After I’ve crawled and jigged the worm off all the obstructions and am free of all them, if I haven’t had a strike I quickly reel in, because I’m not going to fish it all the way to the boat. This is what I do especially in shallow-water situations when I’m throwing directly into cover. Then I’ll throw to the next ambush point.
As I’ve written many times and others have written about me, I’m a line watcher. I use Stren fluorescent line, and in shallow water I identify probably 75 percent of my worm strikes by seeing the line move before I ever feel the fish. When my worm’s falling straight down—and I give it slack line so it’ll fall straight down rather than glide off of something at an angle—I’ll detect that little twitch in the line. To make sure it’s a fish, I’ll put on just a little pressure, and then I can determine which way he’s moving. I’m watching the line not only to detect the strike, but also to see what the bass is doing after he’s struck. I do check them a lot after the initial strike, but I’m doing it only on about half a pound of pressure—just enough to know he’s there.
I don’t always fish the worm as I’ve described above; sometimes I do work it all the way back to the boat, and I do this particuarly on structure. When I’m out on a big point or a submerged bar, I’m not fishing an ambush point. I’m fishing open-water structure. In this situation, I don’t know exactly where the obstructions are; I merely know that there should be some objects down there. So I throw the worm out there and crawl it along fairly quickly. But when I feel something, such as a stump, I think that might be where one is hiding. Then I slow the worm down and fish it more carefully, and I do this every time I hit some piece of cover.
When I’m fishing heavy brush or cover—shallow or deep—often I peg the slip sinker to make the weight part of the worm. I take a round toothpick and jab it in the hole next to the line and break the toothpick off so it’s flush with the weight. I peg the pointed end of the bullet weight, but the toothpick can be inserted in either end of the weight. After a cast or two, water will cause the toothpick end to swell up and this makes it snug.
The reason for pegging the weight is if I’m fishing heavy cover, I don’t want to pull the worm up on an obstruction and get it caught in a limb. If that happens, the weight will slip down the line when you give it some slack, and you’ll think the worm is sinking, when really it isn’t sinking at all. Also, when you’ve separated the weight from the worm, you’ll get hung up more. By pegging the weight, the worm becomes more snagless because it isn’t separated from the sinker.
One of my second choices in plastic worm fishing is entirely different from the Texas rig. It’s the Carolina rig. It doesn’t have a slip weight down against the hook, and about half the time it doesn’t have a self-weedless hook. It features a rather heavy egg sinker with a swivel, and 18 to 30 or more inches behind the weight and swivel is the worm, which usually is floating free. The worm has either a bare exposed hook or the Texas-style imbedded hook. The latter is used if this rig is fished in brushy areas.
This rig is important because it’s great for fishing deep-water structure. Quite often on deep points, structures, bars, and channels the bass are down on the bottom, but they really can see a floating worm better. Remember the weight—the egg sinker, which often weighs from ½ ounce to 1 ounce—is plum-meting the whole rig to the bottom, but the worm is floating up. I often use a plastic worm which has been injected with a lot of air bubbles, such as the Sportsman Catch-Em-Quick Super Floater, or some of the other styles of worms that float even with the hook inside.
This floating worm is more visible to bass 6 to 8 feet away. Also, the worm has a lot better action being away from the weight. It drifts, darts, and oscillates from any currents and wave action present under the water.
When a bass grabs the worm, he feels virtually no weight or resistance. When he starts to run with it, the line slips through the hole in the weight and you need to give him some line for the first couple of seconds. This method is an especially great way to get a worm deep in a hurry. You can take a small, delicate worm which floats and get it down 30 to 50 feet in a hurry with a ¾ ounce sinker. It’s excellent in deep, rocky lakes like Bull Shoals in Arkansas, Clark Hill Reservoir on the Georgia-South Carolina border, Sidney Lanier in Georgia, and Lake Murray in South Carolina. These are all deep, relatively clear lakes, and they’re perfect for the Carolina rig.
You can get the worm very deep in a few seconds. You have a lot of contact with the weight, but you need a good, sensitive rod and you need to hold it high to be able to give the fish line for a couple of seconds before you strike back at him.
In the hot summer when the water temperature is above 70 degrees, a lot of bass seek the thermocline. They get down in the depths, especially in clear water where the light penetration is pretty deep. I like to use a ½-ounce lead sinker with a small swivel and run it about 25 inches back. I usually use a spinning rod for this work, because this entire rig bolos when you cast it. It’s sort of hard to throw and you get a lot of backlashes with a casting rod. I prefer 14-pound-test line. The leader—the monofilament which goes to the worm— can be a little bit lighter if the water’s very clear. In fact, then you might want to use an 8- or 10-pound line to fool more bass. Another advantage of the lighter leader is that when you get hung up, you break your worm off but not the swivel and weight.
Hook size is extremely important. My favorite worm is the 6-inch DeLong Super Floater. It floats very well for its size, but this is true only if you use a hook no larger than a 1/0. Even a No. 1 hook works well. If you use a 2/0 or 3/0 hook, the rig won’t float; the worm sinks to the bottom. If the water isn’t obstructed with brush, I’ll use the hook exposed most of the time. With the hook point out, I can set faster and better. I can troll or jig this rig along at a pretty good speed through quite a few stumps, boulders and rocks. It’s fairly snagless because it’s floating up.
One of my super patterns in worm fishing is the weightless spawning rig. This is nothing but a plastic worm, a hook, and zero weight, rigged Texas-style with the hook embedded in the middle of the worm. I use this rig strictly in the spawning season, because, as I pointed out before, spawning bass aren’t hungry and don’t hit out of Reflex action. Instead, they’re hitting out of protective instinct; they’re merely trying to move that worm which is threatening their nest and get it away from the spawning bed. They’ll swim with it for three to five seconds and carry it a few feet from the nest and then spit it out.
In the Carolina rig the sinker is some distance from the plastic worm, so the worm, which often contains Styrofoam or air bubbles, drifts above the bottom. the hook is usually exposed but can be imbedded as in the texas rig for fishing in brushy areas.
Keep in mind that spawning bass usually pick up a worm near the middle. You need your hook back down the worm toward the tail, and you need to set the hook pretty quickly. I don’t use particularly heavy tackle, because lots of times spawning bass are in clear, shallow water without much turbulence. Therefore, you need to go to fairly light line. I like to use at least 10-pound line because it’s hard to set the hook through that plastic with 6-pound line. It can be done, but it’s more difficult, and you’ll miss a lot more bass on 6 than you will on 10, even though you’ll get more strikes on 6-pound line. Most of the spawning bass I’ve found are around some type of cover, such as weeds. Even in natural lakes in Minnesota and Wisconsin, the weeds and bullrushes so often found in spawning areas are enough to break a 6-pound line when a bass tangles around them. In the swamps of Lake Seminole or in Florida and in lakes in Oklahoma, where I live, bass spawn usually in the north coves around heavy brush or vegetation, and they easily can break a 6-pound line.
This Florida largemouth, over 10 pounds, wasn’t going to let my weightless rig stay in her nest.
Another thing I do during the spawning season is continually use a new worm. I do this so that if I miss a strike, I can examine the worm and determine from the teeth marks where it was bitten. My favorite color and size of worm at this time of year is the 7- or 7 ¼ inch black worm. For some reason, whether you’re fishing in Maine or Arizona, they seem to hit black the best when they’re spawning.
Worm fishing really comes into its own when the spawning season arrives. Before that, the water is on the cold side for plastic-worm fishing, and bass don’t hit worms good in cold water. But when the water reaches at least 62 degrees during the full-moon period in the spring, spawning activity begins and so does good worming. I stand up in my boat and wear Polaroid sunglasses to spot the beds and to determine the type of cover they’re bedding near.
When you spot a spawning bed, cast 10 feet past it and swim the worm slowly up to it. Let the lure settle for fifteen to thirty seconds in the bed. When the bass picks up the worm, strike him within three seconds. If you wait too long, the fish is apt to drop the worm. If you catch the smaller male bass, keep casting to the bed and you might catch that trophy female. If you don’t catch her, wait at least thirty minutes and then return to the area again. For particularly large bass, the period just before dusk is the best time to catch them.
For this type of fishing, I prefer a 5½-foot graphite bait-casting rod and 14-to-20-pound line. Graphite gives you a lot more sensitivity, and for almost all my worm fishing I use graphite rods. Graphite also enables me to cast a few feet farther. The line size varies with the amount of cover near the beds, but most spawning strikes are lip strikes, and the hardest spots to hook them. It’s much easier to hook bass in the summertime when they’re actually trying to eat the worm and have it back inside their mouths, where the flesh is softer. Extremely sharp hooks naturally are especially important.
