Successful bass fishing on Lake Okeechobee requires a constant state of adjustments

Captain Steve Daniel has fished Lake Okeechobee since the 1980s and won major professional bass tournaments on it, but he’s constantly adjusting his tactics because the lake is always changing.

Hurricane Irma in 2017 had a major impact when it swept across the Big O, completely clearing out vegetation from some parts of the lake and providing access to areas that boaters hadn’t been able to fish for decades.

More than five years later, Daniel still has to modify his daily game plan based on water depth, water clarity and what type of vegetation is available given the regular spraying of herbicides to kill grass where bass like to hang out.

Hydrilla is an invasive aquatic plant that bass and waterfowl love. Constant poisoning has reduced the amount of the lake’s Hydrilla, so when Daniel locates some, he will almost always fish around it.

“See these coots,” Daniel said, pointing out the small, noisy black birds with white bills during a recent outing out of the Harney Pond Canal on the west side of the lake. “The areas where you have a little bit of Hydrilla, you’ll have coots.”

On a trip two days earlier, Daniel set up his anglers with live wild shiners for bait, which produced three bass over 7 pounds. As he explained to me and fellow outdoors writer Glenn Sapir of Putnam Valley, New York, when you cast a shiner to the edge of the impenetrable mats of water hyacinths, the shiner gets nervous. A bass can sense that and will swim out from under the cover provided by the vegetation to eat the baitfish.

“They’re a little harder to catch with artificial baits,” said Daniel, of Clewiston (www.okeechobeeprostevedaniel.com), whose preferred lures are a Zoom Fluke, which imitates a baitfish, and a 7-inch Senko.

Daniel wacky rigs the soft-plastic stick bait on a size 4/0 shiner hook, which has a wire weedguard to limit the number of times the hook point snags on vegetation. To wacky rig a stick bait, the hook is placed through the middle of the lure so it wiggles enticingly.

“I like it wacky rigged,” Daniel said, “and the reason for that is it acts so crippled. The nature of predators is they go after things that are injured, even if they’re not feeding.”

Sapir brought his fishing tackle that he uses back home, spinning rods spooled with 8-pound monofilament line, which is about half as heavy as the line that most Lake Okeechobee bass anglers use. But the light line produced a lot of bass, some of them weighing 1-2 pounds and many weighing less than a pound.

“A 7-inch Senko, you’ll catch 12-inch bass on this,” Daniel had said.

Daniel did catch one of the bigger bass of our morning trip, a 3-plus-pounder, on the Senko. Unlike some stick worm devotees who cast out the lure and let it sit and wiggle on the bottom, Daniel likes to twitch the lure back to the boat.

Sometimes an angler can feel a bass whack the stick worm and other times the angler will notice the line moving as a bass swims off with the lure. All the angler has to do is reel the line tight so that the hook sets itself.

Daniel fishes in the cleanest water he can find on the lake because that’s what bass prefer, although he admitted that “nobody’s really been able to give me a good answer as to why, I just know that it’s important.

“If the water stays dingy, the fish tend to bite better in it, but if the water’s been clear and all of a sudden it gets muddy real quick, they won’t bite at all. I think it’s because these fish are used to sight-feeding so much.”

Daniel qualified to fish in several Bassmaster Classics, and he won two FLW Tour events on Lake Okeechobee, as well as the inaugural Forrest Wood Cup in 1996 on Lake Sinclair in Georgia. The water in that tournament was so dirty, it confounded most of the elite field, but it didn’t bother the bass that Daniel caught.

“You couldn’t see down 3 inches,” Daniel said. “I was throwing a chartreuse crankbait and you couldn’t see it in the water, but those fish could find it. They were used to that dirty water.”

In his 30-plus years of guiding on Lake O and tournament fishing, Daniel has always been particular about his lures and tackle. In an FLW tournament on Lake Kissimmee, he drilled a hole in the head of his lure and poured in melted lead to give the plug more weight, which the bass liked.

On a tournament on Sam Rayburn Reservoir in Texas, Daniel had No. 7 Shad Raps rigged on three different fishing rods each spooled with different sizes of line — 8-pound, 12-pound and 17-pound. The key to getting bass to bite was reeling the crankbait along the top of submerged vegetation.

“If I wasn’t touching the grass, I’d go to a rod with lighter line and the lure would run a foot deeper,” Daniel said.

As my longtime friend Glenn Sapir demonstrated, lightening up your line can definitely make a difference on Lake Okeechobee. Especially when you have someone like Steve Daniel guiding you to where the bass should be.