Taipei Area Bass Pond Map

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Spring and Spinnerbaits

Spring is the perfect time of year to tie on a spinnerbait in Taiwan. The flashy blades are the perfect enticement for a strike when the water is stained or slightly off color from rain, as it often case during most times of the year. For bedding bass, the fluttering blades are particularly irritating and will usually trigger satisfyingly hard strikes.

I tend to be a creature of habit when it comes to bass, and lately I've been relying more heavily on finesse baits at local ponds, like shaky worms or Texas and wacky-rigged worms. I recently decided to give my spinnerbaits a workout and ended up using them all day long. The cast-to-strike ratio may not have been quite as high as with a worm, but because you tend to retrieve a spinnerbait more quickly, this didn’t affect the number of fish hauled in on this particular morning.

Some local anglers may not have spinner baits in their tackle boxes because they can be hard to find in local fishing shops and when they do turn up they are inexplicably pricey. I avoided this problem by picking up a few while back in the U.S. this winter.

The usefulness of a spinnerbait is not limited to the bass pond. They can be productive in canals, around heavy weeds and other cover, making them a nice change of pace for snakehead anglers tired of the ubiquitous topwater frog. You can also toss them in estuaries for barramundi and red drum.

One of the tricks to using a spinnerbait is tying them on correctly. Here is a simple knot I use that works great.

Late July Bass Fishing

A little post-storm fishing

I dropped by my old reliable pond in Pingjhen Sunday morning after Tropical Stom Meari moved out of the area. The ponds water was quite muddy and the laoban warned that the fishing was wouldn't be good today. Still, there were fish to be caught. This one grabbed the Berkley Gulp! shaky worm I was fishing Texas-rigged near the the pond's inflow pipe. It put up quite a tussle for a little guy before heading strait for the weeds. It took some work to pry him out, much to the amusement of my son. 

Preview: Pure Fishing Asian Cup 2011 Third Leg

This was a recent scouting trip to Happy Farm. These guys were catching a few tilapia on lures, but weren't seeing much bass action.The final leg of the preliminary round of the Pure Fishing 2011 Asia Cup wraps up this Saturday with the tournament arriving at Happy Farm fishing pond in Bade, Taoyuan County. This is the round that I’ll be participating in and I wish I could say I was a bit more excited. I have scouted out this pond on three occasions and have yet to experience or witness any real action outside of the bait anglers landing tilapia.

If any readers are wondering why there haven’t been many new fishing reports of photos posted in the last month, the reason is that I keep heading back to Happy Farm and getting shut down. I have spotted the occasional largemouth bass, the target of this tournament leg, but haven’t seen that many being caught.

What I did notice was the visibility in the pond is pretty poor and the water his heavy stained green from algae. The oxygen content may be low because I notice several tilapia gulping air at windward end of the pond. I’ve also spotted a few sluggish and sick looking bass, carp and tilapia. That said, I’ve also seen many big fish jumping and rolling in the middle of the pond.*

So, it should at the very least be interesting to see what happens when 50 tournament anglers show up on Saturday. I have my doubts that the action will be as wide open as it was at the previous two legs.

Speaking of which, pure fishing has posted pics from the second leg in Tainan on their site. It looks like a good time was had by all catching a mixed bag of barramundi and bass. There are a couple of nice fish in a few of the shots.

*Just to clarify, I don't have a completely negative take on Happy Farm. The staff there are very friendly and so are the other anglers. It has a more family friendly atmosphere than some other ponds in the area and if you are a bait angler, you'll probably do well fishing there. I'm just a little dubious about the bass action.

Here is a map to Happy Farm in Bade for anyone interested in viewing or fishing their in the future.

檢視較大的地圖

Pure Fishing Asian Cup 2011 Taiwan

Pure Fishing, the umbrella company that owns Berkley, Fenwick, Penn, Johnson, Abu Garcia and a host of other tackle brands, is sponsoring a series of bass tournaments in Taiwan in May and June. The tournaments will take place at ponds in three location--Tainan, Hsinchu and Taoyuan. Registration is NT$600 per angler and participants can only use gear from the Pure Fishing brands, including lures. I'll be taking part in the June 25 event at Happy Heart Farm pond in Bade, Taoyuan County. Here is a link to information at the Pure Fishing Taiwan site. You can download a registration at the bottom of the page. Registration is limited to 50 anglers at each location and it's filling up fast.

Bass Video from Jinji Hu Pond in Pingjhen

A short clip of my Saturday morning fishing session at Jinji Hu Pond in Pingjhen. In all, it was a great morning. I went through the remainder of my plastic worms and had to switch to grubs. I lost track after about a dozen bass. Things slowed down after the plastic worms ran out. This was all before 10 a.m. It may be time to find a new wild spot for a bit more challenge.

Saturday Morning Bassin'

I headed back to Pingjhen with my son in tow to kick off the long holiday weekend. We managed eight bass, all in the 12 to 13-inch range. Josh even took a nineth with the landing net, but I don't think we'll count that one. The weather is warming up nicely. The bite wasn't as wide open as it was during the "super moon," be we weren't complaining. I had at least two well-meaning local anglers come up and inspect my wacky worm rig and try to tell me I was doing it all wrong. One guy wen't so far as to re-rig me on the spot before I could stop him. Ironically, it was another local that put me onto the wacky rig a few weeks ago. To be fair, if you have never seen a wacky rigged worm, it looks like the the kind of thing someone with no clue what they are doing would do with a plastic worm.