Don DeMott of Boca Raton with a largemouth bass. DeMott likes fishing in tournaments on Lake Okeechobee, but he appreciates Lake Ida for fun. Photo by Steve Waters/The Coastal Star
By Steve Waters
With its warm weather and year-round growing season, South Florida has a reputation for producing big largemouth bass. Now through March is the best time to catch a trophy bass, and one of the best places to land that lunker is in eastern Palm Beach County.
Winter is when bass spawn in area lakes, ponds and canals. In the Lake Ida chain, which extends from Boca Raton to Lake Worth Beach, bass spawn in the canals that connect the lakes.
Your chances of catching a bass of 7 or more pounds are better this time of year because big, egg-laden females are concentrated and often visible.
If you look in areas with a hard, sandy bottom, you can see white spots where the fish have used their tails to sweep out shallow, crater-like beds. I’ve also walked along canal banks and seen bass hovering over flat rocks.
Typically, you’ll see a female on the bed and a nearby male, which is almost always smaller than the female. When the female releases some of her eggs on the bed, the male fertilizes them.
Anglers who sight-fish look for bass on the beds as they slowly move their boats through spawning areas. When they spot a fish, they try to cast a lure onto the bed in the hopes that the female will pick it up.
There are a number of effective lures, from soft-plastic worms and crawdads to jigs and jerkbaits. Many anglers like plastic lizards and tubes with a quarter-ounce weight. A favorite color is white because it’s easy to tell when a bass has the lure. Often, a bass will pick up a lure, move it off the bed and spit it out before you realize what’s happened. With a white lure, as soon as you can’t see it, you know to set the hook.
Another effective tactic: Instead of targeting individual beds, reel soft-plastic swimbaits through bedding areas to get strikes.
Bass pro Don DeMott of Boca Raton has done exceptionally well fishing tournaments on Lake Okeechobee. But when he just wants to go out for a few hours and catch a bunch of fish, he heads to Lake Ida.
The lake isn’t all that big, but it connects to miles and miles of canals. At the southern end of the Lake Ida chain is the C-15 Canal, on the Boca-Delray border. At the north end of Lake Ida is Lake Eden, which connects to a canal that runs all the way north to Lake Osborne.
“You don’t need a big boat,” DeMott said. “You could fish the whole chain in a johnboat.”
Or you could spend a whole day fishing in a couple of canals not far from the Lake Ida Park boat ramps. The influx of big fish into the shallow areas that hold their spawning beds makes them a lot easier to target than during the rest of the year, when they can be anywhere in a lake.
“They get out of the main lake and move into the canals because that’s where they do most of their spawning,” said DeMott. “There’s more grass and the canals are protected from the wind and wave action that could tear up spawning beds. Plus, the water in the canals warms faster.”
The spawning beds are in the grass, and DeMott said the key is to fish your lures around the pockets in the grass. A popular surface lure is a plastic frog imitation. Fished on a rod and reel spooled with braided line, which is much stronger than monofilament line of a similar diameter and resistant to breaking, a frog is very productive worked over the vegetation in the canals.
A silver-and-white spinnerbait, which imitates the abundant shad in the Lake Ida chain — bass love to eat the little baitfish — not only catches largemouth bass but also peacock bass.
Some anglers believe that bedding bass should be left alone. Others say that any female bass they catch this time of year, even if she’s not on a bed, will have eggs.
The solution is to quickly release every bass you catch this time of year. Handled with care, bass will return to their beds, spawn successfully and provide even more good fishing during future winters.
Outdoors writer Steve Waters can be reached at steve33324@aol.com.
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