When does it get too hot to go fishing? For me, last Thursday at noon! I had met Mike Reid at Lake Sinclair to get information for a Georgia Outdoor News article and it was pretty comfortable when we started at 5:30 AM. But by 9:00 the sun was getting hot and the bass were smarter than us – they had quit biting. We gave up and put his boat on the trailer just after noon.

It was still dark when we started so we hit some lighted boat docks. Mike quickly caught a nice two pound bass on a top water plug. As the sky started to lighten up we moved to some grass beds and caught several fish on top. Mike had seven or eight to my two but one of mine was by far the biggest, at 2.5 pounds. Most were just keeper size.

We fished some more grass beds and caught several more fish. I had another 2.5 pounder on a jig head worm and Mike caught a couple in that range on top. We both got several smaller keeper bass. Sinclair seems to be full of 12 and 13 inch bass.

At about 9:00 we moved out to the riprap on a bridge and both got two more keepers. Then we started running spots, marking them on a map for the GON article. On one Mike got the big fish of the day, a skinny 3.5 pound largemouth.

Mike is in the Air Force and is a very accomplished fisherman for his youth. He is just 24 but he won the Bassmasters Weekend Series tournament on Sincair this year and won one of those tournaments on Clark’s Hill last year. His job working on severely damaged aircraft keeps him on the move and he is out of the US a lot, so he does not get to fish as many tournaments as he would like.

Although the hot sun ran us off the lake early our best five bass weighed just under 12 pounds. If there had been any breeze to cool us we might have stayed longer, but with no air moving it was miserable.

Bass will hit in the heat and fishing early and late in the day is a good tactic for bass right now. Night fishing will get better over the next few weeks as it gets hotter, too. It will be much more comfortable fishing in the dark.