How to Catch Trophy Largemouth on Wakebaits

Spring Chorus

It was somewhere past the old exit 8 when I turned off the main road and heard them, and knew my FOMO would soon kick in. It was the call of peeper frogs, a harbinger of spring, pouring out from some hidden expanse of Cape marsh. The vernal equinox had just passed, and with roughly 85 minutes of sunlight added in the month of March, the ecological cogs of the coast were finding a new gear. Ospreys were returning to their aeries, and the first herring scouts would soon be weaving up their runs. With a cold front on its way, this symphony was the morale boost I needed. The nascent stir of activity in the local kettle-ponds and bogs would soon ebb, giving me time to prepare, and then the good times would unfurl, largemouth bass blowups breaking the stillness of spring moonlight. 

Breaking Convention

Counter-intuitive angling patterns have always struck a chord with me. Why do smallmouth eschew soft plastics for tiny slabs of tin in the winter? Why does a backwater redfish turn up its nose at a live shrimp only to eat a dead one from below a popping cork? Why do false albacore chase down 120-gram yellowfin jigs with abandon in the Northeast Canyons, only to peel off when offered a 5/8-ounce Kastmaster from shore? Regardless, few head-scratching patterns compare to the crash of a big largemouth on a wooden wakebait in water temps barely scratching 45 degrees. Until you hear and then feel the drag peel for yourself, you’ll have to count yourself among the angling orthodoxy. 

In every sacred bassin’ text I’ve ever poured over, the pretense is that the spring transition is a methodical one. Big females are supposedly conditioned, gradually, to increases in sunlight exposure and water temperature. They can be targeted on deep water drop-offs with finesse tactics and forward-facing sonar, but the feeding windows are allegedly thin and variable. Buck bass, we’re told, are always the first to move shallow; they are the most active feeders and the most susceptible to interception in the early spring. However, the more I target big bucketmouths, this advice increasingly seems all too convenient. It closely resembles the circadian rhythm and temperature preferences of anglers rather than the nocturnal and innately opportunistic fish we’re after. Once the sun goes down, these are rules that a distinct population of fish, which are often larger and less pressured, do not abide by.  

Moonlit Revelation

My first brush with this angling counterculture—as all great countercultures should be adopted—was out of spite. The HOA at my favorite kettle hole had already called the cops on me twice that spring—a story for another time—so stealth and discretion were paramount. It was a small, crystal-clear pond, the entire shoreline teeming with houses, floating docks, and aquatic-sports paraphernalia. By Northeast standards, the fish were pressured by kayak tournaments, small boat traffic, rowers, and trout lines. It had a reputation for skittish fish of both the small- and large-jaw variety, with the occasional pre-spawn lunker fooled on deeper weed edges with light-line tactics. Despite the overabundance of shade and shoreline cover, the shallows seemed barren almost year-round save for the spawn period and occasional stocked rainbow; that is, until the day I pulled up at 4 a.m. for a pre-work special, headlights dimmed to avoid detection, and eased my Jon boat off the beach without a ripple.

As my eyes slowly adjusted to the chilly moonlit surroundings, it was what I began to hear that tipped me off to the fact that something was very different about my finesse fishery after dark. The trout and sunfish, usually finicky in daylight, were pushing in the backs of pockets, rolling on insects and what I assumed were perch fry. And then, every 10 minutes or so, there’d be a louder boil—under a dock or across a pocket in the bushes, an unmistakable blow-up. Close-minded and conditioned by years of fishing this pond in a similar manner, I rationalized sitting out on a point for more than a half-hour, all while listening to the irrefutable truth coming from the shallows. After hauling nothing but water on Ned rigs, finesse swimbaits, and under-spins, I had nothing to lose, so I slid in to satisfy my curiosity.

