FLW Tour pro Dave Lefebre grew up near one of America's most productive patches of aquatic vegetation. His classroom was Presque Isle Bay – 4,000 acres of flats, humps and lagoons sheltered from Lake Erie waves by a long peninsula that juts southwest to northeast from the mainland off Erie, Pa. No wonder he's so well schooled in the intricacies of plucking bass from their green lairs.
The bay's sandy bottom is the perfect firmament for lush beds of coontail and milfoil – the nurseries and feeding grounds for a healthy fish population dominated by largemouth bass and, during the spring, smallmouths that move in from the big lake to spawn.
From ice-out to freeze-over, Lefebre poked and prodded Presque Isle Bay's grassbeds to find and catch the quality bass necessary to establish his reputation as the man to beat in northwestern Pennsylvania tournaments. On water where a limit catch is pretty much a given, he learned how to build heavy sacks with tactics that provided the foundation from which he's risen to his No. 6 ranking in the State Farm-BassFan World Rankings.
Lessons From the Grass Man
Lefebre's grass-bass gameplan typically starts with a trimmed and tweaked jig.
"I'm not a stuck-in-a-rut guy, but when the bass are in the grass, I really enjoy flipping the most," he said. "You definitely will catch bigger bass in the grass on a jig."
Flipping is typically better than casting when it comes to lure presentation, he said. "It's usually better to fish more vertically. A lot of people tend to throw out too far in weeds and can't control their lures, feel the bites or get hooked fish to the boat."
He starts with jigs on the small size – 3/16- to 5/16-ounce – and will upsize if necessary to fight windy conditions.
"In the summer, the fish have spawned and are recovered, so they're often schooled up and biting. The best thing about fishing grass is, when you find them, you can fill the boat in a hurry. At Presque Isle, you can get 50 fish off one stretch."
He trims his jig – not just for length, but also for bulk – by removing strands of skirt material. "This gives the bait a compact look and helps it fall faster, which triggers reaction strikes."
Find The Better Beds
Lefebre looks for certain areas within a sprawling bed of aquatic vegetation. "I like irregularities – holes in the grass, points – the stuff everybody talks about. But it's also important that they have some kind of depth change.
"I heard Guido Hibdon say something about docks – that the best docks are the ones where bass would live if there wasn't a dock there. It's the same for a grass honey hole."
Lefebre also said a sparse area punctuated by thicker clumps, and a thin spot in a heavy patch, deserve extra attention.
But don't forget about the grass you can't see, he said. "I'm religious about using a flasher. I can tune the sensitivity and read a flasher better than an LCD to find depth changes. With an LCD, you might not detect a 1-foot change that you can see with a flasher that's set just right," he said.
GPS is equally essential. "If you're in a crowd, which you often are in grass fishing, you can see where you've fished and where you haven't. I have a 182C Garmin on the bow of my boat. I don't know what I did before I got one. You can see your tracks (he sets his fishing tracks to show up as red) and change your route to cover the water effectively."
He also pinpoints the often tiny honey holes with special marker buoys. "The thing about weed fishing is a lot of the time you're camped in an area all day. I've got these little X-markers that I use when I find a school or a pattern in the grass. I toss out the buoys and then can really work over that exact spot."
He's fussy about lure color for grass bass. He likes the greenish hues – watermelon in clearer water and green-pumpkin in stained.
"I use a lot of color highlights that I make with dye markers that don't bleed on the more natural colors," he said. "On darker lures, like black, I use Worm and Chunk Paint. It's like fingernail polish and you can put dabs of color on and they'll stay. I like to add a little chartreuse sometimes."
Notable
> As Lefebre noted, summer grass-bass fishing often involves a crowd. "Tossing out a big orange buoy attracts a lot of attention. I use little X-shaped buoys called Fisherman's Markers (made by a company by the same name in Minnesota)." He rigs them on lines measuring 6, 12 and 20 feet long to match the depth where he tosses them. "I use as many as six to eight markers on a spot. I mostly use the black ones so they aren't as obvious out on the water."
> His go-to grass bait is a Stanley jig dressed with a Zoom Super Chunk. He's also been using tubes more in recent years. He ties them to Gamma fluorocarbon line, a relative newcomer in bass fishing lines with a longer history in saltwater and fly fishing. "It's really great stuff. I use 16-pound-test mostly and I crack them as hard as I can on the hookset and can't break it."
> His preferred grass-flipping rod is a 7'10" medium-heavy Setyr. When he's using lighter lines, he chooses a 7'6" medium-heavy. He'll go down to 10- or 12-pound fluorocarbon if necessary.
