(Editor's note: The following is the latest installment in a series of fishing tips presented by The Bass University. Check back each Friday for a new tip.)
Many bass anglers, even experienced tournament competitors, get scared if forced to fish any deeper than 20 feet. Veteran pro Chad Morgenthaler wasn’t quite in that camp, but the noted grass-flipper got his eyes opened when he moved from Illinois to the shores of Table Rock Lake in Missouri.
“Deep is a relative term to all individuals across the nation depending on the fishery,” he said. Whereas previously he’d topped out – or bottomed out, as the case may be – in the 40- to 50-foot range, the first year he was in the Show Me State he semi-consistently caught fish from more than 70 feet deep. Since then he’s gone even farther. “The deepest I’ve caught one is 112 feet.”
If you want to explore similar depths, or anything deeper than you already know, first you need to get over the mental hurdle. Even if you see the fish on your graph, you need to convince yourself that they’re actually bass. Fortunately, modern technology with forward-facing sonar and improved transducers have made that easier.
Fortunately, if you find them down there, they are usually comparatively unpressured. It’s often not so much a matter of “matching the hatch,” but rather getting a reasonably close lure into the strike zone. With a 1-ounce dropshot, a jigging spoon or a heavy tail-spinner, that shouldn’t be a problem. Sometimes he fishes vertically because these fish are unlikely to be spooked by a bass boat overhead. At other times, he’ll find the bass with his forward-facing sonar. Then it's a matter of making a long cast and controlling the lure’s descent.
“It’s all about depth control,” he explained.
On many lakes, like his adopted home waters, the various bass species will intermingle. He frequently catches largemouths, smallmouths and spotted bass out of the same school. The key to finding any and all of them is typically not some magical structural element, but rather what they’re feeding on. “You’ve got to find the bait to find the fish,” he said. Even when they’re not actively feeding, if the baitfish are balled up the bass will use them for shade. He explained that they’ll never leave the roaming schools. That means he spends more time using his Garmin electronics than he does aimlessly casting.
He also stressed that while we know a lot about these populations of fish, we don’t know everything, and many myths still persist. For example, while you may need to “fizz” some of them, others swim away easily without any assistance.
While shallow fish remain hammered by everyone, Morgenthaler is convinced that they adapt over time and become harder to catch. So do mid-depth fish, particularly as technology improves. If you can push that envelope – whether it means 90 feet on Lake Mead or 40 feet on Kentucky Lake, you’ll have a leg up on the competition.
If you want to learn some of the other secrets of how Morgenthaler learned to love ultra-deep fishing, including his thoughts on seasonal oxygen levels, check out his full video filmed at this year’s Bassmaster Classic, available only by subscribing to The Bass University TV.