Coming around a submerged pine branch, heading into a pocket, I recoiled as a blur of pinkish-white shot out from inches of water, an emerald torpedo in pursuit. Was that…? Yes, it was. A pattern was formulating before my eyes, and I couldn’t immediately figure out how to capitalize on it. The cobwebbed trout glidebait that hadn’t yet made it out of my tackle bag that year was the only replica aboard. I tied it on, and with little to no confidence, chunked and wound for an hour, fishless and frustrated. I couldn’t easily make out the cadence or sink rate in the darkness, and I was certainly not getting any feedback from the bass still savaging bait between tree limbs. All it took was a happy accident—the fluorocarbon leader fouling around my front treble—for the lightbulb moment to arrive. As I dragged my Franken-lure back to the boat, the tail-section slapping back and forth as no engineer had intended, it was engulfed five yards from my feet. A short peel of drag, a few breathless figure eights, and a pristine 4½-pounder was in my grasp. Nothing to write home about, but it was the start of something.  

As dawn crept in after that fortunate lesson, the pond returned to its former state of stillness, but one can imagine the racket of gears churning between my temples. Over the next few weeks, trial and error would slowly yield results as I combed the shallows of my local ponds almost every evening, mimicking the largest forage—trout, herring, bluegills, and rats—in the shallowest pockets and pinch points the mid-Cape ponds had to offer. While I didn’t cross paths with any true northern giants that first season, every nighttime swirl and tail splash of a good bass built my confidence that I was seeing a better class of fish, all feeding in their preferred window. And, it was fun. Night-fishing binds me to the waterscape—I feel a wind change as it happens and hear the natural rhythm of the ecosystem build into an approaching front. Every heave of a 3-ounce crawler or soft-plastic swimbait seems like a gamble about to pay off as it splashes down, and there’s rarely anything subtle about the way the fish eat it. 

Voices in the Dark

The dot-connection process was relatively simple if not time-consuming … and it’s one that many nighttime sharpies in the Northeast have been dialing in for years. Three such dedicated anglers, who always have new moons circled on their calendars, are Jon Hastings, Passang Wong Chuu, and Jeremy Campbell. Hastings is the former president of the UMass College Fishing Team, Chuu is the proprietor of Gloucester-based Sherpa Swimbaits, and Campbell is a Rhode Island big-bait specialist. All three are trophy-bass addicts who have made after-hours missions a priority and were gracious enough to clue me in on some of their nighttime insights. While they each have their own preferences when it comes to gear, retrieves, and fish-finding theories, all agree that the largest obstacle to big-bait success at night is mental; after all, it’s a confidence game. As Chuu so succinctly puts it, “Catching fish ultimately gives you the confidence to not catch and keep going”, which may be the greatest skill an angler can learn. 

While Hastings is an accomplished tournament angler, his enthusiasm for the after-hours pursuit partially stems from its stark contrast to the derby scene. The antithesis to the catch-em-all and cover-water-fast tourney mentality, the after-dark pursuit is a slow stalk, a silent search for ideal ambush angles and one right bite. It’s more like hunting, he says, because he’s trying to find a “set of conditions where I have the upper-hand, where the fish might not get a great look at the bait, but they have to have it in that moment”. That could mean the confluence of a falling barometer, a bit of cloud cover or drizzle, and steady chop on the water. Hastings’ search for nighttime largemouth on wakebaits begins once he starts seeing newly emergent grass in his local waters, hints of migratory herring, or a sustained warming front after the spring equinox. “Fish when you can,” he says, but the limited visibility of the new moon has always “seemed luckier,” even if he has found some off-the-wall patterns fishing shade lines thrown by beams of a full moon.  

Hastings likes matching his presentations to the tempo set by the weather, pitching subtler wakebaits in tight to cover in sheltered pockets, whereas a stiff breeze against a secondary point might see him cranking an oversized jointed swimmer. With a bass’ visual acuity diminished, he pays particular attention to the audio quality of his offerings. On calmer evenings, a slow gurgling wakebait or subtle squeak of a jointed ABS plastic plug may outperform that of the lower-pitch knock of a wooden rat. A resonant rat or metal-winged crawler can shine, as Hastings recalls, at drawing fish out of impenetrable cover or deep water, like shoreline brush or submerged vegetation. His fondest “out-of-body experience” came two falls ago, when he put together a 30-pound limit overnight, including a personal-best 7-pound, 14-ounce largemouth. Every fish came on the Sherpa Crawler, retrieved in erratic pause-and-go fashion, paralleling main lake points that fish were using as a late-season ambush zone.