One time before a B.A.S.S. tournament in January on the St. Johns River in Florida, my friend Paul Chamblee of Raleigh, N.C., and I practiced together during the pre-tourney warmup. We located a tremendous bunch of spawning bass, but they were shallow and the water was super clear. We had to drop down to 6-pound lines to get them to strike, but during the tournament the sun was bright, and we had trouble keeping from spooking them even with 6-pound line. This tough condition is much the same as smallmouth fishing on bright, sunny days in clear water, as Billy Westmorland often points out, and you really have to go to very light line to have any success. However, if there’s a lot of cloud cover, you can step up your line size a bit.
The surface-floating worm sometimes is confused with the Carolina rig, but the two are entirely different. This worm really floats, and that’s the difference. A lot of anglers use a weightless worm and think it’s the same thing, but a weightless worm and a floating worm are two different rigs.
In South Carolina the floating worm rig has a tail planted with Styrofoam so that it lies evenly on the surface in spite of having a hook attached. I first came across this particular type of rig in Salt Springs, Fla., where the local boys were catching huge strings of bass with it. This rig is best used in the spring in weed-infested warmer waters around spawning beds. The worm floats on the surface, and gentle twitches often provoke sucking strikes and huge swirls. The floating worm is fished about the same way as you would fish a small surface plug like the Rapala.
I fished this floating worm by twitching it like any surface lure, and the bass fell for it.
The surface-floating worm is really for an exceptional condition. Use it only in extremely clear, weedy water. The best examples of here to use it are in an ultra-clear lake in the north or in some spring area down in Florida or in some type of very weedy bay where any slip weight would catch moss or algae.
You can make a floating worm rig by cutting strips from a Styrofoam cup and inserting them in the worm (I use a ballpoint-pen refill to make the holes and stuff in the foam). Note position of the exposed hook.
In this type of fishing I use spinning tackle. My favorite outfit is a light-action spinning rod and open-faced reel loaded with 6- or 8-pound line. The hook usually is left exposed in most weedy areas where there aren’t many surface weeds. If surface weed is there, such as lily pads or coontail moss or a stringy weed, then I rig the worm Texas-style. But when I rig it Texas-style, instead of running the hook through the fat part of the worm, I’ll just barely hook it through a tiny section of the worm. It has only about 
inch of the plastic to tear loose from, and the hook point is just barely in, making it weedless. When I set the hook, it’s going to pop loose quickly from that small slice of plastic. In all of my light-line fishing, I hook my Texas-style rigs this way.
I like to use a fairly large plastic worm usually one 7 ¼ to 7 ½ inches long for this type of fishing. You can’t use a very large hook because you would sink the worm. I like a No-1 or a Style 84. A Style 84 is not really a worm hook. It’s got a good open throat, and when I use a No. 1 or 1/0, I keep the hook exposed. It’s a good, solid small hook with a lot of body that can hold a big bass.
Big spawners suck it in when it comes over the bed. You see them rise up as if for a surface plug, and then as the summer progresses in these same weedy areas, it’s a good surface lure to use in the early morning and late evening or on cloudy days. It is a surface lure.
It was during a five-month period in 1980-81 that I was fortunate enough to accomplish something that has been called one of the most phenomenal feats in all of sports.
It was during that time that I won an unprecedented three consecutive Bass Anglers Sportsman Society tournaments, an accomplishment that the outdoor press has ranked with Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak and the Miami Dolphins’ perfect 17-0 season in 1971. I don’t know about that, but I believe it is a record that won’t soon be equaled.
The thought of being able to outdistance the nation’s top pros in three consecutive contests was unimaginable to many—until it occurred. The streak started with 48 pounds of Lake Okeechobee bass. I followed that with a whopping 84 pounds of Toledo Bend largemouths and 43 pounds from Lake Eufaula.
I was definitely on a roll and extremely efficient during that stretch. But if you ask me to cite a common denominator between the three victories, I would single out my skill as a jig fisherman.
Jigs are my favorite bait for most lakes in this country and I’ll tell you why. I’ve probably had more success with that lure as anything I’ve ever fished. It played a significqant role in my three straight wins. The last four tournaments I’ve won came on a combination of baits and the jig-and-pig played a big role in each.
That’s quite a statement of confidence in a specific lure, particularly considering that I have collected almost $300,000 in B.A.S.S. winnings and won sixteen tournaments and nine Angler of the Year awards in the process.
Jigs can be effective at any time of year.
From my experience with the rubber-skirted leadheaded lures in lakes and rivers all over America, I have come to consider the jig— particularly the jig-and-pig combination—to be the best big-bass bait of all in a wide variety of conditions. I believe the ability of the jig to produce large bass can be attributed to the fact that it resembles one of the bass’ favorite food sources—crawfish. And a major reason why jigs are effective in radically different waters in all parts of the country stems from the fact that crawfish are a prevalent food source throughout America.
It is such a great big-bass lure because it simulates a crawfish better than any lure known to man. There’s no question that the basic size and shape of a jig and the way it moves and hops emulates a crawfish more than anything else. The addition of a pork chunk makes it look even more like a crawfish.
Crawfish are a big source of protein for bass Everywhere. Some southern lakes, particularly the rocky lakes, like Truman Reservoir and Lake of the Ozarks, and others like Toledo Bend have a lot of crawfish and, therefore, they are better jig lakes than others. For example, Florida has some lakes that aren’t as good for jigs as they are for plastic worms because the basic make-up of the lakes are different from the rocky southern reservoirs and they have fewer crawfish. But Okeechobee sure fooled me.
Despite living on massive Lake Okeechobee in southern Florida for the past six years, I rarely tied on a jig. That all changed when Kentuckian Corbin Dyer used a jig-and-pig to catch 31 pounds (one of the largest seven-fish stringers in B.A.S.S. history) on the final round of the 1985 BASS Master Florida Invitational to come from nowhere to finish third. That opened the minds of many Floridians and others to the productivity of the lure in these shallow, weed-laden lakes.
I should have realized the power of a jig on Okeechobee bass long before Dyer’s heroics. Years earlier, Californian Dave Gliebe introduced Floridians to the art of flipping by winning a national tournament on Okeechobee with an amazing 96 pounds—on a jig and-worm combination. The second-place finisher had more than 60 pounds, a guy named Roland Martin.
The value of fishing a jig on Okeechobee doesn’t escape me anymore. I’ve come to the conclusion that if you want to catch a big fish, use a big jig—anywhere.
In the last few years jig-makers have gone wild with colors, manufacturing every hue and color-combination under the rainbow (or Color C-Lector). As a result, the average jig angler is faced with deciding between as many skirt colors as a spinnerbait fisherman. But I have a simple system for selecting jig color.
The simplest way to choose color is to match the hatch. I use color combinations involving only four colors—brown, black, red and blue. All are colors that are found on crawfish during different times of the year in different parts of the country. There are probably more than 100 different species of crawfish and I think almost every lake has a slightly different coloration to its crawfish, so take the time to examine the crawfish and try to match your jig color to it.
The most productive color combination for me over the years has been brown and black. I team either a black jig with a brown pork chunk or vice versa.
Jig fishermen have adapted a variety of trailers for their use, including pork eels, plastic worms of various types, grubs and frogleg-like plastic extensions. For 90 percent of my jig fishing though, I rely solely on a jig teamed with a No. 11 Uncle Josh pork chunk, the combination that best resembles a crawfish.
But don’t rule out a jig-and-worm combination. I still use a jig-and-worm or a jig with a Mr. Twister Twin Tail as a trailer sometimes when flipping isn’t my main pattern that day.
Let me explain that. If you’re fishing a hot day or you’re running down the lake, the pork chunk can dry out very easily if flipping isn’t your primary pattern. What I mean by that is you may stop first at a crankbait point. Then you might run to a surface-plug spot. Finally, five miles down the lake, you might see a tree that’s fallen over in the water, which you decide to flip. By that time, your pork chunk has dried into nothing but a hard mass. So if you’re just casually flipping, it might be best to have something like a worm or Twin Tail tied on as a trailer. Then, when you pull up to that tree, you’re ready to go.
Jig fishing is most effective in water temperatures less than 60 degrees. Over the year, most of my big bass hit a jig in water between 45 and 35 degrees. Generally speaking, that makes a jig most effective in the winter and early spring for catching sheer numbers of bass, while a plastic worm is a better choice for late spring, summer and fall. But don’t abandon the jig in the hot portions of the year if you’re after big bass.
For many years, I thought jigs were just not a good summer bait, so I would automatically use worms once the water got over 60 degrees. But I conducted a pretty extensive experiment in 1980 that convinced me that jigs are a good big-bass lure in the summer, too.
I knew that Dave Gliebe and (fellow Californian and flipping pioneer) Dee Thomas had really done well flipping jigs most of the year, so rather than switch to worms when the weather got warm, I decided to stick with a jig-and-pork rind combination to see what would happen. That summer, I fished jigs in water with 90- and 95-degree temperatures all through Oklahoma and Texas and the tournament stops on the east coast. I fished it in every kind of condition.
