(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.)
Keith Combs has established himself as one of the premier offshore anglers in professional bass fishing, with multiple tour-level wins and three Toyota Texas Bass Classic titles to his name. As electronics and mapping have improved over the course of his career, he’s tried to learn to use every feature available, and he believes that Humminbird’s LakeMaster is indispensable.
“LakeMaster is a big part of my fishing no matter what lake I go to,” he said. “There’s no way I’d want to go anywhere in the country without LakeMaster detail.” There is one place he’s skeptical of it, however – on his home waters, where it gives visiting anglers a shortcut to learning many of his decades-old, hard-earned secrets. The LakeMaster comes in a standard version and a “Plus” model. He said both are exceptional tools, but if forced to choose he’d go with the latter, which has aerial views that allow him to look for features like docks.
One of his favorite tools on the Humminbird mapping is the ability to shade at certain depths. For example, if he’s finding fish in 6 feet or 12 feet, he can shade all of the water up to that depth to easily break things down. “It changes the whole look of the lake.” He may adjust it later in the day, or add a second level of shading to look for things he may have missed the first time around.
His overall process is simple: He uses LakeMaster to get in the general vicinity of the school; then side-imaging or down-imaging to see how the fish are set up; and then he’ll back off and use his 360 Live to put a bait in their faces and make them react. If the school relocates slightly, 360 is also exceptional for finding out where they’ve gone.
His first approach is typically with a moving bait, like a crankbait or a vibrating jig. “Those are my confidence baits and I feel like they’re winning baits. They win tournaments every year on the Elite Series.” If the fish don’t bite immediately, or they stop biting, however, he’s sure never to leave a prime area without throwing a jig, a big worm or another slow-moving bottom bait into the zone.
Combs believes that in the fall the smaller fish tend to gang up in schools, while the biggest fish are loners. Accordingly, he tries to have a milk run of isolated cover on structure. It could be a stump on a main-lake point or a manmade brush pile.
“The key is lots of places,” he advised. That’s why mapping is so critical. Time is money, and he needs to get onto the sweet spot as quickly and unobtrusively as possible. He uses different symbols on his Helix or Solix units to demarcate various notes. For example, a red car symbol indicates a spot where he caught a big fish in the past.
If you want to learn some of the other tricks Combs uses to make the most of his mapping, check out his full video, filmed at the Bassmaster Classic with Greg DiPalma, available only by subscribing to The Bass University TV.
