Top 10 Best Flies For Largemouth Bass

Best Flies for Largemouth Bass

Largemouth bass are an iconic sport fish, found in all 50 states, and are a blast to fly fish. If you live in the upper midwest, the east or southeast parts of the country you probably live within 15 or 20 minutes of water that holds largemouth bass. Largemouth bass are exciting to catch with a fly rod and especially when fishing with topwater flies.

Flies for Catching Largemouth Bass

Largemouth bass eat many aquatic creatures. Crayfish, leeches, frogs, mice and fish make up the bulk of these opportunistic feeders' diets. Most fly anglers love to catch these fish on top and poppers and deer hair bass bugs are extremely effective. We carry all of these types of flies from the best poppers in the business to deer hair bugs and all of the sub-surface patterns you need.

Rods and Reels for Catching Largemouth Bass

Fly rod selection for largemouth bass is a matter of picking a rod size to work best with the size of bass you expect to encounter and how big of a fly you intend to use. Our favorite size and the most popular largemouth bass fly rod size we sell are 8 weight rods. Smaller rods like 6 and 7 weights can be effective but will limit fly size and being able to wrestle a large fish out of the brush and weeds. Fast action rods are important to help you throw accurate casts, cast large flies and throw longer casts to cover more water efficiently. 

Fly reels for bass fishing call for a simple reel where paying for a drag isn't a necessity. Something that matches the weight of the rod to balance it out is really all you need.

Largemouth Bass Fishing Techniques

While smallmouth bass have a tendency to be found around rocks and gravel, largemouth bass tend to hang out around grass, weeds and wood. Lowlight times of the day and evening are often the best times to fish surface patterns but that doesn't mean you can't catch them on top at mid-day. Lily pad areas and slop are great places to fish topwater too. Pay attention to docks as many of these will hold decent fish. As summer heats up, bass tend to move deeper and inhabit weed beds. Look for weed edges and points inside the weed beds to try and locate active fish. Sub-surface patterns and sinking type lines are often in order here. Vary fly patterns and retrieves until you get success. Find a pattern and work that pattern until things change.

Our 10 best flies for largemouth bass (in both surface and subsurface versions):

• Femme Fatale
• Freaky Frog
• Lexo's Mud Puppy
• Pat Ehlers' Foamtail Superworm
• Pat Ehlers' Grim Reaper
• Rattlin' Frog
• Schmidterbait
• Schmidterbug
• Umpqua Swimming Frog

Check out all of our bass flies for largemouth and smallmouth bass.