Bass will eat almost anything
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Article RatingI spoke with Bobby Clouser a week ago Saturday at the annual heritage day for the Pennsylvania Fly Fishing Museum Association at the lower meadow at Allenberry Playhouse. He volunteers to teach fly casting techniques to attendees and also monitors a fly casting contest.
Bobby manages the fly shop in BASS Pro Shop across the river in Harrisburg. He and his father pioneered guiding for smallmouth on the Susquehanna and has been a founding member of the Smallmouth Alliance. He keeps a close eye on the big river. He told me, they’ve witnessed another young of the year fish kill and when I asked him what he thinks of fishing the river, he just shook his head.
I know a lot of anglers have told me, they’ve been catching some big bass on the river but very few smaller fish. When the big fish begin dying off because of age, we probably won’t see a lot of fish in the river until the state gets its pollution under control.
That doesn’t mean we need to quit fishing. Our small bass lakes hold a lot of largemouth bass and they are only willing to jump on any offering that looks both helpless and edible.
Little Buffalo, Opossum, Pinchot, Marburg, Letterkenny and many smaller farm ponds hold good numbers of largemouth bass and with summer here it’s their season.
A lot has been written about bass fishing in the almost century and a half since Dr. James Henshall wrote his Book of The Black Bass. Just imagine how many outdoor writers have written pieces for magazines and columns like this in a century and a half. We’ve all got to say something and we probably have to prove that we know at least a little bit about fishing.
Thousands of fishing lures received patents and each year a new crop of lures hit the market promising they are the magic lure that makes bass strike. I know I’ve filled tackle boxes with all the latest and greatest in just about any color imaginable and some beyond that. They all caught fish but the reality is bass are opportunistic and when they are hungry they eat the first thing coming by that looks edible, no matter what color or what company made it.
The competitors on the bass fishing circuits know that and they not only keep moving but they keep casting. Some average more than a cast a minute but that doesn’t mean we as individual anglers must work as hard as they do. We can catch bass with plastic worms, artificial lures, and bass poppers and we can buy all the new glitzy lures, or we can fish with old standbys that we’ve used for years. The bass don’t seem to care. If they’re hungry they eat.
Last weekend at Meshoppen, several young sporting clay shooters competed in the Scholastic Clay Target Program Pennsylvania Sporting Clays State Championship and qualified for the upcoming national championships.
In the Varsity Division teams from our area won first and third place. Trent Diller of Mechanicsburg, Benjamin Rickard of Wellsville and Zachary Walters of Marysville took first place and Timothy Findle of White Hall, Daniel Neumann of Harrisburg and Parker Zellers of Dover won third place.
In the Intermediate Division Nathaniel Jensen of Mechanicsburg, Chip Johnson of Westminster and Michael Magee of Dover won first place.