I carefully documented everything and I found that I caught a lot fewer fish than I had on a worm. I had probably caught twice as many bass, on a plastic worm. But the fish I caught that summer on a jig-and-pig maintained a 4-pound average. A 4-pound average is fantastic. That proved to me that the jig is an excellent big-bass bait throughout the year.
Although my favorite size is a ¾-ounce jig, I advise anglers to match the lure size with the type of cover (and, to a lesser degree, water depth) they are fishing. The ¾-ounce jig is ideal for shallow-water situations like fishing a tree top or stump field because it falls at a tantalizingly slow speed. But thick cover like bulrushes, milfoil, hyacinths and hydrilla usually form an impenetrable barrier for jigs of that size. So I will usually switch to a 
-or 1-ounce jig—whatever size it takes to puncture such cover.
And I concentrate my jig attacks in some of the toughest cover imaginable, while avoiding open-water situations.
I never throw a jig in something that it can’t bump through. When I’m fishing a jig, basically, I’m throwing it over things and through things.
Unless I can feel it pull up over a limb or pull up on a rock—actually be in contact with the cover—I don’t feel like I’m fishing the jig in the manner that would be most productive. I’ve found a jig is most effective when you bump it into the cover or slowly pull it over a tree limb and, at the last moment, shake it over the top and let it flutter down the other side. As soon as I see it sink, I really concentrate hard because that’s when bass will often hit it. So it’s important to be a line-watcher when fishing jigs.
It was during my winning streak in 1980-81 that I developed a three-pronged attack for jig fishing that involves three distinctly different methods of getting the lure to the fish.
My most common method was the conventional California-born flip ping technique that allows you to quietly and accurately present the lure to bass in heavy cover. The technique involves stripping off line from reel with one hand and using a pendulum motion to propel the jig just above the surface of the water before dropping it into the desired location.
It was during my tournament victory on famed Toledo Bend in 1980 that I developed my “flip-cast,” a method of flipping long-distance that has paid major dividends for me since its invention.
It was a spring tournament and I was fishing water so clear that I could actually see the fish spook every time I got close enough to flip a big stump or tree.
I tried to flip these places the conventional way from a farther distance away, but the best I could get was a flip of 25 or 26 feet. Even at that distance, I was scaring the fish.
I couldn’t cast to it because there was no way that a regular casting rod could handle these big fish in this heavy, heavy cover. So I had to use my flipping stick and that’s when I developed my flip cast. The flip cast is a very simple cast. You simply let out enough line to match the length of your 7 ½-foot rod. You then grasp the jig in your left hand (assuming you are right-handed). Now, as I make an underhanded motion by swinging the rod upward sharply, I take the jig and both aim and propel it with my left hand like I was bowling. By using your left hand, you can get another 10 or 15 feet more than conventional flip ping. That gives you a cast of 35 to 40 feet that is very accurate and still has a quiet lure presentation.
But even with the ability to flip-cast 40 feet, I found there were times when a fish would break the surface off in the distance and I had no way to present my jig to it. Or I was unable to fish a solitary piece of timber away from the line of stick-ups I was flipping without taking the time to motor over to it.
The flip cast is a very simple cast. You simply let out enough line to match the length of your 7 ½-foot rod. You then grasp the jig in your left hand (assuming you are right-handed).
Now, as I make an underhanded motion by swinging the rod upward sharply, I take the jig and both aim and propel it with my left hand like I was bowling. By using your left hand, you can get another 10 or 15 feet more than conventional flipping.
As the lure arrives at the target, bring your left hand back to the reel and you are immediately on point in case a fish nails the lure as it hits the water.
It was then that I realized the potential value of being able to cast jigs on heavy tackle like flipping sticks.
It takes practice to develop a feel for using the big rods to make long casts, but the versatility this particular skill provides is well worth the effort to learn it. Not only can you make a long cast and cover more water, but you will also have the good hook-setting ability that a stout flipping stick gives you.
In 1985, the willow-leaf spinnerbait craze hit this country with a force never before seen in the fishing industry.
When Bassmaster Magazine unveiled the so-called Secret Bait of the Pros, it captured the imagination of America’s bass fishermen. Here was an unusual big-bass lure that was dominating the national tournament scene, a bait that the pros guarded zealously, but finally the secret was out.
Bass anglers stormed their tackle stores in search of this magic lure, while the nation’s manufacturers scrambled to respond to this sudden upsurge in inter-est. Only a few manufacturers, like Blue Fox, were ready when the food-gates of enthusiasm broke loose.
This 8-pounder hit a No. 5-bladed willow-leaf spinnerbait as it fluttered down into a 6-foot deep hole in the hydrilla on Lake Okeechobee.
I’m a big believer in flash points. And with all of the experimenting I’ve done with the willow-leaf, Colorado and Indiana-style blades, I’ve carefully examined the flash points of each. And the willow-leaf blades just have a larger and brighter flash point than the more oval-shaped blades. Just look at the size of a No. 5 willow-leaf blade compared to a No. 5 Colorado. The surface area of the blade that gives off the sun’s reflection is a heck of a lot bigger.
And with the big willow-leaf blades, like a No. 7, it would take the biggest Colorado blade in the world to match it.
Besides the size, the shape creates a different flash point. A Colorado-style blade condenses the flash of the blade to a smaller area because it is a wider piece of metal than a willow-leaf blade. But a willow-leaf blade spreads the flash out more because it is longer. And that’s important.
What that longer flash creates as the blade is shining and rotating through the water is a hologram that more resembles the natural body shape of baitfish. And that is important. For the first time, a spinner bait—the one lure that doesn’t resemble anything a bass would eat upon close inspection—has a long shape that a fish could mistake for a shad.
Besides the superior vibration that a willow-leaf bladed spinnerbait emits as it’s pulled through the water, that hologram effect is the secret to its fish-catching power. My good friend Cliff Shelby, an executive with Ranger Boats and an excellent bass fisherman from Arkansas, be lieves in the value of adjusting the size of that hologram by adjusting the size of the willow-leaf used as the shad grow bigger and bigger throughout the year.
With Blue Fox’s Roland Martin Big Bass Spinnerbait series, I have developed three sizes of willow-leaf bladed lures to handle all fishing situations: No. 7 blade on a ½-ounce lead head; No. 5 blade on a 
-ounce body; and a No. 3 blade on a ¼-ounce body.
By understanding the applications for each size, you can greatly improve your catch rate. You will have much greater success than you will if you stick with throwing the biggest willow-leaf bladed spinner bait available.
The No. 7 bladed spinnerbait has a definite, but limited application. It is not a real pleasant bait to fish. You have to use heavy tackle and it doesn’t cast or retrieve very easily. People are really going to be dismayed by the performance of the No. 7 bladed spinnerbait if that’s all they use throughout the year.
The No. 7 blade is effective in parts of the South where you can slow-roll it through milfoil and other grasses. On Lake Okeechobee, I put it on 30-pound line and it produces some big bass from the thick vegetation. It’s a good grass bait for big bass, but you will not catch very many fish with it, because its size automatically eliminates some bass.
But the No. 7 bladed willow-leaf spinnerbait has some excellent applications for musky and pike in the North. I think it is of more value to the musky and pike fishermen than it is to bass anglers. Although I have caught 5-pound smallmouths in Canada on it, I was amazed at its ability to produce big pike and musky. And it is one of the few spinnerbaits with the body strength capable of handling big pike and musky.
This lure could prove to be the pike and musky enthusiast’s ace in the hole.
But I use the No. 7 bladed spinnerbait selectively and seldom these days for bass.
The spinnerbait I use the most is the No. 5 Roland Martin Big Bass Spinnerbait, which is the best and most versatile all-around size.
The No. 5 casts and performs better than any size I’ve used. And it produces more big bass—4 pounds and up—than any other size of willow-leaf blade. And believe me, you may not be hearing about it, but quite a few national tournaments have been won recently on that No. 5 blade.
It casts like a bullet and is so much easier to fish than that big No. 7. The willow-leaf bladed spinnerbait seems to be most effective when it is slowly rolled over logs and through grass and the No. 5 bladed lure is the easiest to control in all types of cover. It is extremely weedless.
I haven’t found a type of cover or structure that is immune to the No. 5 bladed spinnerbait. I will fish it in open water in a clear-water western lake like Lake Mead. I will bounce it off of boulders and standing timber. I will buzz the top of submerged grassbeds and then run it through the vegetation. It’s a great lure for working boat docks. I often work it as a drop bait in cover like lily pad fields.
The No. 5 bladed spinnerbait has a good feel to it, which is important with spinnerbait fishing. You need to keep in good contact with your lure so that you know when you have bumped a log or have been bumped by a half-interested fish. That No. 5 blade resists your pull enough so that you can retrieve it with a tight line and still drop it deep. You have more control over it, which allows you to fish it more effectively. You can feel it as you pull it over a submerged tree limb and know exactly when to let it sink.
