Black Bass

Introduction

TO ATTEMPT TO put together a book that deals with bass in general and to enumerate, describe, and set down the individual characteristics of each and every member of the bass family, great and small, would indeed be a stupendous task. Further, to itemize and explain the unending permutations of angling methods incidental to the capture of all of the members of the bass family not only would test the knowledge and ability of the writer, but would, I’m afraid, be a sore trial to the reader. Between the Spotted Jewfish or Giant Sea Bass on one hand and the lowly Pumpkinseed on the other, the bass family runs the full gamut of size, color, weight, and distribution. Even with the dozens of varieties that are scientifically established today, the list is still far from being complete.

With this multiplicity of subspecies in mind, the title of this book—Black Bass—was chosen carefully. By dealing only with the black basses, we thereby narrowed the list down considerably. But don’t be deceived. Contrary to general opinion, the black basses do not confine themselves to two main varieties, the Largemouth and the Smallmouth. So that we can understand each other more thoroughly, here is the accepted list of the black basses—the Micropterini

Family Centrarchidae Cope

Subfamily 1. Lepominae Gill

Tribe 1. Micropterini (new name)

Genus 1. Micropterus é

1.   M. punctulatus (Rafinesque), spotted bass

1a.   M.p. punctulatus (Rafinesque), northern spotted bass

1b.   M.p. henshalli, new subspecies, Alabama spotted bass

1c.   M.p. wichitae, new subspecies, Wichita spotted bass

2.   M. coosae, new species, redeyed bass

3.   M. dolomeu Lacépède, smallmouthed bass

3a.   M. d. velox, new subspecies, Neosho smallmouthed bass

3b.   M. d. dolomieu Lacépède, northern smallmouthed bass

Genus 2. Huro Cuvier

4.   H. salmoides (Lacépède), largemouthed bass (Subspecies not yet delimited)

Please note the last line of this enumeration, the one in parentheses. Since the listing was made in 1940, another subspecies has been added, the Texas Spotted Bass, Micropterus punctulatus treculii (Vaillant and Bocourt).

While we are about it, let’s set something straight which has needed straightening for a long, long time. A little learning is a very dangerous thing. Too many men, when they take pen in hand, indulge themselves in what might be called ‘lay classification" of our game fishes. In other words, they attempt to classify by using common names. Classification simply cannot be done by this method.

How many times have you seen this statement in print? The Brook Trout is not a ‘trout’ at all. He is a ‘char.’ Well, Brook Trout, Brown Trout, Rainbow Trout, what have you, all belong to the Salmo family.

This sort of thing happens all too often. It has been said, A Black Bass isn’t a Bass at all. He’s a Sunfish, and, A Black Bass isn’t a Bass. In reality, he’s a Perch. All of which is completely and beautifully haywire. If you want to use common names, a Black Bass is a Black Bass; a Sunfish is a Sunfish, and a Perch is a Perch. All of these fish belong to the suborder Percoidei. The Largemouth, the Smallmouth, and the Pumpkinseed all come under the general classification Centrarchidae, which is referred to as the Sunfish family. But that doesn’t mean that a Black Bass is a Sunfish or a Perch any more than the fact that I belong to the order Homo sapiens means that I am an African or a Chinaman. As I say, there are a great many game fish, in both fresh and salt water, which properly can be listed as Bass, and for our purposes it is safer to stick to common names and not confuse matters.

This being in no sense a scientific work, it will not be necessary to include scientific descriptions of the various members of the list. For the most part, we are concerned only with two of its members—the Largemouthed and the Smallmouthed Bass. If you want all the data on the Bass family, complete with biological keys, go to your library and ask for A Revision of the Black Basses (Micropterus and Huro) with Descriptions of Four New Forms by Carl L. Hubbs and Reeve M. Bailey, published by the University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, July 27, 1940. Subsequently these two gentlemen published through the same press Brochure Number 457, Subspecies of Spotted Bass (Micropterus punctulatus) in Texas, February 10, 1942. These two able works will give you all that you need to know, or can know, for that matter, of the scientific aspects of the Back Basses.

