During this same period some species of fish such as Walleyes will even practice their feeding habits at night, but the majority of the anglers practice their habit during the daylight hours.
The problem is amplified with the fact that once fish have aggressively fed, then sought shelter from the sun or suspended they become very finicky biters and become seemingly impossible to catch with any amount of consistency.
To overcome this problem an angler can convert the slow times into productive times simply by changing his (or her) locations and using smaller, slower working offerings. This is a situation that calls for live-bait such as minnows, leeches, worms, etc.
If you are a fan of using artificial lures with or without live baits attached, the modernized sportfishing retailer has just the thing to suit your fancy. I speak now of the soft baits such as plastic/rubber worms, minnows, crawfish, curly tail worms etc.
What is so exquisite about these artificial baits is that for all intents and purposes they are meant to be fished slowly. At this point of the fishing day even though your targeted species may not be aggressively feeding, he would have to be a total idiot to pass up an easy looking meal. (There's another excuse for a bad fishing trip-the fish in this lake are all idiots!)
Let's look at one of the most popular soft-baits in detail-the curly tail worm. This sneaky little item has accounted for so many fish being boated, its a wonder it hasn't been banned from the store shelves. It looks just like a worm except for the addition of a curled tail. This odd creature comes in every colour in the imaginable spectrum (plus a few) and is available in lengths from one inch to twelve.
As for colour preferences we had better leave it up to your choice for now. I'd like to cover the colour concept at a later time. To hold you over until then I will say that for Largemouth bass I prefer darker colors but when it comes to smallmouth bass or walleyes, I hit high on the spectrum with whites and yellows being my favorites. Keep in mind that experimentation is always open at any point.
On my home lake (Lake St. Clair) we prefer to stay with three or four inch curly-tails for the Walleye and smallmouth basses. The main reason for that is because the basic forage of these fish are emerald shiners of the same size. You will have to adjust your selection in accordance to the preferred forage on your lake or river.
When it comes to spring panfish such as Sunfish, Crappie and Perch, we grab up the one or two inchers in the light colors and quite often add some form of live bait.
I do a fair share of Largemouth tournament fishing across Ontario and Michigan and the main choice of synthetic worm wherever I am are the six inch dark colored ones. In this case I find uses for both the curly-tails and the straight paddle-tails.
Here's a hot tip. If you like to use the common spinners or spinner-baits,take a three or four inch curly tail and add it to your hook. It will add a lot of action to your lure and your result will be more and larger fish. Try it!
Whether you select a curly tail worm, grub, crawfish etc., you will find it necessary to add some weight to your line to get your offering either to deeper water or to pound that thing through the thick weeds. A common practice of mine is to add a three inch curly-tail to a leadhead jig. Once again you may or may not wish to add live bait. When the sun gets high and the fish move deeper I will cast or troll this very slowly near bottom. Unless the fish are mental idiots, this will put me back in action.
As a matter of fact the only soft bait that I don't use with a jig is the longer worms that I use for Largemouth Bass. In this case I first attach a bullet shaped slip sinker onto my line and then tie on a hook. About one inch of the worm is threaded onto the hook and then the point of the hook is buried back into the worm. This is referred to as a "Texas Rig" because that's where it originated. It is this set-up that accounted for my largest bass so far, a 5 1/2 pounder from Long Point Bay in Lake Erie.
Soft artificial baits may also be used during periods when the fish are feeding aggressively. Don't get the idea that you can only use them when the fishing is slow. Quite often a fish for one reason or another prefers a slow moving offering. This recalls the key point to using the soft bodied baits. Fish them slow as if they were live-baits and fish them steady.
