Monday, 18 July 2022 / Published in Short Stories and Timely Tips

Bluegill Bites and Mid Summer Largemouths

In mid summer, largemouth bass are often reliable, abundant, and willing day-to-day participants. Their fisheries thrive in the heat!

Where we find the lake’s biggest bass depends upon location.

Location is most important element in finding your fish. Across many northwoods lakes, largemouth bass are present in concentration along some deep green weedlines. In these lake locations, depths I like to search are 10-18 foot zones. Green cabbage and coontail are often the top vegetation preferences for these fish.

Additionally, largemouths are present in areas with the highest concentration of juvenile bluegills. This is a mid-summer pattern we live and die by. The best largemouth bass fisheries are driven by these abundant preyfish.

The best locations are offshore, and deep weeds. Every July and August, we are catching many fish on swim jigs with craw or paddletail trailers, Kalin’s weedless wacky worms, drop-shot rigs, Tokyo rigs, Carolina rigged worms and lizards, and an assortment of Freedom Tackle FT Series structure jigs with Bizz Baits Bizz Bug trailers and Missile Baits D-bomb creatures.

We tackle our summer largemouths with a variety of St. Croix Rods that includes the entry-level Bass-X, the workman-like Mojo Bass, Victory rods, and the Legend Tournament.

What’s common about the set-ups we’re using, they’re all medium heavy-fast (MHF) and heavier actions, necessary for extraction from weeds and other types of deep cover.

These past few years, I’ve gotten myself back into the Carolina rigging game for both smallmouth and largemouth. The Victory Marshall, a 7ft 3″ MHF handles this application very well.

If fishing shallows, you will find steady action around docks and flooded bogs and tamarack bushes. Early or late in the day, shallow slop and pad fields are active locations as well. This shallow water bite is often reliable on the calm, warm, humid days if your lakes don’t have much to offer in deep, offshore habitats.

For casting the junk, the 7ft 4″ heavy power Victory Full Contact keeps me in touch with the shallow water, near-shore fish.

My go-to rods of choice for this target shooting are Mojo Bass Dock Sniper, and the Legend Tournament Dock Sniper. At 7 foot lengths and heavy power, these rods can handle pitching, flipping, skipping, and long distance casting duties. I have both working in tandem with either casting jigs, or swim jigs. In my hands, the only difference between the two are flex and sensitivity. The Mojo Bass Dock Sniper with its IPC blank has more flex and loading capacity, while the Legend Tournament Dock Sniper and its SCIV blank provides more sensitivity which is excellent for feeling pickups and bites around docks and wood. Both rods are tailor-made for pitching, flipping, and jigging, but are just as good for casting jigs too.

This time of year, a tell-tale sign of an active fishery is the observation of surface activity. Usually, bluegills and minnow species are schooling heavily sub-surface. Hungry largemouths are on the prowl, commonly busting them early and late in the day. This is what I hope to see anywhere I fish.

An active fishery will hold the better fishing, but if millions of yoy bluegills are prevalent like the few occasions we also encounter, expect more challenging fishing to follow.

NORTHERN WISCONSIN BASS FISHING GUIDE - MINOCQUA, WI