Bass on the Beds

Birds nesting, newborn fawns trying their legs, toads and frogs singing in the swamps.  These are all spring magic, but none greater than fish spawning in the shallows of the lakes. Older brother Steve visited our Birch Lake cabin two weekends ago, and while fishing we spotted smallmouth bass tending round gravelly beds they had cleared of sand and silt so as to lay and hatch their eggs.

Now, anglers sometimes debate whether it’s OK to fish for bass while they’re bedding. I can buy the argument that it’s not altogether sporting. Drop almost anything onto a bed and the bass guarding it is compelled by instinct to pick it up and move it away. So an accurate cast to a bed is almost certain to trigger a strike. And it is in fact a bit too easy.

As to whether fishing for bedded bass harms the population, most of what I read says it doesn’t. If you release the bass where you catch them, they’ll go right back to the nests. And in my lake there are essentially no bluegills or other interlopers to eat the eggs for the few minutes when the resident bass are missing.

So Steve and I prowled along the shoreline looking for light-colored circles in the rocky, gravelly areas, finding them often next to sunken logs. Since I am at the lake much of the time and Steve is a once-or-twice-a-year visitor, I mostly just steered the boat, not fishing the beds myself, satsified just to aid and abet and show my big brother a good time.

Birch Lake holds trophy smallmouths, and Steve caught at least one measuring more than 20 inches – 20 and three-quarters to be precise, just as long as the biggest one I’ve ever caught there. He got one or two that might have crossed the 20-inch threshold but that we didn’t bother to measure. If we had been into the taxidermy thing, Steve would have had himself a trophy for the wall, but we both prefer just to let smallmouths go, in some cases after snapping a picture.

We didn’t overdo it – we stopped after had Steve caught half a dozen bass – all lip-hooked and released unharmed – and had enjoyed one of the better fishing times of his life. By the time I get back to Birch again this weekend, I suspect the spawn will be over, the beds empty, the smallmouths in a resting phase, so that I must focus on walleyes. And that’s fine. If some bass are still on their beds, I may just let them, content to observe. I'm just glad I got to witness the spring ritual of smallmouth bass creating the next generation of their kind.