With so many spinnerbaits, once you cast it out, you just don’t feel anything. With this No. 5 blade, you can really feel just how deep it is and how it’s working. You can tell whether it’s got grass on the blade, whether the blade is rotating properly. With a blade with good vibration, if you feel it missing a beat, you know that you have either hit a piece of grass or a bass has kind of half-struck at it.
This is one of the most responsive spinnerbaits you’ll ever use.
If you’re interested in numbers more than size, No. 3 Roland Martin big bass spinnerbait is the lure for you. If the sheer fun of catching fish more important than fishing all day for a single trophy bass, you’ll really enjoy the No. 3 blade spinnerbait.
The No. 3 willow leaf spinnerbait is geared more for catching a lot of small fish. I’ve caught big bass on it—including a 3 pounder while filming a television show in 1987—but in general, that is the size lure that a 1½-pound bass will hit. If you run that No. 3 blade spinnerbait in front of a 1½-pound bass, he will go nuts over it. If you run a No. 5 spinnerbait by a 1½-pound bass and he’s really hungry, he might hit it. Otherwise you would probably scare him off.
You will catch more bass on that No. 3 bladed spinnerbait than any size willow-leaf blade made. There’s no question in my mind about that.
And it is a very versatile bait. I enjoy fishing it in clear-water situations on 12- to 14-pound line in relatively open water. It’s an excellent bait for skimming it across the top of deep-water grass and then allowing it to sink as it reaches the edge of the grass. Or you can run it through thick grass.
It is a tremendous smallmouth bass lure as well.
In the spring of 1986, on Lake Ontario, we found that smallmouths go crazy over this little spinnerbait. We were catching 3- and 4-pound smallmouths consistently on it. It is as good a smallmouth bass bait as I’ve ever used.
When choosing the color of skirt and blade to use, I use a single criteria—water clarity.
As far as I’m concerned, there are only two skirt colors—white and chartreuse. I’ve fished every color known to man, but my consistent success has always come on those two colors. That doesn’t mean that other colors won’t produce fish, however. I probably should be more open-minded about spinnerbait colors, but success tends to make you a little complacent.
In clear water, I use mainly a white skirt and a nickel blade. That is a visible combination that a fish can often see from 35 feet away.
In the dark, off-colored water, I’ve had good success with chartreuse skrits and a copper or gold blade. In muddy water, I like a chartreuse skirt and copper blade combination.
The willow-leaf bladed spinnerbait has received more publicity than any other lure in recent years. It is not a magic lure. But if you will learn to fish all different sizes of the blades in a variety of situations, you will become a much more productive fisherman.
Stickups are one of my most productive patterns, and one reason is that most new lakes have stickups. I try to travel the country and fish as many of the new, productive lakes as I can—lakes which are five or six years old. I’m talking about hundreds and hundreds of different reservoirs in the south, the midwest, and even in the north. If you hit them after five to seven years, you’ll find there are still a lot of stickups. This is secondary growth. After the timber was cleared, a lot of stickups grew during the first couple of years before the impoundment finally filled up. Quite often these stickups hold a lot of bass, and the spinnerbait is one of the fastest ways to catch ‘em. You cover a lot of water making thousands of casts. Look for stickups along the shorelines.
This sounds really crazy, but a good, solid pattern is slow-rolling the stickups. What I do is throw past the stickup and then bump the stickup with the spinnerbait. As soon as it comes over the top of it, I drop it down with just a little bit of tension to the shady side of the stickup and just roll it over the limbs. Most of the time this gets their attention—the fact that it’s bumping the stickups and limbs. As it rolls down to them in the shadows, that’s when they hit it. Bass have no eyelids, so most of the time they seek deep water in most reservoirs. But because of the heavy stickups that provide a lot of cover, even in the summertime the fish will be in 2 to 4 feet of water and often hiding beneath the dense, shadiest part of the stickup. Particularly in a new lake where there are simply a lot of bass, these fish are right in the shade. You’ve got to drop the lure right on top of them. And the strike is a Reflex action. The lure’s coming right into their territory—right into the space they’re occupying. It doesn’t work to cast by the stickup and retrieve it past the bass; you have to really bump through the limbs and drop it on top of the fish. That’s the kind of retrieve which pays off.
All my deeper-water spinnerbait fishing is done with a single blade, because I can feel the blade rotate— particularly a No. 4 or 5 blade—if I’m using a good sensitive line like Stren. I put just enough back pressure on that spinnerbait with a No. 4 or 5 blade to feel the little thump, thump, thump as it’s sinking. If you use two blades, you won’t feel that thump because the two blades counteract each other. Anytime I’m dropping a spinnerbait deep, such as with the slow-roll stickup technique, I’m fishing the single blade on a long wire. I like the long arm for the weedless effect, and also the long wire gives me a flash point well back by the jig, so when they attack the jig or the flash point, they’ve got the hook.
There are a couple of patterns which are very important about slow-rolling. A bass can position himself in the shade of even a 1-inch-diameter stickup. It’s not much cover, but he can angle himself so that the inch of shade falls over both his eyes. It’s all the shade the fish needs on a hot summer day. Some of the best structure to look for during the feeding season in summer is the deepwater points on the main lake. During the hotter weather, the more extreme or more exposed points are best. Again, in the spring or pre-spawn season, the highly protected coves are usually best. Water temperatures which work best for this are in the 55-degree range. The water is fairly clear, and they start hitting spinnerbaits. If the water is a little dingier, they start hitting best in the 60-degree range. I continually monitor the water temperature; I leave a surface temp gauge turned on all day, and I also have a hand thermometer that I check at least five or six times during the day just to see if my surface temp gauge is working properly. I’m looking for the sections with the warmest water—usually the north pockets—in the spring, and in the summer it’s usually the other way around. Then I’m looking for cooler water. The coves are usually warmer than the main lake. The optimum temperature is 72 degrees. When bass are at 72 degrees, they’re at the maximum peak period of their feeding. They’re going to leave 80-degree water to go to 72, and they’re going to leave 65-degree water to go to 72, so you get ‘em both ways.
One factor about spinnerbait fishing is the sun, and the reason stickups are so good is that sunny days concentrate the bass. They might have been roaming around in shallow water which has only one stickup Every 50 feet, but when the sun comes out strong, they’re going to go to areas with shade. With cloud cover, bass are going to spread out all over; you might catch a lot of fish then, but you’re not going to catch them particularly in the stickups.
Wind also is an important factor. Bass cannot swim backward, and they’re going to face the wind. Regardless if it’s a stump, a rock, or a stickup, a bass will be in the shade facing the wind, because the wind creates a slight current. It’s important to remember they’re going to be facing the wind as well as being in that shade. To get the typical Reflex strike, throw into the wind and retrieve downwind downsun, and as soon as you reach the stickup, he’s going to be right behind it in the shade facing the current. Drop the bait right on top of the fish as close as you can to where you think his eyes are.
I like to play a little game by conjuring up an image of at least an 8-pound bass. Thinking big is fun, and it really is effective. Be optimistic and look at that stickup; there might be a hundred of ‘em, but look at the one you’re going to throw to and conjure up an image of a truly big fish—something you want to catch. It really instills confidence and keeps your enthusiasm going. Much of the enjoyment and pleasure of fishing is nothing more than to anticipate what’s going to happen on the very next cast. Figure all the factors and drop that spinnerbait right on his eyeball and you’ll catch him. He might not be 8 pounds; in reality he’s probably 2, but the point is you’ve figured out where he is and had fun doing this anticipation bit with that fish.
What I use for most stickups is a ¼-ounce bait. I don’t want it to drop very fast, and it makes a softer splash than a heavier spinnerbait would make. I’m throwing past the stickup, but when I come over the top of it and let the bait roll through the limbs, the ¼-ounce spinner bounces through there pretty good. I usually use all kinds of tails. I might use a plastic minnow body, a skirt, a worm trailer, or a piece of pork rind. There are all kinds of possible different combinations and variations you can experiment with. I have usually at least a No. 4 blade and sometimes a No. 5. Nickel and gold are my standard colors, but in very muddy water I might go to red, chartreuse, or bright orange.
I always throw either crosswind or slightly upwind with heavy tackle. The strike is nothing more than a tick when it’s dropping through there; it’s just a small tick, and in hot weather sometimes you don’t even feel the tick. They sometimes overtake it, and all you see is the line moving to the right or left or toward you. And at other times in hot weather you’ll feel the strike. The shady side is the key to stickup fishing, but I use Stren fluorescent line, and I can see what’s going on even if the water’s dingy. I watch for any side movement, because sometimes half the fish which hit you will hardly feel. You’ll just see that line start to move maybe 3 to 6 inches to the side. If that happens just the slightest bit, the lure might be falling down a limb, but go ahead and set the hook anyhow. You’ll get hung up a few times, but it’ll be worth the effort. If the bass grabs the spinnerbait for more than four or five seconds and chews on it much, he’s going to spit it out unless you set the hook quickly. By keeping a little back pressure on the lure you can tell what’s happening.
