Fishing Report January 15

[Member]

Lake MacDonald
With the warmer weather the bass are starting to move into the deeper water of the lake, onto the flats into the 12 – 20ft mark. Some fish are still being caught around the weed edges, but more of the action is leaning toward the deeper areas of the lake. The bass have been responding well to small trolled hard bodies such as the Ecogear SX 60’s and Jackall Aska’s just to name a few. If you prefer casting and retrieving techniques such as slow-rolling spinnerbaits/beetlespins off the edges into the deeper water, or souding schooling fish, hopping and slow winding blades such as Little Max and Nexgen Xcite Blades, as well as soft plastics. At the moment, the gun lure to use are the Lunker City Grubsters. These plastics get maximum vibration and body roll with their large body and big tail.


Lake Borumba
The Bass and Saratoga have been a bit slow over the last month. The temperature has been extremely high with the water temperature being around the 30 degree mark. The toga have been biting the best as Shannon Watson from Daiwa Australia has been getting into quite a few. He’s been targeting these fish around the shallow bays in the main basin with spinner baits. The biggest has been around 75cm and plenty around the 60cm mark. Early and late afternoons will be worth a shot with surface lures.  Cultiva Zip’n Ziggy’s and Megabass Anthrax’s are the stand out surface lures by far and there should always be a couple in your tackle box when targeting these beautiful fish. The bass have been very tough to land but not hard to hook. They have been very active early in the morning and late in the afternoon on the edges. Beetle spin rigged soft plastics have been working well using a slow lift technique. This technique involves casting your beetle spin out and letting it hit the bottom, once it’s hit the bottom slow draw your rod high and then let the lure free fall back to the bottom. The fish will usually hit the beetle spin on the drop. If this technique isn’t working, try 5 winds off the bottom and let it free fall back to the bottom, and repeat this repetitively all the way back to the boat.

Lake Somerset
I got the call from one of the best bass fisherman I know, Matthew Mott, to get down to Lake Somerset to get into some massive bass on spinner baits. So that was a big enough excuse for me. I hopped in my car and drove down the next day. Motty had come down from Kingaroy with his legendary bass boat, so I didn’t have to worry about taking mine. Motty wanted to do a bit of filming for Smak Lures so he organised his son Dylan Mott and a bass guru David Green to come down for the day also.
We headed out onto the dam and started looking around a few of the general areas. I haven’t done a lot of deep water spinner baits fishing and was that keen to give it ago. We found a few decent schools of bass but they were very hard to tempt. We then went for a bit of a drive up into the timber for a bit of a look. We had a few casts at a rock wall up around the power lines. We ended up catching 2 decent bass around the 45cm mark. By this time the sun was well up and we thought the schools of bass in the basin would have turned on. Off we went again in Motty’s bass boat. This boat is by far the best riding boat I have ever driven and can do outstanding speed of nearly 75mph. It helps you get to your spot very quickly.
We ended up stopping at 1 tree point for a look and we found another large school. So we started firing casts out into around 20ft of water. It took us a while before we got the first fish but as soon as we caught one it was on. We ended up catching around 30 to 40 bass on ½oz Smak spinner baits. The technique was pretty simple. It consisted of casting the spinner bait out, let it hit the bottom, and wack the rod a few times so it therefore activates the blades on the spinner baits. Then it was a simple slow roll technique all the way back to the boat. It’s a very simple technique and it’s going to be one of my new favourites. When using spinnerbaits the strikes from the bass are insane. We had multiple snap offs just from the first hit.