To catch smallmouth bass, bait with pink flukes near rock piles

By ERIC SHARP

For the next month, most of the fish will be nesting and spawning in the shallows.

DETROIT — Aha! At last it makes sense. The bass we’re catching have keyed in on the very rare Double Bubble eel, which tried to evade predators by mimicking a piece of pink bubble gum.

If that’s not the answer, then I have no idea what Lake St. Clair smallmouths think this thing is. But bass guide Gerry Gostenik says that at this time of year, most of the bass that he and his customers catch are taken on that weird piece of wiggly plastic called a fluke, and the best color is pink.

Gostenik and I try to fish together three or four times a year, but this spring during the catch-and-release season we hadn’t been able to mesh our schedules until last week.

Between chasing walleyes and bass, Gostenik is on the lake more than anyone I know (at this point he was coming up on 50 days straight) and usually has a good handle on where the fish are and what they want. We ran to a spot he hasn’t fished yet this spring and where he thought we might get some big ones.

As we pulled up, what had been a flat calm on a windless afternoon became a two-foot chop pushed by a 15-knot wind that sprang out of the south. But the real problem was that the crystalline blue skies developed a high, bright haze that made it impossible to see deep enough in the water to find the rock piles where the bigger bass like to spawn.

“This is pretty frustrating,” Gostenik said as he let the wind blow the boat across a flat about six feet deep. “If we could see the rock piles, we’d take at least one bass off every one of them. But with this haze moving in, all we can do is drift and blind cast and cover water in a fan shape.”

It wasn’t an unproductive technique. In two hours we caught and released 12 fish from two to 31‚Ñ2 pounds and missed strikes from a half-dozen more.

“If we could see the right places to fish, we’d have caught twice as many,” Gostenik said. “What you do then is use the trolling motor to move from rock pile to rock pile and don’t spend much time fishing the less productive water between them.”

Earlier in the day, with the sky still clear, Gostenik had fished with Tom Hector of Farmington Hills, Mich., and Matt Freeman of Troy, Mich.

“We had about 60 [bass], and that’s an accurate count,” said Freeman, the general manager of Corporate Flight jet charters at Oakland International Airport and an angler who fishes for bass all around the country. “We fished with Gerry last year at this time and did almost as well, but today we did a little better.”

Freeman added that the technique they used was “cast and pray with flukes and tubes.”

Gostenik casts the fluke unweighted and works it six inches to a foot under the surface, reeling and twitching the rod to make the lure dart from side to side. The same technique works well later in the summer for fish hanging out along the edges of flats in Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair River.

Smallmouth bass in Lake St. Clair are roamers during the summer months, traveling in wolf packs that follow schools of baitfish. From July through September, bass anglers on the lake move around a lot trying to locate a school, and when they find one they work it until the fish stop biting.

But for the next month, a lot of those fish will be in the shallows, from two feet to six feet deep, where they build nests and spawn. Gostenik said that anglers can find a lot of bass on the flats off the mile roads along the St. Clair Shores shoreline, but they “tend to be smaller fish, maybe a pound or two.”

“The bigger ones usually spawn on more isolated structures farther out in the lake, and if you can find a lone rock pile or ledge, you’ll probably get some nice bass off it,” he said.

Even with the haze, we could see the flukes darting about just under the surface 100 feet away. Every now and then we were rewarded with the sight of a smallmouth rocketing up through the clear water like a little submarine missile and attack the lure, a couple of times within 10 feet of the boat.

“That’s a lot of the fun of it, watching the fish come up and grab the fluke,” Gostenik said. “Sometimes you don’t see the fish, but if the fluke suddenly disappears, strike hard because a bass probably has eaten it.

“I don’t know what it is about that piece of pink plastic, but they sure love it,” Gostenik said as he reeled in a three-pounder on the lure he introduced to Lake St. Clair about five years ago. “You can still get them on spinnerbaits and tubes, but I don’t think there’s anything better than a pink fluke for numbers and fun.”