Great Lakes Bass Fishing Forum

Wednesday May 20th (2015) I drove over to Upper Crooked Lake in Barry County wondering if I would still get into a little sightfishing yet? I rented a rowboat to get my exercise for the day and rowed over to a favorite backwater to get some protection from the breeze so I could fish a little more effectively.

I found the pads in the shallows close to solid already but open enough I decided to get my Freak on! What I mean when I say I'm going to get my Freak on is The Freak jig by Kustom Kicker Jigs (http://www.kustomkickerjigs.com/)!
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I rigged it with a Green Pumpkin Zoom frog and started swimming it over and through the various lily pads while looking for any sign of fish or something different. On the first few casts a nice probably post-spawn male largemouth bass ate the jig near the surface with gusto!
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We've had some real cold nights before my day trip so I thought some bass might still be on beds and coming in maybe with the weed growth being behind. I expected the bite to be subsurface and maybe start out slower until the sun warmed things up a few hours.

Instead the day turned out to be a great topwater fishing trip so it goes to show what I know, and the bass just do their thing regardless. I found this out fairly quick in the morning because the pads were a lot thicker and there was quite a bit of algae and other weed-like stuff to gunk up a lure.

Because of this when I got into the gunkier stuff I put down The Freak jig and picked up a Strike King Ragetail Shad (because past experience has shown this to be popular with Lower Crooked Lake bass). I didn't expect things to light right up fast because of the very cold night and low air temp to start the day but the largemouth bass lit me up but good!
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At one point I caught 3 bass in 6 casts with this Ragetail Shad! The strikes were the really good aggressive kind that make topwater bass fishing what it is! I only had 1 color left and the bass didn't seem to mind, which is good only having 1 color available.

I found out pretty quick the bass had just kept their end of things up despite the colder nights we've had. That was a big part of why I was doing well in my bay - there were clouds of bass fry wandering all over the lily pads and weeds, and lots of the fry still had the male bass guarding them. These bass seemed pretty aggressive about doing it.
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I never saw a single bass still on a bed though I don't doubt there are still some bass on beds in the main lake. Just harder to fish those from a rowboat with only oars and anchors for positioning so I stuck to the warmer, protected backwaters.

To keep them honest, see if I'm missing something I did switch to other techniques and test the waters but the topwater bite was the hottest, even hotter than pitching a stick worm though I had one hot, hot bite on one of those too. But... it was when I was reeling it in real fast and it broke the surface!

I caught a few still on The Freak in more open water and along edges because it was also fun and I could test that I wasn't missing subsurface bass by mostly fishing on top. I caught this little keeper bass from under one floating dock that was one of the few pieces of cover other than lily pads. I skipped The Freak under the dock and swam, hopped it out. Thunk!
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I didn't light the world on fire but the strikes were great and the bass taught me more things about the world of fishing. Learn from every day and if you catch enough to keep you interested and working at it that's a good day.