Calico Bass (Paralabrix clathratus), or more properly called, Kelp Bass are the mainstay of the Southern California inshore recreational fishery. This grouper-like sea bass is popular for excellent table fare and skill required hooking and landing them consistently. Easily recognized by the squarish white spots all over the fish, Calicos are the most numerous fish inhabiting the extensive kelp forests of Southern California. Any half-day party boat in the summer months will generally target either Calico Bass or their cousins, Sand Bass.

Calico Bass range in size up to nearly two feet long and 18 lbs. Any fish over about four pounds in California and seven pounds in Baja is considered a real trophy. They range from Central California to central Baja but are common only from Point Conception to Punta Abreojos. Some of the better Calico Bass spots include the kelp beds near the offshore islands in Southern California and the Mexican Islands of Guadalupe, Cedros, and the San Benitos island group. Along the coast, the kelp beds near La Jolla and Point Loma, near San Diego are the best places north of the border for Calico Bass. South of the border, along the seldom fished, desolate, Mexican coast, any of the near shore kelp forest stands can be extremely good for Calico Bass fishing. Though Calicos are predominantly a summer fish, they do not migrate and can be caught all year round near many of kelp beds. The farther south you go, the less seasonality the fish seem to show. Catching Calico Bass

Kelp Bass are voracious feeders. Many a fisherman has had the experience of tossing an 8 or 9 inch long brown bait (herring) right into the fringes of the kelp bed thinking he would hook a trophy sized bass, only to have the huge bait inhaled by an 11 inch fish (too small to be kept). Calicos readily take any of the more common live baits including anchovies, sardines, brown herring, and squid. In certain times of the year, they’ll eagerly snap up strips of cut squid as well. Most Calico fishermen fly line for bass, that is use no weight, simply a hook tied to the end of the line with a frisky live bait hooked such that it will swim easily. This is gently tossed to the fringes of kelp beds and allowed to take line freely.

In addition to kelp beds, Calicos often inhabit shallow water reefs and can be caught at many of these techniques by using a sinker to get bait down into the structure. Sunken ships are great places to locate Calicos. They also frequent the seawalls in and around harbors and many bays where moorings or other bottom structure provides suitable shelter.

As for lures, many fishermen toss heavy iron, that is, candy bar or bone jigs along the fringes of the kelp beds to lure the bashful bass from their leafy homes to snap at a well presented jig. In addition, lead headed rubber swim baits, particularly the single tailed shad bodied lures in blue & silver or green and white are an excellent choice for Calico Bass. The effectiveness of such lures is improved by the addition of a long thin strip of squid to the hook of the lure. A thin strip will usually outperform a chunk, since it doesn’t restrict the natural swimming action of the lure.

Some fishermen use swimming plug lures such as Rapalas, Rebels, and the like, for these bass. They take these artificial lures readily. A few private boat fishermen who use tackle and techniques very similar to fresh water bass fishing have some success, toss and crank, toss and crank, but most ocean fishermen seem reluctant to abandon their tried and true salt water techniques.

There are a number of old pros at Bass fishing that use small boats and trolling techniques running right close to rocks and underwater structure and really catch lots of quality fish. The secret is to keep your trolling line short, like maybe 15 feet or so and slow troll as close as you can to rock walls, boiler rocks, semi submerged wrecks, etc. – anywhere where there is shallow structure and places for Calicos to hide. Rapalas, jointed Rebels, and other swimming plugs are the best ticket for this type of fishing. This is not for the faint of heart and the bashed up bottoms of the aluminum boats these fishermen use are testament to the caution needed.

Kelp Bass also take flies. Larger, blue and white streamer flies imitating anchovies such as Clouser minnows and Lefty’s deceivers seem to do the best coupled with a shooting head, sinking line. Though they’ll sometimes boil on the surface to feed they usually prefer to stay from a few feet below the surface to the mid water depths. Calicos are ambush feeders unlike many surface fish who run down heir prey. Calicos tend to sit in cover waiting for an unsuspecting prey to happen by, so the most effective technique when fly fishing is by presenting the fly as a nervous but unsuspecting bait fish with twitchy but slow movements as opposed to fast ripping retrieves so many other ocean fish seem to enjoy.