You need heavy tackle unless you’re in ultra-clear water which is fairly open except for a few isolated stickups. For the latter you can get by with light tackle and can throw 6-, 8-, or 10-pound line as long as you drop the spinnerbait on the close side of the stickup and there are no other stickups between you and the lure. In a lake like Santee-Cooper (which actually is two lakes—Marion and Moultrie) or Lake Seminole or some weedy lake in Texas, there are likely ten more stick ups between you and where you dropped the bait, and you might not see any of them. In waters like this I favor at least 17-pound line. Sometimes under these conditions I’ve gone to 20-pound or 25-pound line with a 5½-foot stiff casting rod.
I do almost 99 percent of my heavy spinnerbait fishing with heavy casting tackle. I usually have my drag adjusted pretty tight in this kind of cover, because the object is to pull ‘em upward and get ‘em up to the top of the water if you’re fishing 4 or 5 feet deep. I might have 30 feet of line out, so I can have a tight drag and yet the line will stretch. When I get one on top and he starts jumping or splashing, that’s good because he’s now away from the deep limbs and won’t snag the line. As soon as I get him right up to the boat, I loosen the drag. I constantly back my drag off a little bit on a real hot fish, because it’s been only seconds since he was hooked, and he’s lively and fighting every which direction. If you try to horse him into the boat, this is where you’re apt to lose your fish. When you have a hot green bass, even though there might be stickups underneath the boat, you’ve almost invariably got to back off on your drag and give him some line if he’s over 5 pounds.
Don’t stop him at the boat, because it’s too much of a shock even with 20-pound line. A 5-pound bass can break 20-pound line if you try to horse him into the boat within three or four seconds after he struck. Play him around the boat a little bit and keep him on top, but give him enough line if he wants to run. Let him run on top, and generally he’ll tire after 10 to 15 seconds. Slide him into the net. If you want to play with him, play with him when he’s in the boat.
One of my favorite patterns is prodding the weedlines. These aren’t weeds that you see; they’re weedlines which often are out of sight.
Most newer lakes have stickups, and getting right in there where you can drop a spinnerbait on the fish is one good way to work such a pattern.
Back in 1971 when I was doing promotional work for Lowrance Electronics, Carl Lowrance told me to go out to Virginia because we wanted to sell a bunch of locators out there and it’s a good section of the country. Mary Ann and I went to Smith Mountain Lake in Central Virginia. We got there on Sunday, and we met Bob Mayes, who was a Lowrance representative at the time and is a good fisherman from Roanoke. He had a trip lined up for us at Smith Mountain, and Roanoke newspaper outdoor writer Bill Cochran, and Tom Sutton, who is a draftsman and makes lake maps throughout the southeast, went along too. The five of us went out in two different boats. We caught about ten bass, including a 4-pounder, that day.
Sutton, Mayes, and I went back there early Mon-day morning, and we had a time limit. We had a store promotion that night, and a local TV station had called and said that if I could meet them at the store at noon, they would interview me and have the interview on the evening sports.
We got started fishing at eight a.m., and an idea hit me. I suggested we try a “nothing bank” and explained that sometimes in tournaments I pick the crummiest, worst-looking spot I can find, with my thinking being that every other fisherman thinks the same way and consequently the place never gets fished. There was a crummy-looking spot across from the boat ramp. It was adjacent to a farmer’s field, sloping grass with nothing but solid grass coming into the water.
We went over there and worked back into a pocket and never got a strike. I started the big engine and looked at the locator. It showed a big line of weeds almost to the surface, although the water was about 5 feet deep. I shut the motor off and we drifted out to where the solid weeds quit and the water was 6 to 7 feet deep with a bare clay bottom on out. I threw back over the boat wake with a chartreuse Zorro spinnerbait and let it tick along the grass until I didn’t feel anything, and I let it drop down. A good bass of about 3 ½ pounds stopped it. We were about 50 yards off the bank, and I grabbed a marker buoy and threw it to the edge of the weedline. I circled around with the trolling motor and located the edge of the weeds again and threw out another marker.
Bob Mayes caught the next bass—about a 6-pounder—by throwing his spinnerbait right on top of the weeds and pulling it to the edge and then letting it settle to the bottom. Then he pumped the bait upward. The bass were right on the lip of the weeds about 3 feet deep, and they weren’t difficult to catch. With the aid of the locator, we found a 100-to-150-yard stretch of weeds. They were the only weeds on this nothing bank and probably the only ones within five miles of where we were. We were right across from the ramp, and we hadn’t burned a half gallon of gas.
We started nailing the bass. Sutton caught a couple around 5 pounds, and Bob caught his biggest bass ever in Virginia—an 8 ¼-pounder. I caught a few in the 5-to-7-pound range. We kept seventeen largemouths and put them in the live well. We hurried back to Roanoke and got there just in time for the television interview. They filmed our fish. We weighed the biggest ten and they totaled 55 pounds.
The film ran on the sports show following the six-o’clock news, and we had the biggest ten in a 40-gallon tub full of ice and water. Most of the bass had died, but a few still had their gills moving. Shortly after the news, we started hearing tires screeching in the parking lot, and a couple of red-faced fishermen rushed in and started questioning us. We convinced the first fifty people who came in the store that we actually had caught those bass that morning and what they had seen on TV was an interview conducted as soon as we got back to town.
There was a gross of Zorro spinnerbaits in the store, and they were all sold by seven-thirty p.m. They had about twenty-five fish locators, and we sold them and took orders for eleven more by the time the evening was over. Sutton sold several of his maps on Smith Mountain, and he marked all the areas we’d fished.
Every year I go to probably thirty different store promotions, but never have I seen a more enthusiastic crowd than those 500 to 600 people who came in the store that evening following the TV interview. Smith Mountain is not known for its big largemouths, and 5-to-8-pounders make news in Roanoke.
I had merely found a good shallow weedline, and we had worked the edge.
I grew up in Maryland near a few lakes with weeds, but this was before I fished spinnerbaits. During the past ten years, I’ve fished a lot in Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, and all through the northern-tier states. In many of the natural lakes there, you’ll find a lot of weedlines. With Al Lindner one time in Wisconsin, we hit a lake in late April, and the bass were on the weedlines. Toledo Bend has a lot of weeds, but often the weeds aren’t visible, and early in the spring to find bass in the pre-spawn season you have to rely on your “underwater eyes”—a fish locator. Santee has some deep weedlines, and they’re hard to see in the early spring before they really start to grow up good. Some sections of the upper lake in the Jack’s Creek area have deep underwater weeds. Right on the weedline is the first area where the bass move into from deep water, and they hold on this structure until it’s really warm enough for them to go in to spawn. The most productive depth depends on water clarity. In real clear waters of the north, the weedlines might be 15 feet deep. At Minnetonka in Minnesota in the spring we caught a lot of bass on both spinnerbaits and plastic worms in Jason Lucas’ favorite lake, so it was a memorable experience for me.
If you go to a shallow, dingy lake such as Lake Seminole in Georgia, the weedlines might grow out to 6 feet deep. At Toledo Bend you’re apt to find the weedlines growing no more than 7 feet deep. The type of lure I use here is a -ounce spinnerbait. It’s kind of an inter mediate depth, and since I’m working the edge of the weeds, I’m not concerned with the shallow water, only 2 to 3 feet deep. I really want to fish that part right on the edge, dropping the bait down. Some TVA lakes, mainly Pickwick and Guntersville, have a lot of milfoil, and milfoil is common in lakes even in Texas and Oklahoma. But in the spring when the water temperature is still cold, it’s recessed and is not growing right to the top. These milfoil weedlines are extremely productive with ½-ounce spinnerbaits.
A bass caught in shallow water over a weedline can have lots of energy—always a thrill.
The long-wire spinnerbait is needed to keep the lure from getting snagged up. Often in the weeds you can put on a trailer hook. This works good because you don’t have much to hang up. If the trailer snatches some of the milfoil or elodea, snatch the bait just as hard as you can and often you will break the weed off the trailer hook. But you need at least 14-pound line. Actually, 17-pound is excellent for this because it doesn’t stretch much.
The kind of structure I fish is adjacent to the spawning coves during pre-spawn conditions in the spring when the water is a little dingy. The irony of it is that most lakes with weeds normally are very clear. Many clear lakes aren’t good spinnerbait lakes, but in the early spring before it really gets warm, a lot of rain and wind might give the water more color. The weeds have not grown up and they’re still deep. Then you can get by with heavier lines. Figure the weedlines as a ledge, and if the sun is shining, it’s forming a shadow on the ledge.
In the spring I like to find small, irregular features in the weedline; it isn’t always straight and might have a little point or pocket. If the wind is blowing in, the bass are facing that wind, and they’ll be on the current side of the grass. If there’s a pocket, the pocket has two points—one on each side of the weedline. The point facing the wind usually is the best pocket. Pockets and points produce fish Particularly when the wind blows.