Incidentally, I’m not at all sure that there isn’t some work that can be done on Smallmouth subspecies. While the following account is by no means conclusive, it may very well be that there is an interesting breed of Smallmouth which is known at present to only a few people.

Throughout the lower valley of the main Delaware River, and particularly in the vicinity of the little village of Mast Hope, Pennsylvania, the old-timers will tell you some tall tales of the Oregon Bass, which, according to local belief, show up in the Delaware every seven years. These fish are reputed to grow to prodigious sizes, specimens ranging from twelve to fifteen pounds not being uncommon. They are not the same color as the regular Delaware Smallmouth. Instead, they are said to take on a greenish yellow tinge, with no appreciable darking across the back of the fish. Other than that, they look and act like ordinary oversize Smallmouth.

I have never seen one of these fish, but I have heard about them from two different sources. My first informant was a man who was employed in the railroad shops at Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. We fell to talking about bass and bass fishing while we were each having a cup of miserable coffee at a lunch counter in Susquehanna. We had agreed that it was a sad but inescapable fact that most lunch counters served horrible coffee, when he noticed the fishing license button in my hat. He then told me that he planned to go fishing that week end, down in Mast Hope eddy in the main Delaware. I asked him why he went so far to fish for bass when the North Branch of the Susquehanna River flowed right through town. Then he told me of the Oregon Bass, that year, according to him, being the magic seventh year when these fish were in the river. The weights he mentioned so casually—nine, ten, twelve pounds—were so much at variance with anything I had learned of Smallmouth sizes that I charged it up to optimism of a fishing fanatic and promptly forgot it.

The next time I heard of Oregon Bass was, of all places, in the clubrooms of the Anglers’ Club of New York. As a rule, you don’t hear much about bass at the Anglers’ Club. There the discussion runs to salmon or trout. Bass are coarse fish and of little interest to the general run of the members. Were it not for the fact that the story was told to me by a reliable individual, I would hesitate to set it down here. However, he is a friend of many years’ standing, the very soul of honesty, and his word is good with me up to any amount of my somewhat limited financial resources. Unfortunately, the story was told to him by the man who saw the fish and had it weighed. Offsetting this third-hand version is the fact that my friend vouches for the reliability of the teller, just as I vouch for my friend. I have every reason to believe that it is true, otherwise I would have forgotten it long since.

This man, who is an executive in one of New York’s publishing houses, had taken a camp at Mast Hope for the summer. It being too much of a journey for him to attempt daily commutation, he stayed throughout the week at his house in Orange, New Jersey, and over each week end joined his wife and his two sons at the camp at Mast Hope, arriving there on Friday afternoon.

It so happened that there was divided opinion in that household concerning the merits of the sport of angling. The father and one of the sons could see no virtue in fishing, while the mother and the other youngster, a boy of twelve, were quite fond of it. These two knew little or nothing about fishing, but they liked it and each day found them on the river. Their tackle consisted of a heavy hand line and a big pickerel spoon. With this rig they trolled up and down Mast Hope eddy and they managed to bring in enough bass and walleye to supply their table.

One Friday these two were trolling, the mother rowing and the boy holding the line, when they had a heavy strike. The mother soon saw that the fish was too big for the youngster to handle. He was game all right but not strong enough for the task. Before they could change places, the heavy line had cut the boy’s hands several times. After a battle that lasted for a considerable time, she was able to pull the big fish into the shallows. There the boy threw himself on it and between the two of them they managed to get it up on dry land.

Having no live box and no ice for refrigeration at camp, they had been keeping their fish in a large burlap sack that was tied securely with heavy rope and allowed to rest on the river bottom, out where the current could bring a constant supply of fresh water. Into this bag went the big bass, to be saved until the man of the house could see it.

