When warm summer air infiltrates the country, conventional wisdom tells anglers their best bites of any day spent fishing for bass will come in the early morning hours, when temperatures are at their coolest and the sun has yet to rise high in the sky.
This week at the St. Croix Bassmaster Open at Lake Eufaula presented by SEVIIN, that hasn’t necessarily been the case as many of the top placing pros on Day 1 have struggled to find a consistent morning bite.
In fact, second-place Andrew Loberg spent plenty of time searching for a way to get a quick limit in the morning hours, but was unable to do so. The biggest bass of his 18-1 Day 1 limit was a 6-pounder he caught at noon.
“During practice I really wanted to find the morning bite,” he said. “There were a couple stretches where I could catch a few fish, but it was really shaky with the water dropping. Some areas of the lake I thought the water dropping would help, but I never found a magic morning deal. I started really shallow Day 1 trying to find a topwater bite but it never happened.”
It took leader Jim Moynagh over four hours to fill out a limit and his last cull was with an hour and a half of fishing left to go.
Local angler Justin Phillips also struggled to find a good early morning bite on Eufaula. He caught two in dirtier water before making a big run to cleaner water.
Trey Swindle was one of the few who enjoyed heavy action in the morning hours.
“This morning started off pretty quick. I had what I had around 9:30,” he stated.
Elite Series pro John Soukup also enjoyed morning success, but unlike Swindle he needed to hit several different spots to take advantage of it.
“I had a pretty good morning bite on top. There was a key to it and I had to run a bunch,” Soukup said. “I did that for a couple hours and then ran some ChatterBait stuff after that.”
Had the bass Emil Wagner caught this morning been keepers, he would have considered it a success. Unfortunately for the Georgia pro, almost all of the bass he caught did not reach keeper status. He needed to change things up to catch the 15-1 limit he landed Day 1.
“I pulled up on one point this morning and probably caught 20 fish, and two of them were keepers. And those were tiny. There’s a lot of 8 to 13-inch bass. That has been the problem for me anyway. Around 11:30, I went to a different part of the lake to hit some backup stuff and there were some bass that were bigger than I anticipated.”
He isn’t sure if the bite he found in the afternoon will translate to the morning hours, but it has worked in both clean and dirty water and he plans on expanding on it Friday.
“It seems like an afternoon pattern, but this morning I got hung up on my best spots from practice,” he said. “So I don’t know if it is a morning pattern. But it seemed like this evening they bit better in general. I’m excited to have until 4 o’clock tomorrow.”
