September is a funky month. It’s still kind of summer but also a little bit fall. It’s a transitional time, which means summer patterns for your favorite gamefish can start to be less productive and new ones won’t emerge until the air and water temperatures cool off. But while bass, walleye, and trout fishing can become tricky, native bowfins are eager to chomp.
My good friend, Tyler Winter of Native Fish For Tomorrow, is an even bigger bowfin addict than me. We both root for the underdogs. And it’s been paying off, because year over year we can’t help but notice that more people are becoming interested in targeting the lowly bowfin. The truth is they’ll out-fight a bass any day of the week. They’re also a lot easier to catch. The quickest way to success? Soak a stinky chunk of bait on the bottom and kick back until the rod bends in half. September is a great time to do it across the U.S., so if you’re ready to duke it out with a living dinosaur, here are the basics for everything from finding them to making sure they wind up in the net.
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Pocket Aces
I’ve chatted with bowfin anglers from all over the country, and while their approaches to catching them may vary a bit, one thing they all agree on is that bowfin exist in pockets. In other words, while they might be listed on paper as an inhabitant of a large lake or river, most of the time their strongholds within that system are limited to niche areas. If you don’t have a bead on where that is, the first question to ask is, “Where would crappies, bass, pickerel, and anything else in here not want to be?” The answer is in the shallowest, muckiest, weediest areas.
“Bowfin don’t necessarily cruise around very far or chase things very fast, so finding the spot that has the most numbers of them in any body of water is the first challenge,” Winter says. “And if you want to have the best action, you really want to be in a pile of them. A safe bet is heading to the most back-bay cove you can access. If there’s a culvert on that body of water feeding a ditch on the other side of the road, go fish the ditch.”
Because bowfin can breathe air, they’re very comfortable in low oxygen environments. That’s not to say they never stray to deeper water, but until the temperature drops off, you’re likely to find the best concentration of fish in swampy backwater areas.
Seafood Feast
Bowfin will attack a wide variety of lures and flies. Just ask any bass fisherman plying bowfin-rich waters and chances are good he’s had a few spinnerbaits mangled over the years. But those catches are incidental. Specifically targeting bowfin with artifcials requires the right scenario which often includes being able to see your target. It can be a very fun game to play, but a chunk of smelly bait on the bottom will always get the job done faster and more efficiently.
“Bowfin are not only incredible scent feeders, but they’re also very opportunistic,” says Winter. “I believe they’re one of only two fish in North America that can feed by biting a piece off of their food. So, they’ll key in on just about anything that smells edible and bite a piece off to see if they want to eat more.”
This habit can occasionally make bowfin fishing frustrating, as your line will start running, you think you’re just about to come tight, but then the fish chomps a piece off the bait and swims away. As a countermeasure, Winter primarily uses frozen shrimp as bait. Bowfin will eat anything from a hot dog chunk to a piece of carp, shad, or bluegill (where it’s legal to use), but Winter believes the small size of a shrimp, plus your ability to thread the hook neatly inside it, make it more likely a bowfin with take the entire bait in its mouth on the first shot.
Beef Up
I can’t tell you how many anglers I’ve bumped into with sob stories about connecting with a big bowfin they lost. Most of the time, the problem obviously wasn’t their bait or lure; it was the strength of their main line, leader, or hook. Bowfin are brute fighters with hard jaws. So while bait selection for bowfin is simple, you’ll need to put more thought into how you present it if you want to score that grip-n-grin.
“They are very strong fish with a lot of teeth, but they’re conical teeth so they won’t cut you off like a pike,” Winter says. “People think you need steel leader for them. You don’t, but you do want a heavy piece of 40- or 50-pound fluorocarbon leader. I like a sliding slip sinker rig and use just enough weight to keep a little bit of tension on my line, but honestly if you need more than a half-ounce you’re probably in the wrong spot.”
As for hooks, Winter uses a 1/0 short shank in a heavy gauge. They’re more commonly used on offshore boats for covertly freelining small pieces of bait into a chum slick for tuna, but that strength is a boon for bowfin because their mouths are like granite and can easily bend out light-wire hooks. If you target bowfin in highly pressured areas like I do in the Northeast, the number of bites you get by hiding that small hook inside your bait will increase exponentially.
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