Preparing Calico Bass

Calicos are almost universally filleted. They’re rarely cut into steaks owing to their small size and low oil content. For this reason, they’re generally not prepared whole since the belly meat, head, collar, and other parts contain little worthwhile. The roe is hardly worth picking out of the viscera.

Eating Calico Bass

Calico Bass is considered tops eating by many people, especially those who like extremely mild, low oil content fish. They’re probably best fried since oil is added during the cooking. They’re also great baked, especially when butter or olive oil is added. Sauteing is another great option since it, also adds flavorful oil. You can eat them raw as sashimi, especially if the fish is filleted and iced down quickly to tighten the meat, but it’s too mild for many a sushi aficionado’s palette, and it will pickle as in ceviche, but again, the low oil content makes them a bit mild for this also. For the same reason, they don’t smoke very well. Stick with frying, sauteing or baking for best results.

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Overview. Wireline trolling is a techinique that is used by many thousands of New Englanders every year to catch striped bass. It can be very productive if you know what your doing, but many people think you simply put the line out and motor around in your boat to catch fish, and are surprised when they see others catch fish after fish in the same area and apparently doing the same thing and even using the same rig. Well, there must be something different. Knowing where the fish are holding, what their feeding on and the speed to troll at are just some of the considerations to take into account.

Where are the Fish. You have to go where the fish are, not where you want them to be. You also have to go when the fish are there, not when you want them to be there. For any kind of Bass fishing, early morning is usually the best. Early in the season they may feed throughout the day, but as the season progresses and the sun gets higher in the sky you won’t find them feeding during the day unless there is tide and a lot of bait or a weather pattern to entice them into activity. You may find them holding on structure and be able to catch them but its pretty certain that there is something in the way of food down there to keep them interested. If the fish are holding on structure, you have to present your offering over that structure, if you are off by 50′ there is no joy. If you are trolling and mark and catch fish, turn around and keep going over the spot until you stop catching. Don’t go trolling away unless your damn sure there is something better to head to. And don’t spend too much time trolling around a spot and not catching.

Tides and currents. Bass are ambush predators and a current will provide them with the opportunnity to lay in wait for a small creature to be swept past their position so they can gobble it up. It is the current generated by the tides you need to pay atention to. An example of this would be the Block Island North reef. The currents there provide areas which bass like to use as ambush points, and some of these are places to troll wireline.

Trolling Speed. Never troll at the same speed all the time if it isn’t working. Often fish will follow your offering and are waiting for that trigger that tells them that their prey has detected them. Speed up, slow down, change speeds, speed up during your turns. You will be surprised how many times you hook up fish immediately or very soon after a speed change. Sometimes only going at a particular slow speed works, or a particularly fast speed. The most important thing to do is pay attention to what is going on when you hook up. You need to notice if it is always during a speed change, only when you go fast, only when you go very slow, etc. If you speed up and turn, and the inside line picks up a fish, you may not have enough line out since the inside line will usually go deeper, the outside line shallower.
Current can be used to control your speed. If you want to go very slow, troll directly into the current. There is one area I fish trolling to the same spot and slowing down as the boat gets near it, going into the current. At times we are barely moving forward, and when I reach the spot on my GPS one or both rods will go down with fish on (tide is very important in this case.) There are times when you will catch most of your fish only trolling in one direction in relation to the current. Pay attention to what is happening when you hook up.