The technique of retrieving the spinnerbait is important, but determining just how far out the weedline is is something you need to do before you even fish. Start zigzagging the weedline with your boat running if you’re looking for a weedline in 7 to 10 or more feet of water. You might be able to approximate how far out it is from what you can see, but marker buoys and your electronic locator are the best way. I take four markers and try to cover 50 to 60 yards at a time. When I line all my markers up, I now have a reference point, and then I idle along the edge of those markers with the big motor or the trolling motor. Sometimes I can see the irregular parts of it, such as a point I didn’t know was there.
For weedlines in 1 to 4 feet of water in the shallower lakes, you need to drift over them or perhaps use your trolling motor. Once you’ve got a couple of markers out or at least some reference where you can throw, the technique is to parallel-cast into the wind on the shady side and try to tick the weedline as I mentioned doing at Smith Mountain. When you quit feeling the tick, drop the spinnerbait and watch your line and keep a slight bit of back pressure on the lure. It’s just as you do in stickup fishing. The strikes are not vicious, Particularly from pre-spawners; they’ll just stop it. Some of the biggest bass in the lake are on the edges of the grass line.
Florida is a perfect place for spinnerbait fishing in the spring. When the water’s 55 degrees, you can catch a 12-pound or 13-pound largemouth in Florida in the eel-grass areas of Lake George, all through Rodman Reservoir and in Lake Kissimmee. The possibilities here are fantastic. There are not only exposed weeds, but some waters have underwater weeds. Lake Jackson has a lot of clear water, and a lot of weeds are 10 to 11 feet deep before they form the weedline. Weedlines are the key to some trophy bass just before they spawn, and this is true from California to Connecticut. Any weeds will do.
When I think of the lying-log pattern, I immediately think of Jeff Green, a former guide at Toledo Bend. He now lives in central Texas; he used to be from Tulsa. When I’d go down there for tournaments in the early 1970s, I’d look up Jeff and ask him what the fish were doing. He’d invariably tell me it didn’t make any difference where I fished in the early spring, the pattern to look for was a log lying out in the water. It could be in 2 feet or 20 feet, but it offered shade, and he’d say just cast a spinnerbait out there and run it down the shady side of that log.
Since Jeff told me about that pattern, I’ve tried it, and it really does work. Another good friend of mine from Oklahoma is Jimmy Houston, and lying logs are one of his favorite patterns. Jimmy’s one of the finest spinnerbait fishermen in the country. He designed the Red Man spinnerbait, and he won the B.A.S.S. tournament at Santee-Cooper in 1976 by fishing stickups and lying logs—always the shady sides. He and Jeff Green used to fish a lot together in Oklahoma.
Fishing the shady sides of lying logs sounds easy, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. Lots of fishermen don’t consider boat position, and this is critical. You need to cast your spinnerbait within 2 or 3 inches of the log and retrieve it from 1 to 4 inches deep along the entire length of the log. You simply must have perfect boat position to fish the entire length of a 60-foot log. Remember, too, with the Reflex strike you get with a spinnerbait, the first cast is the most important cast. When you see a log, don’t just cast at it, because if the lure doesn’t come right past the bass, he doesn’t get a chance to hit it out of Reflex action. Then he’s alerted; he’s heard that spinnerbait go by; he’s going to be leery and hard to catch. The average fisherman who comes up to a log—and it’s apt to be lying in most any direction—simply throws at the log and bounces his bait over it. That’s not the way to fish a lying log. That first cast has to be right down the log. If it takes you 20 seconds to get lined up properly on the log, then it does. But don’t make that first cast until you’re positioned right.
Bass get beneath these lying logs because they’re some of the only horizontal cover they have. Logs frequently lodge against the shore line, and as they stick out in the lake, the opposite end might be in over 10 or 15 feet of water. Along such a log bass can travel from a foot of water next to the bank to 15 feet of water in the shade as they search for baitfish. The logs offer horizontal movement to the fish, and this horizontal movement is not found in standing trees. The little bit of shade behind the standing timber is only in that one spot, and the same applies to a stickup. But with a lying log they might have from 40 to 60 feet of running room, and with all this latitude, a lying log in timber is better than the timber itself. A lying log on a regular shore line with no timber is better than a lying log in timber. The more isolated the log, the better its potential.
Jimmy Houston placed high in a tournament at Ross Barnett Reservoir in Mississippi, and he did this by running to every lying log on the west side of the lake and fishing only the shady sides. That west side of Barnett must have only twenty to thirty lying logs, but he’d run from log to log, and most of those logs had one bass apiece beneath them. Lying logs are not school-bass situations, but it’s a fast pattern where you can run up to the log, drop your trolling motor, get into position, and make one to three casts and leave and look for the next log. This is pattern fishing supreme!
The larger logs are better because they obviously provide more shade. Logs are enhanced if they’re near a point, a creek channel, or any deep water. The best lying-log pattern usually is in the spring when the water tends to be a little dingy and on the cool side, such as in the 50s. But if the lake’s very mud-d y, spinnerbaits are productive in 80-to-90-degree water temperatures, and lying logs are apt to pay off good then, too. A light spinnerbait with a fairly small blade is good for lying logs because the bait moves fairly slowly, and also a heavier spinnerbait, such as a -ounce with a No. 4 to 6 blade, is good because the resistance slows it down and permits it to travel 2 to 4 inches deep.
Most of the time with the lying-log pattern, you can watch your lure and never lose eye contact with it, because it’s traveling barely beneath the surface. Always use a trailer hook, because there are virtually no limbs to hang on, and if you make an accurate cast, you’ll seldom get hung up. Sunny days are good on the lying logs because the sun concentrates the fish. On cloudy, overcast days they don’t need to go beneath the logs for shade.
A maze of logs lying in many different directions is not good for this type of pattern because the bass could be beneath any of the logs and that first cast likely will spook them. The spinnerbait is good for fishing single logs at a time. The best logs almost always are lodged into timber or against the shoreline. Free-floating logs out in the lake do not pay off well. The logs need to be stationary, just as floating hyacinths do. I catch bass on hyacinths which are stationary but not on the ones drifting free in the lake.
A lying log is a great pattern in early spring. The tricky part is positioning your boat so that you retrieve your bait along the entire length of the shady side of the log.
This bass hit a crankbait fished along a sunken log.
Even in a lake which has been cleared of timber, a lying-log situation can develop because of high water in the spring. The high water might move logs off the shore. Not too long ago I was fishing for smallmouths on Rainy Lake across into Canada from Minnesota, and I was amazed at the logs in the lake. Masses of cut timber headed for paper mills are floated down the lake. I guess that in periods of rough water, these logs had drifted away from the logging operation. In the backs of a lot of pockets were logs. Some of them had sunk, but others were floating and sticking out along the rocky shoreline, and smallmouths would smack spinnerbaits and crank baits when the lures came past them. The fish were beneath the logs.
Most all lakes have fallen trees, and the pattern for fishing them is similar to the lying-log pattern. Position your boat so that the branches and forks in the limbs point toward you. Cast toward the base of the tree and retrieve toward the end of it. If the branches and forks are pointing toward you you’ll have less risk of getting the lure snagged up. If there are a lot of branches and forks on the tree, you might be better off to remove the trailer hook on your spinnerbait to reduce hanging up. If there are several big limbs coming out from the tree, you need to make repeated casts to each of the limb areas. Also, you might need to move your boat around to the other side of the tree to get good shots at limbs on that side. Take it easy and slow. I use 17-to-25-pound line for this fishing, reserving the heavier line for dingy water. Particularly in fallen trees you have to get the fish to the top of the water and keep him on top to prevent him from tangling in the deeper limbs.
Regardless of where you are, today you’re probably within a two- hour drive at the most from some decent bass fishing. The U.S. has 15 million acres of good bass water in reservoirs, natural lakes, and farm ponds. The natural lakes don’t have many stumps, but many farm ponds, impoundments, and flowages have plenty. A plain simple truth in bass fishing is that you can catch a bass on a stump with a spinnerbait.
In the big southern impoundments, such as the TVA and the Army Corps of Engineers lakes, there are millions of stumps, particularly on the edges of the river channels. Bass will lie on these edges, but more specifically they lie on the stumps. At Pickwick Lake in Tennessee, they night-fish with spinnerbaits and catch smallmouths around stumps in 3 to 5 feet of water. At Santee-Cooper, they fish spinnerbaits in the stumps in the Pinopolis and Russellville areas. At Sidney Lanier, a deep, clear lake at the outskirts of metropolitan Atlanta, points might have two, three, or five stumps, but that’s where the bass are in early spring. A knowledgeable bass fisherman who knows where the stumps are and can see stumps with Polaroid sunglasses really catches bass on spinnerbaits in the dingy waters in the spring and in the windswept waters in the fall when the current caused by the wind moves shad into these stumpy banks.
