Fishing small freshwater lakes in the summer is a lot like fishing saltwater on a slack tide.
It's tough.
The similarities occurred to me last week during my most recent trip to Lake Barnett, a 245-acre lake owned by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission in southeastern White County near Beebe.
One look at this little lake convinces you it has big potential for bass fishing. Mark Bailey of Beebe fishes the lake often and has hooked at least one giant that pulled hard enough to straighten a hook. I've talked to other anglers besides Bailey who have lost big bass at Barnett, but they've also boated some big ones.
Bailey and I fished together last Thursday after Bailey responded by e-mail to a recent column about my first trip to Lake Barnett two weeks ago. He offered some tips, and the tips morphed into a collaboration.
We launched about 7:30 a.m. If that seems late, it's because Bailey said fish always bite better later in the morning.
Bailey described how the creek channel meanders through the floodplain. He described the features of the wide flats on the inside bends of the channel, and we inspected the bluffs and rock shelves on the outside bends.
Lake Barnett, Bailey said, is custom-made for square-bill crankbaits. It has a lot of tree skeletons poking out of the water, but there is also a multitude of submerged stumps. Bass often hold tight to timber. They circle around the trunks as the day progresses to stay in the shade, but they also move up and down.
You can often provoke strikes by banging a fat-bodied squarebill off the trunks and stumps. It's doubly effective because squarebills notoriously resist snagging. When you retrieve them through submerged limbs, they juke and roll and careen away in strange angles. It will often provoke even lethargic bass to strike.
Case in point: During a really slow day at Missouri's Stockton Lake, I once hung a crankbait deep on a tall tree on a bluff ledge. I couldn't free it by popping the line, so I employed a heavy lure-retrieving tool that slides down the line and thumps the bait free. It took a few tries, but I finally knocked it loose.
When it finally broke free, a big smallmouth bass attacked the crankbait. It had probably watched this spectacle the whole time, and when the lure broke free it provoked the fish to bite. It was quite a rodeo fighting a big fish and a heavy plug knocker, and the fish threw me before I made it to "eight."
Lake Barnett's bass wanted nothing to do with squarebills that day, and though we tried everything in our boxes, we returned to them time and again.
We covered almost every acre fishing shallow, deep and mid-range. We tried soft-plastic frogs in the shoreline vegetation. We tried spinnerbaits and chatterbaits. We jigged spoons next to the creek channels. We tried jigs. Bailey tried an articulated swimbait, and he even tried an Alabama rig.
"I know this is the wrong time of year for this, but sometimes you get surprised," he said.
The only thing that worked was a lure called an Eiland Fish Head in cotton candy color. I rigged it with a line through the body and a treble hook in the rear, and I caught a fat Kentucky bass with it. That was the sum total of a blistering hot and still day when fish simply would not move.
Current animates fish.
Case in point: In 1997 I did a story for Bassmaster about fishing the Verdigris River in northeast Oklahoma with Alan McGuckin of Terminator Titanium Spinnerbaits. The Verdigris is an Arkansas River tributary and is part of the McClellan-Kerr Navigation System.
It was early summer, hot and humid. The river was lifeless, but it had a pulse.
Whenever a towboat went through the locks, it created a strong current that positioned bass on small, muddy points. These "lock-through tides" only lasted a few minutes, but they created spurts of phenomenal fishing. When the lock-through was complete, they quit biting immediately.
In saltwater, tides create current. Fish always feed on a rising or falling tide. In our tailrace streams, trout always feed on the rise when generators at the dams start running. That also gets fish going in the lakes above the dams because it causes current there, too.
In small lakes, there is no impetus to move water except wind and rain, and that makes them hard to fish in summer.
Oh, but one of these days I'm going to hit it right, and it will be a different story.
Sports on 06/11/2015