Entry 165-1

George Cochran on Weed Whacking for Mr. Bass

Part 1: A Grass Master Becomes Number-One Bass Master

Editor’s Note: The grass parts. The wake on the water shows the approach of a bass. Then the bass explodes on the bait, blowing it out of the water in as savage an attack as when a mountain lion kills a lamb. Regardless of where and when you fish, if you locate any type of water vegetation in that body of water, you can bet you’ll find bass in the grass, which provides a hiding place for baitfish, cover, shade and oxygen and acts like a fortress against anglers. George Cochran of Hot Springs, Arkansas, used a most-unusual grass-fishing strategy when he won the 1996 Bassmasters Classic on Lay Lake near Birmingham, Alabama, that you too can use successfully to catch bass in the grass.

The surface temperature had climbed to 95 and even up to 110 degrees on Lay Lake in August 1996 during the Bassmasters Classic. Conventional wisdom said that anglers would discover the most and the biggest bass in deep water on ledges between 15- and 30-feet deep where they could stay cool and feed. But in pre-practice a month earlier, George Cochran had located a small, shallow creek that he could enter and motor to its back only by running his boat at full throttle and getting the boat up on-plane.

Once he’d shut his big engine down, the boat would sink to the bottom in only 2 to 3 feet of water before lifting itself to float 2 to 6 inches up off the bottom. To move his boat around in this large bay in the back of this small creek, Cochran had to use his trolling motor on low speed and bring the blades of the motor up to within inches of the surface. He totally raised his big outboard out of the water.

“The entire bay was only 1- to 3-feet deep,” Cochran remembers. “But there were grass and stumps in this bay. Although the water in this bay was really muddy, the bass were holding there.” Cochran knew he wouldn’t have nearly as much trouble taking shallow-water bass as he would deep-water bass suspended and feeding on schools of baitfish.

“The grass and stumps in this small bay gave the bass plenty of cover to hide behind,” Cochran reports. “Since the water was dingy, the light and the heat didn’t penetrate deep down into the water.” Because the bass in this shallow bay fed actively on shad, Cochran chose a spinner bait the color of the shad.

“One of the advantages to fishing a Strike King spinner bait is that you can make extremely long casts with that lure, which means you can position your boat to keep from spooking the bass,” Cochran emphasizes. “When the bass attacks the bait, even at long range, you can set the spinner bait’s hook on the bass fairly quickly and much quicker than you can if you’re fishing a plastic worm.” Cochran learned the shallow channel’s route into and out of the creek weeks before he fished the Classic.

Next: Diamonds in the Grass

Contents:

• Part 1: A Grass Master Becomes Number-One Bass Master
• Part 2: Diamonds in the Grass
• Part 3: Spit on the Grass
• Part 4: Worms in the Grass
• Part 5: Spinner Baits and Jigs in the Grass