How a Bass Legend Tackles Tough Conditions

Larry Nixon of Bee Branch, Arkansas, ranks among the top tournament bass anglers of all time. In his storied career, the former guide on Greers Ferry and Toledo Bend has placed in the Top Ten 94 times and won 19 major tournaments, with total winnings around $2.5 million.

Like any angler, though, he’s often faced with difficult fishing conditions, and he’d be the first to tell you he doesn’t always figure out the fish. But his vast experience in dissecting reservoirs was on display the day I joined him, as he prefished for the 2008 Wal-Mart Open on Beaver Lake last May.

A Look at Beaver Lake

The past spring went on record for odd weather happenings, and Arkansas didn’t escape Mother Nature’s shenanigans, which included tornadoes, torrential rains, and hail, with cold fronts tossed in for spite. Usually clear Beaver Lake was 71⁄2 feet above normal level, with visibility barely a foot or two along much of its 449 miles of shoreline.

Conditions facing Nixon and the other 199 FLW Tour pros included water in the prespawn to spawning range of 61°F to 65°F on the surface, light southerly winds, and a steady barometer. Nixon, now 57 years old with 31 years of professional fishing under his belt, often limits his prefishing regime to 8 or 9 hours, unlike some of the young guns who try to be the first to launch and persist until dusk drives them home. He set forth at 7 a.m. on May 12.

In his previous two days on Beaver, he’d found a fair bite for medium-sized spotted bass that are Beaver’s most common bass species. The lake also houses a modest population of largemouths and increasing numbers of smallmouth bass. He didn’t include smallies in his fishing plan, since their numbers seem sparse in the section of the lake he planned to fish, though he didn’t rule out an inadvertent catch while targeting spots. To build a winning bag, anglers at Beaver feel they must include at least one good largemouth in the daily creel, to boost them over 12 pounds.

Picking Presentations

During our day on the water, Nixon relied mostly on a spinnerbait, which he fished on a 7-foot Fenwick Techna AV rod (AVC70MHF) with an Abu Garcia Revo STX and 17-pound-test Trilene Maxx mono. His lure of choice was a 3/8-ounce tandem willowleaf, with two gold blades and a skirt of white and chartreuse.

He worked with a vintage Eagle flasher on the bow, which he feels is the best sonar option in shallow, murky water and around beds of thick aquatic vegetation. He warned me that bass were generally scattered, with many of the newly flooded shorelines undoubtedly housing many of the largemouths, making them difficult to pinpoint.

Nixon retrieved his spinnerbait briskly, keeping it running from an inch to 8 inches below the surface. If he allowed it to run deeper, he couldn’t elicit a strike. Boat docks were his primary target, as he’d determined that spotted bass were holding on the docks, just a foot or two below the surface.

He made short casts to all corners, gaps, and shady spots, and even pitched the bait past ropes and cables. He readily admitted that dock fishing isn’t his forte but, through 40 years of guiding and tournament fishing, he’s become quite proficient at it.

Nixon also fished the spinnerbait parallel to steep rocky banks. The best ones were bluffs along the main lake that contained a significant ledge, and he kept the lure within a foot of the flooded bank. Similar to the dock situation, bass held just a foot or two below the surface.

His back-up plan was pitching a tube into thickets of partially flooded grass, flotsam, laydowns, and around trunks of flooded hardwoods in 1 to 3 feet of water. He impaled a black/red-flake 4-inch Berkley PowerBait Flippin’ Tube on a 5/0 Gamakatsu EWG hook and added a black 5/16-ounce Tru-Tungsten sinker, held in place with a red Tru-Tungsten Smart Peg. He flipped and pitched the tube on a 61⁄2-foot Fenwick Techna AV rod (AVC66MF), Abu Revo STX reel, and 17-pound Trilene 100% Fluorocarbon line.

In the shallow cover, Nixon worked the tube by slowly pumping it up and down several times, moving his rod between the 2 o’clock and 1 o’clock positions. On occasion, he also swam it near the surface around docks. He noted that the 5/0 hook limits the tube’s action but is needed to securely hook and hold a bass.

During the morning hours, he also made many short casts with a white jig and PowerBait Chigger Craw, ­swimming it speedily from a couple inches to 2 feet below the surface. He swam the jig through flooded vegetation, buckbrush, and around docks, but bites were scarce and he gradually eliminated that pattern.

On the Waterfront

Nixon, in fact, spends substantial time eliminating patterns and areas of a lake. When the swim-jig failed to produce, he expressed relief that it wouldn’t be a factor in the tournament, as he’s often missed and lost fish using that technique. Similarly, he tested a 6-inch lizard, thinking it might attract a few big bites from largemouths. But this, too, he laid aside, feeling that high water had created so much extra territory for Beaver’s meager largemouth population to hide in that he’d need a fast approach to find fish.

He primarily targeted shorelines, reasoning that rising water would lure bass shallower, and that a firm bank would stop their progress, ­making them more catchable. He did test some shallow gravel flats with flooded willow trees, fence rows, and brush, working a spinnerbait and swimming a jig through the cover. But he didn’t find action there, commenting that expert flippers might be able to pick apart the cover and draw some bites, but this wasn’t his forte. Also, he noted that if conditions were clear, he would have tested a Zara Spook across these flats to draw strikes from prespawn bass.