Speed Bumps For Bass by Jack McQuarrie "One of the pieces is lure speed, something that all anglers should take into account, because it's such an important ingredient in the whole scenario," says the distinguished fishing pro from Weatherford, Texas. "There are times when different lure retrieves and presentations will make or break the day, determining whether you're successful or not. Nevertheless, many bass aficionados ignore this important factor. At the end of the day, most anglers are still retrieving a bait in the same manner as when they started," says Klein, two-time winner of the B.A.S.S. Angler-of-the-Year title. His sentiments are shared by another Texas fishing giant, Rick Clunn, who believes that most anglers are only sufficiently cognizant of their fishing tendencies about 10 percent of the time that they're on the water. "Ninety percent of the time you're in an automatic, mechanical mode, and whatever the lure speed is that you're using at that time is what you maintain the whole day," says Clunn. The only man to win the Bassmaster Classic four times, Clunn believes the whole key is in being constantly aware, and that requires a lot of discipline and concentration in order to shut out the external distractions. This can be a difficult task for even the pros, he adds. An angler who truly wants to be successful is akin to an actor who's waiting for this subtle cue to get involved and if he misses it he misses the entire play, says Clunn. And sometimes the cue is as simple as speed control, how you were working the bait when the fish hit. He alternates between fast and slow retrieves, while staying alert for cues that will enable him to refine his lure speed to the right point. Listening to the fish, some call it. That's kind of metaphysical, but in actuality that's what you're doing, Clunn explains. Fish are constantly sending messages to you and you have to be able to understand their language. One of the ways fish communicate is by the way they hit a lure. Obviously, if the fish has swallowed the bait, it's a pretty good indication the fish are fairly aggressive and your presentation was pretty much dead-on, Clunn says. On the other hand, if you're getting strikes but not managing to hook fish, or not hooking them very well, then you could be receiving a message informing you that you need to back off a little on the speed of your retrieve. If anglers often tend to ignore the signals that bass send, it's probably because they expect the lure to do all the work, says Klein, fresh off a big win at the recent Bassmaster Missouri Central Invitational at Table Rock Lake.v Lures are only tools, and it's up to the angler to figure out the correct use of that tool, he continues, echoing Clunn's thoughts on the subject. In fact, once the lure is tied on, that's when the angler should really start working. Your whole thought process should be directed toward that lure, trying to visualize what kind of retrieve the fish want. According to Klein, varying your retrieve will really help you catch a higher percentage of fish within the areas that you're fishing. Conversely, anglers who don't vary their retrieves can use every bait in their tackle box and still not be thoroughly fishing the water they cover. Their catch percentage is so low that they're not really hurting the population of fish in the area, he says. I'll gladly fish behind them. Sometimes, Klein finds that a speedy retrieve will trigger a response. If I get the feeling that I need to provoke a strike, I may try three casts with a crankbait and reel it in really fast, he says. I may use a stop-and-go retrieve on my next three casts. Then I may use a medium retrieve followed by one in which I really slow the lure down to a crawl. I'll continue to rotate those casts all during the course of the day. The strategy has paid big dividends for Klein on several occasions. One was a B.A.S.S. tournament on the Potomac River when he found a fishing spot that was so productive that he decided to devote all four competition days to it. After experiencing considerable success at this honey hole during the first two days by using a Poe's wooden plug and a relatively quick retrieve with a high-speed reel, the action slowed to the point that Klein was catching maybe a fish every hour. Because his depth finder indicated there were still a lot of fish in that area, however, he resolved to stay put, though he realized a change of tactics was in order. He decided to switch to a Bill Norman DD22, even though the little ridge he was fishing was only about 6 feet deep, relatively shallow for such a big, deep-diving crankbait. I cast it out and let it go down until it hit the bottom, and then I would pull it with my rod tip really, really slowly, Klein recalls. I would just basically root that big plug into the bottom. The result? I started catching just about everything that swam across that spot, he says, adding that his catch totaled over 32 pounds for the last two days of the tourney, earning him a second-place finish. And it was all due to a totally different lure presentation, a total change in my speed of retrieve, Klein adds. I went from a hard retrieve to an about-the-slowest-you-can-reel-a-crankbait retrieve. Last November, during a B.A.S.S. tournament on the Arkansas River, he was reeling a spinnerbait semi-fast near a submerged log when a nice bass lunged at the lure and missed it. So I made the exact same cast with the spinnerbait again, using the exact same retrieve, and the same fish busted it again and missed it, Klein recalls. On my third retrieve, I slow-rolled it through there, instead of reeling it real fast, he continues, I allowed the spinnerbait to sink down out of sight and just reeled it real easy through his strike zone. This time, Klein managed to hook the fish. Again, it was a prime example of a lure-speed variation that made the difference, he says. Clunn, too, can recall times when determining the right lure speed made a big difference in a tournament. Like last February, when he finished second in a B.A.S.S. contest at Sam Rayburn by catching 10 bass totaling 50 pounds, 5 ounces in just two days of competition (one of them having been scrubbed due to high winds). One of Clunn's fish weighed 12-1/2 pounds, just 5 ounces less than the biggest bass ever taken in a Bassmaster tournament. While most of his competitors figured that the water temperature-in the low 50's-dictated a slowly-retrieved lure, Clunn put together his impressive catch by burning a crankbait. The water temperature is really irrelevant, says pro bassing's premier freethinker. It's the mood of the fish that you're really trying to key into. The more I fish, Clunn continues, the more I think that water temperature is just a minute variable and there are others that we're not even keying in on that are probably more important. Most anglers also tend to overrate the speed at which they retrieve a lure, Clunn maintains. There's no speed you can reel a bait that a fish can't react to very easily, he says. If they want a bait, they can get it. Another factor that anglers need to keep in mind when trying to ascertain the correct lure speed on any given day is their quarry's personality, as Klein puts it. For example, you can take advantage of bass' competitive nature when you find them schooled-up. They're there for a reason and normally it's food, says Klein, who has found that a speedy retrieve is apt to keep schooling fish in a feeding frenzy. You can also enhance your chances of success at times by altering the speed at which a bait seems to be moving. You can make a spinnerbait appear to move faster, for example, by replacing its large Colorado blade with a small willow-leaf blade. Similarly, the frantic-wiggling of a curly-tail worm will sometimes draw the interest of bass that turn their noses up at the seemingly slower movement of a standard plastic worm. So, too, will a tight-wiggling crankbait sometimes prove the undoing of bass that ignore models with a slow, exaggerated wobbling action. When fishing the edge of a weedline, Klein sometimes resorts to yet another variation to outwit his prey. He has found that after making a dozen or so casts with a Rat-L-Trap he can sometimes draw strikes by switching to a plastic worm. The noise that the Rat-L-Trap makes just draws the fish from the real thick part of the grassbed out to the edge, he reasons. They won't actually hit the Rat-L-Trap, but they will hit the plastic worm. Switching lures can also be the key to continued success when fishing a productive honeyhole. By switching lures or the speed at which you retrieve them, you could say that you're throwing bass a change-up, something that the top bass pros, like the best major-league hurlers, have found absolutely essential to their success. ⌐ Texas Fish & Game Publishing Co., L.L.C. All rights reserved.