Chuu is an equal-opportunity nighttime angler, saying he prefers the new moon for clear-water fisheries, and a full moon for the frequently tannic waters of the Northeast. He also shuns the conventional wisdom around pre-spawn methods, cranking and waking his custom gill-style plugs in sub-50-degree temps. His theory is that northern-strain fish are far more resilient than their Florida-strain brethren, conditioned to “stage quickly and move fast, even within hours, as the Northeast has more violent weather trends and short-lived fronts.” This resilience, Chuu suggests, can make for shorter, more concentrated feeding windows. One of his more memorable early-spring lunkers was a 6-pounder that ate one of his two-piece wakebaits in a late-March storm that dipped air-temps into the mid-30s. A “proper cadence and bit of determination” was his description of the evening. 

At his core, Chuu believes a big physical target is hard for nocturnal feeders to pass up. Noise can surely draw fish from a distance, but in close quarters, the lateral line of a bass does much of the wet work. With a surprising number of his bites coming in less than two feet of water, he sees displacement and stealth as key factors in generating the right kind of strikes. Especially when paralleling banks or casting across shallow flats and backs of coves, he doesn’t fire off casts rapid-fire. Chuu notes that he’s quite selective on casting angles and is subdued in his presentations, which matches the wide range of motion exhibited by his near-silent plugs. A slow wake with intermittent pauses is a good starting point, he says, but don’t be afraid to dead-stick big baits near isolated cover. These fish are wiser than we think, he suspects, so be careful not to “burn your own bite.”

What struck me about Campbell’s big-fish philosophy was his grassroots approach to finding productive water and his emphasis on logging the nitty-gritty details. “It’s all about potential”, he notes. “You can tell relatively quickly by catching a few three- and four-pounders and looking at their build” to get an idea of what sort of forage is present and how much is readily available. Certain fisheries (and spots within those fisheries) simply build a better pedigree of bass, he believes, so “once you find a few spots that have the right kind of fish, put some serious time into learning those bodies of water. “Then, once you catch a real giant,” he suggests writing down every detail of the cast and catch: water temp, air temp, moon phase, date, time, lure, retrieve, location, nearby cover, and weather conditions leading to that moment. “Most of my big ones have come from these yearly patterns”, he says, “building on what I’ve learned, and hitting all those key areas in the pre-spawn period.”

And when it comes to the business of locking down the drag and enticing topwater strikes in early spring, Campbell also leans heavily on slow-moving, wide-bodied wakebaits like Shellcrackers, Sherpa Gills, and Holy Crappies. “The thrill of that first explosion, against the calmness of a cool night, quickly had me obsessed”, and that same passion keeps luring him back to largemouth waters every spring.

While his lure selection broadens as the water temperatures rise in late April, his golden rule never changes. “When the bite is on, fish hard and empty the tank.” Time and again, he’s found that when weather conditions align to produce a bite window, going to prime waters back-to-back nights or more will yield some of the best results of his season. He did just that last year when a low-pressure system met a new moon, landing two fish over seven pounds on sequential evenings. 

Echoes

As the saying goes, fishermen are born honest … but they eventually get over it. There may be more than a few ghost stories told about trophy bass going thump in the night, but there’s a kernel of truth behind them. The adrenaline rush of a big fish wallowing on the surface juxtaposed with the stillness between casts—all of it speaks to the unpredictability that makes catching largemouth on wakebaits so compelling and why so many of us simply can’t pass it up. In these inhumane hours, the rhythms of nature run sharper and the emotional pendulum swings wider. Every outing can be seen as a small trial of faith, asking why we’re drawn to the water when the odds are so often stacked against us.

As I drove home from a marsh pond last April, having finally secured a new personal-best three years after that initial incursion against the HOA, the echoes of the night lingered. What was more rewarding? The trophy or the invitation to decode the puzzle of a world many overlook? For many, it might be the trophy. But, just as the peepers mark the building energy of a new season, we shouldn’t downplay the progress of each cast into the dark, as small steps toward discovery. The promise of spring isn’t in its certainty, it’s in the surprises waiting for those willing to listen.  

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Source: https://onthewater.com/how-to-catch-trophy-largemouth-on-wakebaits

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