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Chalk Talk: Roumbanis on grass mats

Chalk Talk: Roumbanis on grass mats

(Editor's note: The following is the latest installment in a series of fishing tips presented by The Bass University. Check back each Friday for a new tip.)

Fred Roumbanis grew up fishing the California Delta, where the bass are monstrous and the grass beds seem to go on for days. Most of his efforts were concentrated in 2 to 8 feet of water, and it’s still a combination of conditions that he looks for anytime he’s fishing anywhere coast-to-coast, but breaking it all down can be more difficult than it may appear at first. Finding those little sweet spots takes strategy and seining them for all they’re worth takes knowledge.

While his two favorite ways to dissect these mats are with a flipping stick and a frog rod, sometimes the best practice strategy involves no fishing at all. He’ll just run the water at low tide, finding key grass beds with twists and turns, points and indentations, and then go back and fish them at other tides.

On waters like the Upper Mississippi River or the Potomac with big fields of grass, at the end of practice he’ll run zig-zag patterns through the grass to see where it opens up and where the holes are – that’ll enable him to pinpoint where the fish are, too.

He’ll punch the big weight if there’s a defined weedlne or the cover consists of “small, isolated stuff.” If the cover is less dense, he prefers a creature bait like a Gene Larew Hoo Daddy. In hyacinths, or anything with a canopy, he likes a craw, or a Biffle Bug with a plastic insert to make it more solid. In super-shallow, less dense cover, he cuts the appendages off of a Biffle Bug, which he prefers because it glides.

“You can’t go wrong with green-pumpkin or any dark colors,” he said, noting that under the mat the fish may not be attuned to minor distinctions and just see a shadow. He normally doesn’t care about the color of his weight, but avoids a chrome one (or a black one that’s lost its paint) in the north country where it serves as a pike magnet.

More important is staying quiet. While he likes 50-pound or heavier braid, he said it’s important that it be quiet, and he tries not to use his depthfinder if he doesn’t have to. “If you’re getting bites with it, you’ll get two times as many with it off.” He does keep the mapping function active so that he can see his trails, and is a true believer in the power of the Hydrowave.

While he punches with a straight-shank hook like most of his peers, he diverges from them by not using a snell knot, which causes the hook to collapse the bait too often for his taste. He’s gone back to a Palomar knot. Even if the hookup ratio isn’t quite as good, he said he gets a lot more bites, which translates into a lot more fish in the end.

He believes that one key to frog fishing is not getting locked in on any particular hollow-body. He uses the Snag Proof Bobby’s Perfect Frog a lot – especially in his signature “Fred’s Frog” color (white with a greenish-brown back and an orange throat). If there’s a breeze, he likes the Optimum Furbit, which has a small spinnerbait blade hanging from the bottom. He advises that one of his best retrieves is to just “let it drift around and twitch it now and then.” One
“non-frog frog” that he’s used successfully is the Picasso Shad Walker. He also likes Ish’s popping frog. The bottom line is that “the more commotion on top of the mat, the better to get their attention.”

If you’d like to learn more of Roumbanis' keys to dissecting grass mats, and learn which IRods are his favorites for frogging and flipping, check out the full video seminar by subscribing to The Bass University TV.

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