Bumping the stump is an excellent way to catch a bass. This is strictly a Reflex-action strike. The fish is lying right next to the stump; it’s his only cover and shade and protection perhaps within a 100-foot area. He’s so close to the stump that his body likely is in contact with the lower section where the roots start to spread out. That stump is probably 18 inches to 3 feet high, and it gives him just enough depth to have shade.
That’s the time to play the old game again and conjure up an 8-pounder image and picture him in the shade. Throw past the stump, make a wake with the spinnerbait, and when it gets to the stump, drop it and bump the stump and fall right on the bass. It really works!
At Santee I had a lot of experience with spinnerbaits in the stumps in the fall months when the water level was lower. In the spring the twin lakes were high, and there would be so much good shallow cover, such as button bushes, weeds, and lily pads, that I fished this cover and didn’t mess much with the stumps. But when the lakes were pulled 3 feet in the fall and the best remaining cover in the 171,000 acres of water were stumps, that’s where I put my spinnerbaits to good use.
The trick is first knowing exactly where the stumps are. You can fan-cast stumpy areas and bump the stump and catch ‘em that way, but the best way is to spot the stump and keep visual contact with it. Most of the time when I fish I’m standing up. I seldom sit down, particularly in tournaments. This high location plus keeping the sun at my back when I’m looking for underwater cover helps me find the stumps. If you’re looking in the water and the sun’s back over your shoulder, you can see a little deeper and you can spot the stumps a little better.
You don’t always have to bump the stump. You can buzz the spinnerbait over it as long as you get really close to the bass. You’ll get the same kind of reflex strike. I like to make contact with the stump, but don’t always drop the bait down. Sometimes I bump the stump and keep running my bait, and they grab it. The long-arm spinnerbait is good for this kind of fishing, and I like a ¼-ounce bait because heavier ones get lodged more easily in the cracks at the top of the stump. You don’t have to use extra-heavy line; I usually use 14 or 17.
Especially with autumn fishing, it really pays to study the wind. Often in southern reservoirs shad are blown into bays. In the fall, shad populations reach their peak, as many of them are winter-killed. Part of the fall pattern is to learn the direction of the prevailing winds. Study them for the previous week. If the wind’s been blowing out of the south, it’s been pushing a lot of shad slowly to the north coves. Then find north coves which have stumps, and fish them. If there’s any deepwater structure, such as a good point with ten to fifteen stumps on it, imagine how many schools of shad are moved through there. It’s a perfect ambush point for not only one bass, but a big school of them. Where the wind’s blowing and pushing water in a shallow lake in the fall is the only condition I’ve seen fish break the surface to any extent.
I’m not talking about a big school of bass, but maybe two or three running two or three shad. This doesn’t seem like much, but an alert fisherman will watch for this. At this time of the year the shad are 2 to 4 inches long and are mostly threadfin shad with a few gizzard shad mixed in. Anytime you see a couple of shad skipping on the top or a good boil on the surface, throw your spinnerbait at least 6 feet past the spot. Don’t drop your lure on the boil, because you’ll scare the bass, but throw it past where he was and run it 4 to 6 inches deep right through the spot. If he doesn’t strike, let the bait fall to the bottom and bounce it a few times. Intermittent twitches and pauses have about the same effect as bumping the stump, because you’re interrupting the rotation of the blade, and this gives the bass following it all the more reason to nail it right then.
A crank bait is good in deep stumps. If you’re on a point in a fairly clear lake and you can see stumps 4 to 6 feet deep, this is a good place to throw a crank bait. A spinnerbait, however, is much more shallow-running and snagless.
I won two major tournaments at Watts Bar Lake in Tennessee on spinnerbaits. One of the tourneys was in the spring, and I was fishing stumps and duck blinds in the upper end of the lake. The water wasn’t more than 2 ½ feet deep, and I was buzzing the lure. I would move along for 100 yards and not see anything, but occasionally spot a dark stump. The water was very dingy, and the dark spots usually turned out to be stumps. I did the same basic thing as at Santee; I’d go into shallow bays and look for the dark spots. Then I’d drag the bait up to the stump and try to bump it. I moved the bait faster in the fall when the water was warmer and slower in the spring when it was cooler. In the fall when the water isn’t quite as dingy, you can make a wake with the bait right under the surface. This is particularly good if the bass are busting shad, because the wake makes the bait look like a minnow skittering along on top.
A buzzing situation like that is a good time to use a tandem-bladed spinnerbait, but when I’m dropping the bait I like the single blade so I can feel it better. In 2 to 3 feet of water with stumps, a double blade is good because it has extra flash and might look more like a shad.
Stumps in deep water are excellent, but the problem is in finding them. They’re extremely difficult to find. Some contour maps show you where the trees used to be and where the fields once were. If you can find where the trees used to be, you can expect to find the stumps.
On Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley in Kentucky and Tennessee, a pattern exists which is similar in many man-made farm ponds. Shallow bays will have small creek channels which are only 3 or 4 feet deeper, but there’ll be three to five times more stumps and trees along those creek channels than anywhere else. It’s the same in man-made farm ponds, especially where a creek was dammed up to impound the water. The creek channel might be only 5 feet wide, but that’s where the majority of the stumps will be. Since these creek channels often twist and turn, it really helps to watch your locator. You can, with the aid of the locator, stay directly over the creek channel and fan-cast around and feel the stumps and work your way all along the creek. On Lake Barkley, this is the best way to execute this pattern. When you find the stumps on the edge of the creek channel, you’ve done a double deal; you’ve got the structure, cover, deep water—the whole ball game.
I’m frequently asked by beginners and novices how to get a spinnerbait to run right. A combination of things make a spinnerbait run right. The wire with the spinners on it—the arm—needs to be directly over the wire leading to the jig head, and the angle of the wire is important. Generally if the wire leading to the jig head comes off at a 30-degree angle and then makes another 45-degree angle to the wire attached to the spinner, this latter angle balances it out. The line pull is now above the jig, and the torque of the blade and weight of the jig are counteracted. It’s a triangle situation with the line pull in the middle, the torque of the blade (or blades) pulling on top, and the weight of the jig on the bottom. This way the bait will run true and will not roll over or run with the blades off to the side.
Houston, Ricky Green, and Jerry Rhyne are three of the best spinnerbait fishermen I know, and Cliff Craft is another excellent spinner bait man. I’m not as good with the spinnerbait as those guys are and I seldom rely on it as much as they do, but I do know their tricks. I fish it on six to eight different patterns in almost every tournament. In 1976 Jerry Rhyne qualified for his first BASS Masters Classic, and he said he used spinnerbaits to catch 90 percent of his bass. That’s really relying heavily on a spinnerbait.
One advantage to spinnerbait fishing is that the pattern is usually fast, especially in the case of stumps. In a shallow bay at a lake such as Santee-Cooper, there might be as many as 3,000 stumps in the cove. There all you need to do is flip your trolling-motor switch on high and get as many casts to as many stumps as you can. Stand up high, stay alert, and make a bunch of casts. The cast has to be accurate, because the first cast almost always is the one that gets him. Throw 6 feet past the stump, bump the stump, and hold on! With a good, sharp hook and a good stiff rod, you’ll get ‘em.
Lake points are as important in stump-bumping as in other patterns. However, a spinnerbait may not get you down to the deeper stumps; you’ll need a crank bait.
Speaking of sharp hooks—and now’s as good a time as any to mention this subject—it’s super important to have extra-sharp hooks, I use a Weber stone about 3 inches long and an inch wide. It costs about 75 cents. I sharpen each single hook about twenty seconds and put a needle point on it. Another thing I do is angle the point of the hook out just a few degrees. This increases the hook size about one size.
A spinnerbait is a deadly night bait for smallmouths, Kentucky bass, and largemouths in several deep, clear TVA and Corps of Engineers lakes in Tennessee and Alabama. This fishing’s still a bump-the-stump deal. In lakes such as Pickwick, Guntersville, Wilson, Center Hill, Watts Bar, Dale Hollow, and several others, guys like Stan Sloan, who manufactured the Zorro Aggravator, bump the stumps on the edge of the river channel. Smallmouths from 6 to even 9 pounds come up out of that river channel and get in the stumps lining the channels. Those channels have solid rows of stumps for miles and miles. Where they find a little feeder creek coming in to the main creek or a little bar that splits or drops off deep, guys like Sloan and Bill Dance and a whole bunch of those Tennessee boys get out there and bump the stumps at night with their spinnerbaits. They know where the stumps are, and with a single blade and a slow retrieve, they feel the lure hit the stumps. At night, of course, they don’t get much of a view of their line and they can’t see the strike; they have to feel it.
They often use sort of a yo-yo retrieve. They throw out to where they think the stump is and keep raising and lowering the bait almost as you’d fish a worm. When they feel the spinnerbait hit the stump, they keep twitching it a little faster and get it over the stump. These stumps aren’t merely stumps alone; with their root systems, they’re like pedestals, because the dirt beneath them is eroded away and each stump has ten to fifteen roots which make contact with the bottom. Smallmouths often are in the maze of roots, and they really bust that spinnerbait as it falls down on ‘em.