Trolling Depth. This is extremely important. Your depth finder can mark a million fish below 30′ but if your trolled rig is only 20′ deep you will end up being very frustrated and catching very few fish. Your offering must be presented in the “strike zone”, which is the area close enough that the fish will be interested in hitting your lure. This strike zone can be very large when fish are feeding aggressively, or very small if they are “turned off”.
If you see fish smashing bait on the surface, try letting out a small amount of wireline and troll around the feeding fish, not through the middle of them. So many fisherman shut down the fishing very quickly by trolling through the middle of breaking fish. It is the most idiotic thing they can do. You need to have the lure down near the bottom if you are targeting Bass that aren’t feeding aggressively near the surface. If you are in water under 30′ deep, it is only necessary to be within 5′ of the bottom unless the fish are very sluggish. In deeper water. light penetration becomes an issue and it is necessary to get as close to the bottom as you can without dragging.
The rule of thumb is to let out 10 feet of wire for every 1′ of depth. This is varied by boat speed and the weight of your lure. Naturally, going slower will cause the rig to go deeper and faste will cause it to run shallower. Remember, if you aren’t dragging bottom once in a while, you’re trolling too shallow.

Matching the Hatch. You need to troll an offering which is representative of what the fish are feeding on. If there are hordes of sand eels then you shouldn’t be trolling 6″ soft plastic shads. Bass most often eat bunker, sand eels, and squid. Lures that represent these species are ones you should have available to you. If you catch a keeper, open up its stomach and see what it has been feeding on.

Sport Fishing. This is supposed to be a sport. Keeping the boat in gear and continuing to troll after you have hooked up a fish is winching, not fishing. I have seen so many bass skipping across the surface of the water as they are being reeled up, it’s absolutely ridiculous. You should be fighting the fish and not the boat. Where is the fun in that? So the advice is take the boat out of gear after you hook up.

By following the guideleines presented here the reward will be more success for your fishing trips. The last and most important piece of advice when your not catching is this: remember to ask yourself: “what do I need to change?” Are you going too fast, using the wrong rig, trolling too shallow, etc. Watch what other people are doing, it may give you a clue. Catch ‘em up!

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Everyone loves fishing for stripers, also known as striped bass or linesiders. There is something magical about them that appeals to everyone who fishes saltwater in Rhode Island. The Ocean state is blessed with very good fishing overall and many people come here from Mass, Conn, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvannia to fish and vacation here. Knowing a little about the habits of these fish can help you catch more of them.

Bass are not high speed swimmers. They are good at short bursts of activity during which they can go very fast, but cannot maintain those speeds over any distance. Like many migratory species, they will use tidal currents to help them get where they want to go. During the spring when they first arrive in our waters on Narragansett Bay, they are full of energy and will chase large schools of bait for miles, feeding as they go. These are good times when pretty much anything you put in the water will catch them, and they are very abundent and aggressive. Once the bait settles in and finds places to hide out or moves on, so too do the bass settle in. Then it becomes more difficult to find them during the daylight hours. Bass have very large eyes and no eyelids, their eyes are not exaclty like ours in that they cannot adjust as well to the bright full-day sunlight. Striper eyes are very good for seeing in low light and night conditions. They also feed more actively during the day when its foggy or overcast, since this reduces the light level available. So if it’s a bright and sunny July day and it’s around 11:00am, probably not a good time to choose to get out there and catch stripers. If its going to be overcast and gloomy all morning, this is a great time to get out there and target them. Nighttime is also another good time to fish for stripers, but the low visibility also brings danger to the boater and fisherman from rocks, bouys, other boats, etc. Going down a narrow channel at night that is lined with rocks on both sides, that’s a good example of white-knuckle fishing.

Striped Bass, like many Saltwater fish species, have a lateral line organ which they use to sense vibrations in the water. They can sense vibrations out to a good distance, because water is much denser and transmits these vibrations much farther than air would. This is how they first zero in on a prospective meal. Contrary to what most anglers may think, the last sense they use to decide to make a strike is visual. When in an area of extremely strong current, the current itself causes so much vibration that the bass will be forced to use visual acquisition or smell only, making it much harder to catch them since the strike zone will be very short. I can hear some of you naysaying, but for those of us who dive in New England waters, we can attest to the very poor visibility, especially as you go deeper. At 40’ depth, a good day and very clear water will give you around 10’ of visibility. If it’s not clear, this can easily drop to 3’. If we consider the average around 6’, you can see it might be very difficult to get your offering within visual range of a striper. Rattles, violent movement, hefty jigging with a parachute jig, these all send out waves of vibrations that bass can detect and zero in on. Virtually any plug designed for bass fishing has rattles in it, so there must be something to it.

