The author’s buddy, Josh Holm of Valley City, N.D. with a 19.5-inch largemouth bass caught from under a dock on Big Detroit Lake in Minnesota. Simonson Photo.
By Nick Simonson
The heart of July brings with it many things. Notably larger readouts on the bathroom scale following an extended holiday week (or weeks) of barbecues are just one sign of the feasting that’s going on. In the water too, fish are getting their grub on as walleyes set up in summer patterns, crappies stage along the now well-developed weed lines, and of course, my favorite warm water pursuit, largemouth bass are hunkered up under docks in the shallows teaming with bluegills and other bait to fuel their seasonal binge.
Cruising the south shore of Big Detroit Lake with my buddy, we talked about how the water had changed in the 20 years that we had fished it together. Firsthand we had seen the traditional cabins disappear and the McMansions take their place; structures so large they likely occupied every single square foot of permitted building space on their 100-foot wide lots. Where once the large copper-roofed house next to my family’s little green cabin was the biggest building on the lake, providing an easy landmark to find our place, now three out of four “cabins” on the shore were bigger than it. Good or bad, the development continues, but with it comes additions that attract those big bucketmouths; another facet we didn’t hesitate to point out and explore.
In front of each monstrous home on the south shore was a dock with two, or three, or sometimes even four watercraft lifted between and around the arms of each pier. Beneath the pontoons, wake boats, fishing craft and jet skis were rectangles of shade, posts jutting from the substrate, and all the cover a bass could need for its summer ambushes of not only the panfish that also resided there, but our soft plastics as well, which we skipped and whipped under and around the massive structures.
The single docks with the lone boat and those that hadn’t even dropped their lift in yet (and likely wouldn’t this late in the summer season) were easy passes or only worth a solitary cast as it had become clear as in past summers, the biggest docks which covered the most area were the ones the largest bass were located under. We picked up quality fish from below each of the most intricate docks, including those with massive canopies, front roll-down mesh covers, brake tubes, and other unique and comparatively opulent additions that we hadn’t seen in seasons before. The biggest of which was a 19.5-inch behemoth my buddy horsed loose from the edge of a three-armed dock and brought out into the open water in front of it for an exciting drag-burning battle.
Releasing the girthy fish and exploring the last of the few docks on our pre-breakfast run, I stared down the shore to the turn it made to the unoccupied bluff – one area of steep land that remained for sale on the lake and sported no structures of any kind atop it or in the water. While I hoped it may stay that way for a while, a lone holdout of sorts against the tide of development, I also regretted not being able to hit the remaining 20 or so docks between the stalwart hill and our position. Most of them were like the dock we finished up on – U- or H-shaped structures with two or three boats – that likely held fish as the water shallowed into a flat and grew increasingly filled with lake grass and other more desirable weeds just out from the shore, providing bass with even more variety of cover. They were big structures on a big flat that would likely pay even bigger bass dividends. Time being what it was, however, we headed back, content with our handful of quality fish and a chance to remember the good old days, and know that maybe a bit of that development might have played a role in a few oversized memories from years past, and another summer morning hitting the docks…in our outdoors.
Simonson is the lead writer and editor of Dakota Edge Outdoors