Entry 317-4
How to Catch Bass from Texas to New York with James Niggemeyer
Editor’s Note: We caught up with James Niggemeyer of Van, Texas, a Strike King Pro, as he was leaving his home in Texas, heading for New York to fish a Bassmaster Elite Series tournament on Lake Oneida in August. In Texas, temperatures often will soar over 100 degrees on the same day that New York anglers may wear a light jacket in the morning to go fishing. We wanted to know how anglers like Niggemeyer can change their bass-fishing tactics when they come from the extreme southern part of the country and have to fish in the extreme northern region. This versatility and attention to detail are what make the Strike King Pros such great fishermen. They make those kinds of drastic environmental changes, often weekly. As of this writing, James Niggemeyer is 31st in the Bassmaster Angler-of-the-Year race, making him an almost-certain competitor at the Bassmaster Classic on Alabama’s Lay Lake in February, 2010.
Part 4: Being the New Guy in Tournament Bass Fishing
Question: James, you’re a relative newcomer to the BASS Elite Series. When you first came to the circuit, you had experience fishing in California and Texas, but you hadn’t fished all over the country like you do today. What were some of the biggest surprises for you when you had to travel out of state and travel to many states to learn how to catch bass all over the country?
Niggemeyer: One of the biggest adjustments I had to make was learning how to fish water that was completely different from what I’d grown-up fishing in California. I moved to Texas and started guiding on Lake Fork, so I really had to learn to fish there. When I went to Georgia and North and South Carolina and places that had different forage fish than sunfish and shad, I had to learn to how to adjust my bass fishing to take these new baitfish into consideration. For instance, Clarks Hill and Lake Murray have blueback herring that the bass feed-on heavily. I had to start learning how to use lures that I wasn’t accustomed to using. 
That’s the reason I was glad that Strike King had swimbaits like the Sexy Swimmer. I had to learn to use swim baits like Strike King’s new line of swimbaits to catch bass that were chasing herring in those lakes.
Honestly, fishing Lake Erie was a totally-different experience than fishing the lakes of California and Texas. The first time I went to Lake Erie, I had to deal with 3- to 4-foot rolling waves while fishing 6-pound-test line in 30 feet of water. We didn’t have conditions like those in California or in Texas. I had to learn to use a drift sock, and I thought a sock was something you put on your foot, not something you drug behind a boat to slow you down. When I first came to the circuit and encountered all of these different fishing conditions, I was like a youngster who’d been thrown in the water and told to sink or swim.
On top of coping with these physical conditions, I had to learn how to break-down regions of some of these monster lakes like Lake Erie. In much of the South, you can break a lake down into the main lake, the upper half of the lake and the lower end of the lake. Then you can usually break the lake down by the kind of structure or by cover type. You usually can break it down even further by the depth of water and the type of structure where the bass are holding. But fishing on a huge lake like Lake Erie is like fishing in the ocean. I had to learn how to focus on a certain portion of that lake and disregard the rest of it and learn what water depth and bottom structure the bass were holding on there. Even though a bass is a bass wherever you fish for it, dealing with the various types of food that bass feed on in different lakes and dealing with lakes of various sizes and different bottom contours and all types of cover all presented real challenges to me.
You’ve also got to remember that I was trying to learn all this information while competing against the best bass fishermen in the world. 
These pros had probably fished these types of situations and lakes for years, while they were totally new to me. A fisherman who’s fishing Lake Erie for the first time in his life has got to do a whole lot more homework, learn much more and test many-more tactics than a fisherman who’s competed on Lake Erie for 5, 10 or 20 years. One of the things I learned was to travel to the lakes we were going to fish before the cut-off date, drive around the lakes and try to become familiar with the different parts of the lakes and the various types of structure and get to physically know the lake first before I started looking for places to catch a bass.
Contents:
- Part 1: A Span of 1,500 Miles and They're Still Just Bass
- Part 2: New York Has Largemouths, and I Can Catch Them on the Same Strike King Lures I Use in Texas
- Part 3: Practice Down South to Catch Bass Up North
- Part 4: Being the New Guy in Tournament Bass Fishing
- Part 5: Choose Where to Fish for Summer Lunkers
