Every year is different on Lake of the Ozarks, as a fishing guide out on the water nearly everyday being able to adapt to the daily and yearly conditions are essential. This year in the spring the biggest challenge was fishing around a lot of moss which is pretty rare on the lake. The moss just wouldn’t go away and the lake level was pretty low. We needed to adapt and fish extremely weedless lures right in the moss or fish a little deeper.
The first lure that worked really well for bass was a floating worm. It’s really not a floating worm but a slow sinking worm. A zoom trickworm texas rigged weightless. It can skip well, goes through the moss well or anything for that matter. It will catch bedding bass or active bank runners. If you let it sink slowly it sinks just like a senko with that waving sinking fluttering action. You can fish it like a jerk bait as well and it has a lot of darting action. It’s a great versatile bait in the springtime. Spinning gear really helps, I like 15lb braid main line and a 10lb fluorocarbon leader.
The other bait we used alot on our trips was a megabass jerkbait both deep and shallow runners. Fished around brushpiles and points just outside of pockets. The wind is pretty important. Baitfish can be extremely important as well. One day we fished a good hour out in the middle of a big deep clear creek over 30-60ft of water and caught fish cast after cast. The conditions were right for it tons and tons and tons of shad near the surface out there. It was game on! Looking forward to an incredible post spawn bite! I’ll be posting about that asap!
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