Elite Series pro Brandon Card of Tennessee expanded my bass fishing horizons on the summer day I fished with him at Wisconsin’s Pewaukee Lake. Pewaukee has copious submerged grassbeds that harbor quality largemouth bass.
We caught a few chunky bass first thing that morning by retrieving soft swimbaits over some of Pewaukee’s deeper grassbeds. Once the sun got up, we boated several more bass by pitching tubes with a heavy weight into the thicker grassbeds. None of this was out of the ordinary. That changed when Card idled his boat close to the shoreline that afternoon. Along the bank was a narrow band of grass clippings that a slight breeze had pushed loosely against a shallow shoreline. The debris was mainly aquatic vegetation that had been chopped off by boat props. Although it was technically a grass mat, I thought it looked too small and sparse to hold bass. I was wrong on both counts.
