Your water that you fish may also be filled with rat bass, and there is not much food for bigger fish...except for baby bass so use that to your advantage. So you use a swimbait or large dark or baby bass fluke or very large creature bait or jig and bait fished slowly and it should get swallowed. I've caught most of my biggest bass in less than a meter of water though at the same they are not worried to be very deep. The same one huge bass I had caught him a good few times, so many times that he had been given a name, Barry. He became a pet and was fun to watch him and observe his haunts and patterns after the years, stickpiles, jetties, margins of lillies, or just hanging in the shadows under baitfish,he had his places he like to hang out. Biggest that I caught him last year on a jig, playing with the little sunfishes and kurper attacking my static jig on the surface, i gave one twitch and the water disappeared and his gaping mouth appeared in its place, he must have been sitting on the bottom under all this going on, a meter from the side. At that point he was over 4.5kg and just shy of 5kg, he'd been caught so many times he knew the drill and just calmly rolled over and waited for me to drag him gently up the grass and unhook him and slide him back in. Biggest bass I ever caught gave me no fight whatsoever LOL, we were old mates! I first caught him, RIP, when he was about 1.5kg..he was eventually found floating with a 1.5kg kurper stuck in his throat and he was 3/4 of a shovel length and almost as wide as a shovel and at least 8 years old, if he was a year old when I first caught him. He was even caught on plain white dough before, a few times actually, fishing for carp.. so bass really are opportunistic feeders.
My mate once stocked a large tank with 10 bass or so, within 2 weeks there was only one.. LOL A bass will eat whatever he will fit in his mouth that looks alive enough. Bigger bait, bigger bass. My mate who is a pro, swears by his large swimming snakes and rats for the big bass, but those lure cost a fortune! Im am no purist and if you want to catch the biggest bass in that water, swim a small one out as a bait LOL..Though the bass fundis will hang me for that hahaha.
Also when a water is filled with rat bass, I love to fish a bright noisy popper, and fish it slow, twitching it and allowing waves to dissipate and popping loudly once more, past structure, log piles, rock piles, jetties, lillies, any good structure etc.. you have such a blast on the super keen rat bass who just want to kill poppers, that size does not matter and be ready because at some point the big mama bass will want a piece of the action and will smash you up when you are not expecting it!
