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MEDIA HIGHLIGHTS
The Great Outdoors
Guide shows off sure-fire technique
To largemouth bass looking for a cold-weather treat, threadfin shad are
Godiva chocolates. The way Dean Puller fishes is like opening the candy counter
to choco-holics. Puller an Orlando bass guide is one of the few in the
state to fish exclusively with live shad that he nets himself and keeps alive
with high tech equipment. The results; on a good day, he'll see 100 bass caught
and released. On half day trips, 60 - fish totals are the norm. And he's not
fishing one of the state's fabled bass factories such as the stick marsh.
Puller does all of his fishing in an urban Orlando lake - Lake Conway. He
started experimenting with using live shad for bait seven years ago,when Puller
was making a living as a golf pro. 
West coast guide Ray Van Horn and bass expert Doug Hannon generally are credited
with developing the technique on Lake Tarpon in 1993."I'd heard about Van
Horn doing in on Tarpon and I came to the conclusion that I wasn't catching
enough fish on the cold days with bluebird skies that follow a cold front,
" he said. He spent two years tinkering with the technique. At first,
Puller found he could net all the shad he needed, but keeping them alive in his
bass boat's livewell wasn't easy." Shad need to keep moving to have water
flowing through their gills to get enough oxygen, " he said. "In my
rectangular livewell, they'd all bunch up in a corner and die."He got a
large, round, aerated bait container to allow the fish to swim in circles. But
he still had fish dying. "I was trying to put a lot of bait in a small body
of water, and they were pulling the oxygen from the water faster than I could
replace it, "he said. Puller started using tanks of pure oxygen to aerate
the water. I doubled the oxygen content of the water, so I could double the
number of shad I could hold," Puller said.He also started using a custom
made cast net with a quarter- inch mesh. "A lot of people come out here and
use mullet nets to try and catch shad. All they do is gill them and kill
them," Puller said.
When he started Gator's Big Bass Guide Service five years ago, Puller went shopping and found a bass boat with built- in, large round livewells. He found a boat made by Big O Boats in Okeechobee Florida. Although he had perfected the technique, Puller had a hard time convincing prospective clients of its effectiveness. " People would call up to book a trip and ask how In did that day. I'd say,"we had an 80 fish day,' and they just go Uh-huh.' I could tell they didn't believe me,"he said. He'll be the first to tell you it's not effective year-round. The method works only when cooler temperatures cause the shad to become lethargic and move around the lake slowly in large schools. Puller spent a half-day on Lake Conway recently to prove how the shad-fishing technique worked. He anchored the boat in 9 feet of water just off a grass flat that tapered from 2-5 feet deep. then he took two handfuls of shad and tossed them onto the flat. Swirling water soon told him the bass were after his offering. Hooking on a shad, he cast it only 30 feet or so from the boat. In seconds, his line tightened, and Puller was reeling in a one and a half pound bass. He would repeat the performance with assembly-line regulatory for the next four hours. When the winds increased to more than 15 mph, sometimes it would take 30 seconds or a minute for a bass to grab the bait. The water typically would explode seconds after the bait hit the surface, only to explode again and again and again. The bass were having difficulty in the choppy waters. As Puller continued to catch bass, other anglers- who had been casting artificial baits without success- would edge closer. Casting to the fringes of the same area Puller was fishing, they'd wind up with nothing. The fish were so focused on the sudden source of live shad, they didn't notice the artificial offerings."The guys who come here to fish tournaments are funny. They'll see me catching fish and go through every lure in the tackle box without any luck, 'Puller said. "I can hear them: "I can't believe it. He's got another one on, and I haven't caught a keeper.' "Puller said the effectiveness of the technique still surprises him."Years ago, I would read stories of people going to Mexico and catching a hundred fish a day. I'd think, my gosh that's an awful lot of fish," he said. "I am still kind of dumbfounded how many fish you can catch doing it this way.
Don Wilson can be reached
at
dwilson@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5397
