John B wrote:


Anyone else ever had this happen when worm fishing? It's a first for
me...on rare occasion I have had a bass hit the worm when I was
"hauling" it back in, but nothing like this!

I suspect that some top water lures would work as well...but ya all know
I am a soft plastics guy, and I don't have much in the way of those
alternative lures in my "sack". But I am going out and buy some tomorrow
. I did try a spinner bait, and got a couple....but the worm out
performed the spinner 10 to 1.....go figure !

John K


Thirty years ago, the Federation national championship was on KY lake,
right around Labor Day, it was incredibly hot and muggy, and the lake
was way, way down. I caught a pretty good LMB or two in practice tossing
a little 5" blk/chart worm to very shallow bushes, and some barely legal
spots fishing the same worm along bluff banks. 1st day of the tourney, I
head out to do do the shallow bush thing for LM. After about an hour
without a bump, I was in the middle of working the worm through a brush
pile (these were real little, scattered, scraggly pieces of twig and
small branches, not anything you'd really think of a fish holding stuff)
when the need to go chase those little spots just overcame me. I started
just cranking that little worm in as fast as I could -- until a 3
pounder stopped it just as it hit the surface!

Naturally, that renewed my interest in the brush piles. For a half dozen
casts, anyway. With no more hits, those spots on the bluffs started
looking good again, and once again I started winding it in like crazy.
And once again I got smashed just as the worm hit the surface at high
speed. I'm stubborn, but not stupid. I switched to a spinnerbait, and
started "waking" it past the bushes. Nothing. Went back to the worm, but
just winding it, without letting it sink into the bushes first. Nothing.
So I went all the way back to what caught those first two fish --
fishing the worm slowly in brush, then reeling it in like mad. I ended
up catching about 30 fish over the course of that day and the next, by
fishing that little worm in the bushes, then reeling it away from the
cover as fast as I could. If I didn't diddle it around in the middle of
the sparse cover first, I didn't get bit. And If I didn't wind it as
fast as I could on the way back, I didn't get bit. Every, single hit
came within a foot of the high speed worm breaking the surface.

On day 3, I couldn't get bit doing it, and ended up catching one smallie
on a 'smokey joe' color pattern baby big-o. In those days, smallies were
something of a rarity on Kentucky Lake, unless you ran all the way
upriver (south), so my lonely little 2 pounder was something of an oddity.