He showed up, as usual, on the afternoon train, and was escorted immediately to the riverbank. Together the three of them carried the fish, still in the bag, to the local store where, still alive, it was placed on the scales. The reading showed that the big bass weighed well over fourteen pounds. It was then that the storekeeper and several interested spectators agreed that it was one of the Oregon Bass. All professed to know the species well and were not too greatly impressed by its size.

After that the man took the fish to camp. There he cut off the head and tail, dressed it out, scaled it, and cut it into three big chunks. One of them was baked for dinner that night. The other two pieces were placed in the store refrigerator.

Sunday afternoon, the family broke camp and came home. They had another meal of baked bass from the second chunk, and the third was given to a neighbor where it provided a meal for a family of four.

The man, knowing that my friend was interested in fishing, told him the story while they were riding to New York on the train one morning during the following week, and my friend, knowing my interest in bass, told me.

Of course, my friend took the man to task for destroying such an unusual fish. He was truly disturbed when he learned that he had unknowingly deprived his son of what very probably would have been a world’s record Smallmouth. However, the damage had been done. All I can do now is to give you the details here as they were told to me. It is barely possible—not probable, but possible—that some interesting things might develop if some scientific work were done in the lower Delaware.

As stated earlier, this is not a scientific work. Let us, then, leave the scientific aspects of Black Bass to the scientists, where they belong, and go on to see what we can find out about the habits, behavior, and characteristics of Largemouth and Smallmouth Bass, and of angling methods incidental to their capture.

CHAPTER 1

The Yearly Cycle

THE LARGEMOUTH BASS is classified as a warm-water fish. Unlike most fresh-water game fish, a Largemouth is perfectly happy in temperatures that range well up into the nineties. He’s a lazy sort of a fellow and he doesn’t seem to care for running water. Instead, he prefers ponds, lakes, and slow flowing rivers. A mud bottom is entirely to his liking and he is equally content in shallow or deep water just so long as that water is still, or comparatively so. It is not uncommon to find both Largemouth and Smallmouth in the same lake or pond but it is unusual in such a pond to find Largemouth living in water that is typically Smallmouth water or Smallmouth living in the mud-bottom shallows that the Largemouth prefer.

An excellent example of this typical choice of water can be seen in Mystery Pond near Newport, Vermont. Technically, that is not its correct name, but the only other name I have heard for it is the power dam and so we christened it Mystery Pond. This body of water, as you may have surmised, is an artificial lake that was created when the City of Newport dammed the Clyde River to supply power for the generation of electricity. I suppose that the lake covers about twenty-five or thirty acres in all—maybe more if you want to include the rather extensive swamp at one end. Before the area was flooded, a goodly portion of it first had to be lumbered. This was done pretty much without thought to the fishing that was to take place there in later years. The big trees were cut down, the usable timber was trucked out, and the stumps, useless logs, and piles of slashing were left there, just as they fell. Then the area was flooded. It is with mingled and conflicting emotions of pleasure and regret that I recall how many heavy bass and how much good and costly terminal tackle have departed from me and from my son, Dick, in the tangled mazes of those cursed piles of waterlogged slashing. To be sure, we continue to fish there because that is where the bass are, but the fact remains that those piles of slashing are indeed a collective trial and tribulation that will try the very souls of far more patient men than I.

As I say, Mystery Pond was and is a splendid example of the mutually satisfactory way that Largemouth and Smallmouth Bass divvy up a bass pond. At the mouth of the inlet where there are log tangles, mossy rocks, and a flow of fresh, cool water, the Smallmouth take up residence. On down through the deep ravine of the old river channel they live and we catch them along that deep-water bank clear down to the point. Here the old channel curves and makes its way across the bottom of the lake proper toward the breast of the dam. In all the hundreds of times I have fished it, neither I nor any of my companions has caught a Smallmouth downstream from the point where the channel curves out across the

In the backwaters, coves, and out across the shallow stump covered flats the Largemouth live. To be sure, we catch Largemouth along the deep-water bank between the point and the river mouth, but the closer we come to the inlet, with its smooth flow of cool running water, the fewer Largemouth we find. And not once have we taken one from the inlet mouth proper. It is almost as though territorial boundaries have been established and lines drawn over which neither species dares to venture into the domain of the other.

