It has been an interesting week on Lake Lanier. The overcast weather that moved in Wednesday morning was great for fishermen; they were very active. The bass, on the other hand, changed their feeding patterns once it got cloudy.
Let me rephrase that. Once it got cloudy the bass’s food supply changed what they were doing, and the bass responded accordingly.
Bass are not affected by weather change nearly as much as the shad and herring population. Bass are predators, good ones, and they change what they’re doing only because their food supply has changed what they’re doing.
The large schools of bait the bass and stripers follow scattered and went deeper for some reason…possibly due to the “phytoplankton bloom” being adversely affected by the cloud cover and passing thunder storms.
Phytoplankton is the photosynthesizing microscopic organisms suspended in the water that the bait fish feed on. I was taught that without sunlight photosynthesis slows to a crawl, and the small forage fish have to relocate in order to survive.
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday’s lack of bright sunshine apparently sent the hungry baitfish into the trees to feed on the algae that coats the ancient forest still standing 40-plus feet beneath the surface of Lake Lanier.
The bait’s exodus sent many of the predator fish shallower and seemed to turn on the boat dock bite.
For the past several days all you needed to do was throw a green pumpkin worm or jig around a deep dock on big water (20-plus feet on the deep side) and you’d catch fish.
A glance at the weekend forecast, however, tells me that shallower dock bite is going to change.
The clouds and humidity are going away and bright sunshine should return. That will lead to a return migration of the baitfish into 25-30 feet of water where the next crop of phytoplankton awaits their harvest.
That change by the forage will draw many of the bass away from the shallower water where they moved to feed and back into the open, deeper waters.
If the weather forecast is accurate, spend the weekend fishing humps, points and rocky ledges on the lower half of the lake, making sure to cast as far as possible. As I mentioned in my last blog, the fish get very uncomfortable this time of year when a boat sits directly over them.
You paid for all that high-dollar fluorocarbon line on that reel, don’t be afraid to use it.
