The air temperatures continue to climb here on Day 1 of the Bassmaster Classic, and the water temps are on the rise as well. But we as anglers can get a little too focused on the early end of a warming trend this time of year. Those first few hot days and warm nights can send an angler shallow sooner than the bass.
As John Crews pointed out on Bassmaster LIVE this morning, it takes multiple days of sustained warmer temperatures to really start to affect the water temps down deeper. A five-degree shift in the surface temperatures is enough to fire up resident shallow fish, but it’s not enough to trigger a big wave of deep winter fish to move shallow.
Here on the headwaters of the Tennessee River, there’s another factor that dictates when bass push shallow to spawn, and that’s the water level. Fort Loudon and Tellico are drawn down in the fall to a winter pool in order to control flooding, and they begin to fill back up in the spring. As these lakes rise by inches, hundreds of acres of fishable water are added across this system. The water rose 3/4- of a foot last night.
The warming trend will hit a little bit of a hiccup tonight, but bounce back tomorrow. And if the water levels and temperatures continue rising at this rate, the shallows will open up to the bass and anglers alike and may very well explode with immediate pre-spawn activity. Perhaps even a few fish will be caught off bed by the end of this one. That seems like a bit of a stretch, but Brandon Cobb was reported to have caught fish on a buzzbait earlier today. If there are a few fish eating a topwater, there are likely a few on bed as well.