The habits of the northern Largemouth differ from those of the southern Largemouth in that the former hibernates during the winter months. When the ice goes out from the lakes and streams of the northern latitudes, the Largemouth Bass are buried snugly in the muddy bottoms of the backwaters and deep coves, away from possible effects of floods that would interrupt their long winter sleep. Not until the water temperatures are up in the neighborhood of fifty or fifty-five degrees do they wake up and come out of hibernation.

Not always is it possible for bass to find convenient backwaters that have deep, muddy bottoms. Then the bass must use what makeshifts they can contrive. Holes in stumps or in waterlogged logs, nooks and crannies between the rocks, crevasses between ledges, in fact, any sort of a protective opening will serve to shelter a hibernating bass in case he can not find the ideal wintering ground.

Hibernation is not always confined to the winter months. When an emergency arises, bass resort to hibernation as a means of self-preservation. It is nothing short of amazing how much adversity a bass can undergo and still emerge right side up and apparently none the worse for the experience.

The summer of 1937 was a particularly dry and hot one, especially in southern New York State and north-central Pennsylvania. Trout streams dried up completely and bass rivers fell far below the danger point. The loss of fish during these two unfortunate months was incalculable. The West Branch of the Delaware, being in reality an oversize trout stream, dried up until it was a mere trickle. Not only that, but the warm weather brought on an unprecedented crop of algae. In the hot, low water, this vegetable matter decomposed and fermented until what water there was took on the aspect of thick pea soup and smelled to high heaven. True to form, the bass took to the mud and there they stayed until welcome rains brought the water back to normal. Having seen the river some three weeks earlier when my favorite pools could be crossed dry-shod, I assembled my tackle with misgivings. To my great and delighted surprise, I found the bass to be present in their usual numbers and the fishing unaffected.

In one of the early reports of the Fisheries, Game and Forest Commission of the State of New York appears an account of the remarkable capacity for survival that a black bass possesses. At one of the hatcheries, a holding pool that had been used to store adult black bass was drained one fall and allowed to stand dry and empty throughout the winter months. Of course, before this was done the bass were seined out—or so the hatchery men thought. The following spring the pool was flooded again and in it were placed several thousand small trout.

One June evening the hatchery men were surprised to see some large fish slashing about among the trout, evidently feeding on the small fish.

The next day, allowing the water to remain at the same level, they seined the pool with a net that had a mesh large enough to allow the trout to pass through. Much to their surprise, they captured four bass that weighed from two to three pounds each. There being no other way for the fish to get into the pool, it being adequately screened and fed from a two-inch pipe, the only way for those bass to have gained access to it was for them to have been there all the time. When the pond was drawn down the previous fall, these fish had gone into enforced hibernation and had stayed alive, buried in the mud, until the following spring, when they emerged to find a choice meal of trout awaiting them.

When we speak of hibernation and the temperature range at which this annual group movement is reputed to take place, I sometimes wonder whether we know, completely, whereof we speak. Mr. Jason Lucas, in his interesting and valuable work, Lucas on Bass Fishing, brings out a point concerning hibernation that has been in the back of my mind, although heretofore unexpressed, for a long, long time.

Have you ever noticed that during the fall fishing, when the nights grow cold and water temperatures drop to the low fifties, that you don’t catch quite as many bass as you do when the weather is warmer, but have you noticed also that the bass you do catch late in the season average much larger in size than they do at any other time of year? You will find this to be true, season after season. My theory has been—and, believe me, it is theory, with only circumstantial evidence to support it—that the larger, adult bass hibernate only for a short time, if at all. I realize that this is heresy and contrary to the teachings of men whose business it is to know about such things, but the fact remains that there is a strong likelihood that all bass do not