Topwater baits are often the way to catch summer bass.

Sometimes I don’t think I know what I am doing when I am bass fishing, but most of the time I am sure I don’t know what I am doing. A trip to Sinclair a week ago Friday drove this home to me. The Sunday before that trip the Flint River Bass Club had fished the lake for nine hours and it took only 6.1 pounds to win and my five at 5.68 was fourth.

The following Friday I fished Sinclair with Bo Larkin, a UGA College Team fisherman. He lives in Watkinsville and fishes Sinclair a good bit, but I am three times as old as him and I started fishing Sinclair 20 years before he was born!

We started fishing at daylight and we both caught some keeper fish. He had one about 2.5 pounds, bigger than anything I caught the Sunday before. At 11:00 we were marking holes for the GON article and stopped on a small island. I pointed to a nearby cove and told him that is where I started in the tournament and landed a small keeper, but it was the only one I caught there.

Bo said he had never fished that cove and wanted to try it. I told him I didn’t think it was worth our time since the sun was bright and I had gotten only one bite there. But we went over to it and he started throwing a buzz bait, his favorite way to fish.

I thought he was wasting his time since the sun was high and bright and the water was only about three feet deep. But he caught a bass weighing over seven pounds from the shallow water on his buzz bait. Right where I had fished. Shows how much I know.

I fished a buzz bait right where Bo got the big one but didn’t get a bite. Maybe I was fishing too slow or too fast. Maybe I was fishing the wrong size or color buzz bait. Or maybe he knows something I don’t.

It always amazes me when my clubs fish the same lake the day a big tournament is going on there and we don’t do nearly as well as they do. And when I go fishing with really good fishermen, from college team members to established pros, they fish the same baits in the same places I fish but they catch more and bigger fish.

Maybe they have some special talent or sixth sense about catching bas I don’t have.

Last Saturday Raymond English had that special something at Oconee. The Potato Creek Bassmasters fished their June tournament with19 members landing 59 bass weighing 126 pounds. There were five five-fish limits in the tournament.

Raymond blew everyone away with five bass weighing 18.85 pounds and had the big fish of the tournament with 5.52 pounder. Bobby Ferris had fve at 13,01 for second, third was Ryan Edge with 12.32 pounds and Kwong Yu had 11.32 pounds for fourth.

Raymond said he caught his fish early on a topwater frog and had a second bass over five pounds but not quite as big as the other one. Several people got fish around five pounds each early in the morning. It was a great day on Oconee.

Fishing for bass can be tough this time of year but as the two trips above show, topwater baits can still catch good fish. One of the best area to fish topwater baits in the summer is where bream or bedding or feeding. Last week during the full moon lots of bream were bedding and that is always good.

But bream live shallow all the time, so fishing a topwater bait around grassbeds and wood cover in shallow water often works. That is the pattern Bo fishes at Sinclair and most of the spots we put on the map are like that. Details will be in the July issue of Georgia Outdoor News.

Also, Mayflies hatch and lay their eggs during the summer and bream feed like crazy on them. That almost always means you can catch bass on topwater baits. Bream are concentrated in a smaller area and are intent on feeding, so that makes them an easy meal for a hungry bass.

Work a buzz bait, popping plug or plug with spinners on the ends where the bass are feeding and you should catch some. The time before the sun gets on the water is usually best, but as Bo showed it is worth trying all day long.