In the early morning light does not penetrate very far into the water and bass can be found chasing what bait there may be in very shallow water. The bait seeks the shallow water in an attempt to avoid the predators. As the sun gets higher in the sky, bass will move into deeper water to avoid the bright light. So when you first start fishing, fish shallow water and as the sun gets higher you move into deeper water. If the water is murky, the bass are more likely to stay in the shallow water and feed.

Where will you find bass? Usually around structure, such as drop offs, high points, boulders, rocks, and reefs, especially where there is a good tidal current that runs past. The bait that bass feed on also use current to aid them when they travel and will also use reefs and rocks to hide from predators. Bass can be very aggressive and chase bait, but much of the time they will wait in ambush for a bait to sweep by or come out of hiding so they can pounce on it. This is why current can be so important to feeding, and why when the tide runs out fishing can turn off like a light switch. Stripers will often cruise the shallow edge of the beach in the early morning, following the direction of the tide looking for bait. Don’t forget that a sharp eye should be kept for bass feeding on bait at the surface, since this happens very often and can hard to spot at a distance. You should always have an 8×50 or 10×50 pair of binoculars on board your boat for long-range searching. Anything stronger is very hard to use on a boat unless it is internally stabilized. Eventually you can train your eye to notice movement on the water without having to look directly at it.

In shallow waters, engine noise is something to consider as it can spook the bass and drive them off. Very loud engines can still drive them away in deeper water. If your drifting and plugging or jigging, its best to turn the motor off and fish that way. The best thing to do is minimize the problem by never motoring over the top of the fish, always go around on each of your drifts. This way the fish are never spooked by the motor noise.

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I’m going to describe the best bass fishing lures in this article. You won’t find a list from best to worse lures,…. just my humble opinion of what works best for me.

All the lures mentioned in this article should be part of your fishing gear because of their effectiveness for bass fishing.

Large and small mouth bass are the two most common species of bass, so my term “bass fishing” refers to those two fish. The bass fishing lures mentioned here can be used for both types of bass. One of the tricks is to use a small version of the lure you pick for smallmouth bass fishing. It makes sense that a smallmouth bass would go for a smaller lure since they eat smaller prey.

Every bass fisherman should have these lures in their taclke box.

Plastic Worms & Grubs – Plastic worms proven time and time again to work great Carolina rig and the Texas rig are the most common way to rig plastc worms. Largemouth bass really get hooked on plastic worms. Usually, plastic grubs would be rigged on a lead head jig. Plastic grub are commonly known to be smallmouth bass bait Berkley’s and Power products are the most popular in the plastic worm and grub market. These items are similar to the plastics you’re use to except that these have been infused with some fish attractants. For really effective lures, get gulp grubs and worms.

Crank Baits – Crank baits are a highly regarded bass lure. Used for fishing a lot of different ways, these lures are usually manipulated to imitate bait fish. And remember, the more realistic a crank bait looks to a bass in the water, the more bass you will catch. A bait that works for both species and looks very real is made by Rapala and Bagley. Hands down, one of the best bass fishing lures on the market today is the KickTail Minnow. The KickTail Minnow is one of the best at looking like livebait fish than I’ve ever seen.

For early morning and late evening bass fishing, the Top Water Lures are best when fishing for either smallmouth or largemouth bass. One of the things you want to look for when top water lure fishing is the water to as flat as possible The glassier the water looks, the better your chances when fishing top water lures. The Jitterbug or the Pop-R are 2 excellent lures to choose from. Top water lure bass fishing is the most exciting when it comes to bass fishing.

All in all, the three lures mentioned in this article are 3 of the best lures for bass fishing. I highly recommend you add them to your fishing gear as soon as possible if you haven’t already. You’ll thank me later.