DEEP CREEK LAKE fishing guide Brent Nelson is a master of the fine art of skipping. It's a technique he uses to toss soft plastic baits within striking range of bass sheltered in places so tight a skinny bullfrog might have trouble squeezing through. Watching him do it will make you a believer.

A native of western Allegany County, Nelson spends upwards of 60 days a year guiding fishing parties for Ken Penrod's Life Outdoors Unlimited guide service. In his other life, he is a professional graphic designer and lives in Columbia, Md., where he has a web hosting and design company. And he finds time to sing and play guitar and banjo with pick-up blue grass bands in Columbia and Cumberland.


Deep Creek Lake is Maryland's largest freshwater impoundment; it covers about 3,900 acres surrounded by more than 60 miles of shoreline. The lake was created in 1925 to provide water for generating electricity, which it still does, but it now also provides a variety of water- based activities for the summer vacation community which since has grown up around the lake. 

Nelson is licensed by the U.S. Coast Guard and Maryland's DNR to guide on both tidal and fresh water. And while he often shepherds fishing parties for largemouth bass and striped bass on the upper Chesapeake Bay and the tidal reaches of the Potomac, he's partial to the quality bass fishing he finds at Deep Creek Lake from early spring through late fall. 

In addition to guiding on the lake for the past 12 years, Nelson has fished the highland reservoir for the past 40 years. During that time, he has seen a healthy bass fishery develop in the lake as well as a proliferation of private floating boat docks that, except for late fall and winter, now dot the shoreline. From the time those docks are set out in the spring until they are pulled off in the fall, they're a haven for bass searching for cover. 

"This lake has really come around," Nelson said as we set out from the public boat ramp at Deep Creek Lake State Park the other morning. "It's been a smallmouth lake from the start, but the largemouth population has come on strong in the past 5 to 6 years. Now it's not unusual to catch 15 to 20 bass a day but it wasn't that way 10 years ago," he said. 

He attributes the improvement in the bass fishery, especially the lake's largemouth population, to regulations which protect bass during the spawning season by making it illegal to keep bass
between March 1 and June 15. He also gives credit to catch-and-release fishing, which a growing number of bass fishermen practice voluntarily throughout the year. 
.
The activity patterns of bass in this high country lake vary with the season; still they're pretty predictable according to Nelson who has studied them over the years. Surface activity picks up in the fall as the weather cools and bass begin to feed up for the winter. It's a good time to work lake points, shallow coves and grass lines with noisy top water lures, jerk baits and spinnerbaits early in the morning.

Once the sun is on the water, bass move to the shelter of floating boat docks. The higher the sun, the deeper the fish move under the boats and into the shadows of the adjacent piers and the more difficult it is to put a bait in front of them. Anything that offers more shade such as an overhead roof, more than one boat at a dock or the presence of a large pontoon boat makes a dock more attractive to bass. 

So that was our game plan for the day: We fished lake points and grassy flats with topwater lures and spinnerbaits until the sun got up. Then we moved to the shoreline to skip soft plastic lures under floating docks with boats in their slips when we came to them. As we moved from one dock to another, we cast topwater lures, jerkbaits and spinnerbaits at shallow, offshore grass lines.

Chain pickerel were out in force and hungry that morning. We caught and released half a dozen of them on the Devil's Horse I was using and Nelson's white spinnerbait in the first grassy flat we fished that morning. Nelson picked a couple of smallmouths off a rocky point with his spinnerbait before we moved on to fish a collection of floating docks. 

"You can't get your bait to the bass by pitching to the edges of docks. You have to get back to them, as far back as you can; they won't come out of the shade to get it" Nelson said as we approached the first dock. 

The boat in the slip was held parallel and tight to the dock by mooring lines. The openings between the floats along the side of the dock were wide enough but the space between the water and the walkway above it was no more than six to eight inches, leaving a very small window to put a lure through. Get it back to them? Yeah, right!

I've skipped popping bugs with a fly rod to jump them through openings under tree limbs and overhangs but never anywhere that small .Nelson was using a medium action spinning rod with 8 to 10 pound test, green monofilament line and a five inch soft plastic worm hung through the midsection (also known as wacky style rigging) on a #2 Aberdeen hook. Nelson is partial to watermelon or green pumpkin for his bait colors and he believes the green line is the best match for the lake's clear water.

The big, mild-manner guide gave me a seeing-is-believing demonstration of what the skipping technique is and what it can do. I didn't keep count but he pulled bass from under a number of the
floating docks we visited by skipping his bait deep inside the sheltered sites under the walkways and in the shadows of the boat slips. 

An unweighted plastic bait cast low and at a slight angle to the water will skip like a flat stone. Some baits skip better than others, and the way they are rigged may make a difference. But making them skip is the easy part; the other is accuracy. I soon learned that making a bait skip  through a small opening is another matter. The first several times I tried to skip my bait under the walkways as Nelson was doing, it hit either the float or the side of the dock with a loud "Thunk" and bounced back. 

Bass sheltered under the floating docks usually don't seem to be easily alarmed, so the noise of a bait bouncing off a pontoon or some part of the dock might not bother them. But if there is a bass under a dock, Nelson believes your chances of catching it are better if you can skip your bait back where you want it to go on the first try, which is something he was doing with ease. 

"It just takes a little practice," he said.

Just as all docks are not the same when it comes to attracting bass, neither is fishing at Deep Creek Lake the same throughout the fall. When the floating docks are taken up, bass move to other quarters on lake points, in the flats and stump fields and among the laydowns. Fishing is every bit as good, and his fishing parties catch quality bass; it's just not quite the same . . . Nelson is partial to skipping plastic baits to bass under the floating docks. 

If you are thinking a bass guide who is also a graphic designer might have his own web site, you're right. The address is www.fishdeepcreek.com; you can go there for current fishing reports on Deep Creek Lake and what you need to do to book a guided trip with him.