“The shad are smaller, the blueback herring are bigger and so are the bass eating them,” said Wheeler. “Another reason why is the herring and those bigger bass are more isolated and in open water.”
Fishing a blueback herring bite requires stealth, patience and a firm commitment to time. It can be a boom or bust proposition. Most of all, making the most of the short-lived bite comes down to being in the right place, at the right time. An area might be loaded with herring but the bass must be there too.
“Blueback herring are pelagic baitfish and it’s hard to pin them down,” said Gettys Brannon who, like Hite, is a South Carolinian knowledgeable about the baitfish. “Eventually you can pattern them by matching up similarities on the shoreline.”
Observing subtle observations like steep shorelines, and bluffs or long points signals deeper water favored by the herring.
Brannon and partner Patrick Walters are former Carhartt Bassmaster College Series top-10 finishers on Chatuge. Unfortunately, for the AOY championship anglers they can’t use a common tactic used by the South Carolinians.
To fire up a school of bass the tactic involves two anglers. One makes long casts with a noisy topwater bait while the partner stays on the lookout for baitfish and bass activity. A strike and hookup is the signal for the second angler to put a lure on top of the schooling activity. The tactic is repeated until the school disperses.
“You can catch a limit really quick by keeping the school fired up,” observed Brannon, a content producer for Bassmaster.com.
The 50 anglers fishing Chatuge can only hope they find a way to connect all the dots, pattern the herring and fire up the bass.