“If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” - Frank Sinatra... New York, New York
Frank Sinatra may have been singing about the entertainment business in New York, but the lyrics are just as appropriate to bass fishing in the crystal clear reservoirs of the southwestern United States. Indeed, the bass swimming in lakes like Casitas, Castaic, Pyramid, Mead, and Powell are among the most pressured and conditioned in the world.
Throw in the burgeoning population of water worshippers, a dearth of structure and cover, a 365-day fishing season, and clear water with extreme water-level fluctuations and you’d better have some good tricks if you hope to catch fish consistently.
Western anglers like Aaron and Carol Martens, Gary Yamamoto, Roy Hawk, Jerry Hansen, and Jarrett Edwards have been doing just that. Over the last decade, they’ve won just about everything there is to win on the western bass fishing scene. When the bite has been big they’ve done it with gigantic limits. When the fishing has been tough, they’ve weighed in squeakers.
Now, many of these pros have joined national tournament trails. Here they’re turning heads and proving that techniques that work on the toughest bass in the west produce just as well, or better, on fish in the north, south, and east.
SHAKE IT UP BABY
Shaking a worm, dragging a split-shot rig, and drop-shotting are presentations that come to mind when the subject is finesse fishing in clear water. According to Aaron and Carol Martens, the most famous mother-and-son fishing team in angling history, what confuses anglers about these three techniques is their reliance upon the same rods, reels, lines, hooks, weights, and soft plastic lures. Granted, you rig the terminal tackle differently, but the basic ingredients are the same, leading many anglers to believe that the rigs are interchangeable. They’re not, the Martens say.
“It's easier to shake a worm,” Carol Martens explains as she slides a tiny 1/8-ounce tungsten bullet weight onto her 6-pound-test monofilament line and down to the eye of a 2/0 Daiichi Bleeding Bait Red hook. She Texas-rigs a 4-inch Robo worm. Color? What else, Aaron’s Magic.
“You can cast this rig more precisely and hit your target more easily than with a split-shot or drop-shot rig,” she says. “And shaking a worm often is more effective around flooded brushes and trees, and when bass are on beds.”
“If bass are close to shore,” Martens adds, “cast a slim Texas-rigged worm up on land and drag it into the water without making a sound. There's less chance of hanging up, losing fishing time, and spooking the bass with a shaking worm setup.”
Where shaking really differs from split-shotting and drop-shotting, though, is in the manipulation of the bait. Martens says the key is keeping slack out of your line so you can feel a strike. And she never stops shaking the bait, but not in radical hops, pops, or twitches. Instead, her hand motion is like an unsteady senior trying to sip a cup of coffee.
