high water and stuff

[blast from the past]

The high water allows those tucs to spread out and roam. They aren't sedentary like largemouth bass - they swim around and travel. Perhaps they don't get "turned off"; they're just more spread out and harder to find. The low water concentrates them into reduced environments, and are then easy to find. The largemouth bass go for the shallow water and the dropoffs because the food concentrates along the edges and the banks when the water rises. It's the opposite; when the water drops low, the bass go off the bank into deeper water. Unlike tucs, bass can actually "turn off" - they are sensitive to more factors then the cichlid-family tucunare.
We used to use strips of chamois cloth (long strips -like an eel) on a weedless 2/0 hook (the kind with the weedguard), with a splitshot right in front of the hook, like a "head". This would actually work on bass; it looks like a dojo. Use ultralight spinning tackle. Try it! I still remember catching bass with a 4-dollar spinning reel that had a simple wire bail (no roller) and a 3:1 gear ratio. It was and still to this day, the darndest best spinning reel I've ever tried. I just flipped the bail over with my offhand. That slow gear ratio did not make lures go to fast - had total control of lures with that cheap little reel!