One night back in 1974 I was fishing Pickwick Lake, right on the exact spot of the intersection of Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama, with Bill Dance, and he said to remember one thing about smallmouths: When you feel the spinnerbait bump over a stump and then you feel a little teeny tick, set the hook. I kept my rod sort of low and was really concentrating on this little tick. I threw over this stump in 6 feet of water, and there wasn’t a tick. Something hit my bait on the run and seemingly at twenty miles per hour. I was using 17-pound line, and the drag zoomed and about 30 feet of line went out. A super-acrobatic smallmouth blew through the surface and went airborne. That fish jumped and thrashed four or five more times. I landed him finally, and he weighed 4 ½ pounds. We caught several other nice ones that night, but all of ‘em really crashed the spinnerbaits rather than ticking them. Looking back, I sort of think Bill was kidding me about waiting for a tick.
Deepwater spinnerbait fishing is something I very seldom used to do before being paired with a good ol’ Georgia boy named Cliff Craft in the B.A.S.S. tournament at Toledo Bend in 1976. I wasn’t very familiar with the pattern one might call “pumping the timber” with a spinnerbait until I fished with this young pro who lives near Lake Lanier. Cliff is quite a spinnerbait fisherman, and Lanier is a deep lake, and he likes to fish deep with the spinner.
I’d gone out in practice at Toledo Bend with a good friend, Paul Chamblee from Raleigh, N.C. Paul’s a regular fishing partner of that Columbia, S.C., fisherman Billy Goff, who, as I’ve mentioned, first showed me what I’d been missing at Santee-Cooper by not using the spinnerbait. Anyway, Paul and I fished that warmup period when it was cloudy and the bass were real active and eager. We’d thrown a lot of small red crank baits and a few jigs, and we’d caught some really nice bass. One day we caught sixteen from 4 pounds on up. We figured we really had found the best spot in the whole 190,000 acres of Toledo Bend. We were fishing the upper end of the lake along some ridges and timbered areas. We weren’t worried, and we just knew we’d take the first two places in the tournament.
Well, I got paired with Craft in the first round, and he had several spinnerbaits tied on his rods, and he mentioned he’d been catching bass 10 to 15 feet deep with the spinners. We got out to my jig-and-eel hole and I told him the bass were 10 to 15 feet deep but they weren’t hitting spinnerbaits—they were hitting the jigs and eels. My first cast through the hole produced a bass slightly over 5 pounds. Then I threw back and caught another 5-pounder. Cliff believed me and said he was going to try the jig too, if that’s what they were hitting.
We threw jigs, and even threw some worms, but after those two bass the action slowed down. That’s all we caught, and finally after about half an hour on that spot, Cliff said he’d fished too many spinnerbaits deep in this kind of heavy timber not to believe the bass in this spot wouldn’t hit ‘em. He tied on a white Spinnerbait with a ½-ounce head and a No. 4 nickel blade, and he cast out there to where we’d been fishing the jigs and eels. He let the spinnerbait sink to the bottom, and then he just pumped it up about a foot or so and let it sink back down as if he were fishing a worm.
On his first cast, he was holding the rod high, and as the bait was fluttering down, he said, “Oh! There’s a strike!”
He didn’t set the hook instantly; he just lowered his rod and reeled in the slack and about three seconds later he set the hook and caught a 6-pounder. I asked him about not setting the hook when he felt the fish. He said that in deep water they’ll hold the bait a few seconds and he just reels down so he’ll get a good hook set. He was using a standard spinnerbait with no plastic or pork trailer! I couldn’t half believe what I saw!
I missed a couple of bass on the jig and eel, and I figured I’d stay with it. But Cliff repeated his procedure. He said he had a strike, and then he reeled down and set the hook and got another one. He started catching 4-to-6-pounders. Every five to ten minutes he’d nail a big bass, and I wasn’t getting any strikes.
The area we were fishing was a flooded forest with limbs every where in the timber. Cliff simply pulled his spinnerbait up into the limbs and shook it through them. When he got it 3 or 4 feet off the bottom, he’d let it flutter back down. Many of his strikes came near the bigger trees. As his lure fell, he watched his line and would detect a little twitch. Then he’d reel down and set the hook two to three seconds later. He had eleven strikes and put ten of ‘em in the boat and those ten totaled 44 pounds. I ended up with only five fish weighing 19 pounds. Cliff led the tournament after the first day. I finally put on a spinnerbait, and on my first strike I set the hook too quickly and missed him. Then on another fish I set too hard and broke my line.
The second day Cliff tried some different water, and he caught only a couple of fish, but they were 5-to-6-pounders. In the meantime Paul Chamblee had been fishing spinnerbaits early in the shallower pockets and shallower ridges, and later in the day he worked out deeper with his red crank baits (he was using a Mud Bug). Paul finished second in the tournament, and Cliff Craft was third as the result of having a good third round. Cliff also caught the largest bass. Spinnerbaits helped account for second and third places in that tournament, and it was the pumping technique which really worked for Chamblee and Craft. I just didn’t catch on to it.
Paul and Cliff were both using spinnerbaits with ½-ounce heads. They were using the long-wire models with the wire coming all the way back to the hook. This made the bait very snagless, and both of them were using No. 4 and No. 5 blades. Paul was using a white blade, and Cliff used a nickel blade. Neither was using a trailer hook, because it was so brushy you couldn’t get a trailer hook through the limbs and timber without hanging up. They were using single blades because they wanted to feel the thump as the bait settled. Paul was fishing a little shallower than Cliff, but he also was pumping the timber. Paul was setting the hook a little faster than Cliff was, and he missed a few fish.
While pumping seems to work best in big timber, don’t be afraid to try the smaller trees.
This bass fell for a spinnerbait that was allowed to sink all the way to the bottom.
This was early spring, and the water temperatures were in the low- to middle-50s. It was a pre-spawn condition, and the pre-spawners were in schools and were slow and lethargic. When the water’s cloudy and warming up fast, these fish will come up a little shallower and will hit crank baits better. But when it’s bright and sunny, they’ll lie under the brush and they’re quite hard to catch. You really have to aggravate them. That’s exactly what the spinnerbait was doing when it fluttered down on ‘em. I think they were hitting it somewhat out of Reflex action and out of anger.
The jig and eel is a good bait for some of this type of fishing, but I think they strike it more out of hunger when they’re more active. At times the spinnerbait with it’s slow, fluttering action in heavy timber will outproduce virtually any other bait.
The south has twenty-five to thirty good timbered reservoirs where this pumping technique will catch a lot of bass. These reservoirs range from Table Rock in Missouri to Santee-Cooper in the southeast, Seminole in Georgia and Toledo Bend and Rayburn in the southwest. This type of bassing is best in pre-spawn conditions when the water is 50 to 60 degrees, and the basic depths are 5 to 15 feet. Almost all water clarities pay off, but in a very clear lake such as Table Rock, the bass will be a little deeper—maybe 20 feet down. In the dingier lakes, they might be only 5 feet deep.
I prefer the ½-ounce and 
-ounce spinnerbaits for pumping the timber. When you’re fishing deeper, such as in Table Rock, the slightly heavier spinnerbait flutters down a little faster and gets to the bottom of the cedar trees better. Table Rock has a lot of cedar trees 15 to 25 feet deep, and you almost can jig the spinnerbait in some of these trees and catch bass. With this pattern, wind doesn’t seem to make any difference, but the sun puts them a little deeper. I like a stiff-action casting rod—almost a worm type of rod—and look for heavy matted timber and throw well past the big trees. I cast and leave the button pushed on my reel until the lure settles to the bottom. I also use 20-pound line.
When the bait’s on the bottom, the retrieve is similar to deepwater worm fishing. Pull up the bait until you hit a few limbs. If there aren’t any limbs, pump it up a foot or so and let it flutter back to the bottom. Hold a little bit of back pressure on the lure so you can feel the strike. In deep water, 90 percent of the strikes occur as the bait is falling. This is true with plastic worms, spoons, and grubs as well as with spinnerbaits. If there’s a lot of heavy brush, your spinnerbait actually has to ride up 5 or 6 feet to clear a lot of those limbs when you’re retrieving it. The bait will get hung temporarily in the limbs, and you have to lower it a foot or so and sort of jerk it a little to get it to roll over the limb. Occasionally you’ll get hung up and lose your bait. Also, you need to be a line watcher for this fishing.
I’ve never been one to let a bass run with a spinnerbait, but Cliff Craft says when they strike in cool water, he likes to let them take it and get the slack out of his line and lower his rod to get a good hook set. Cliff pumps the spinnerbait in Lake Lanier where there’s very little timber. He just calls it pumping the structure. He’s fishing rocks, boulders, and structure. This same basic pumping technique could be applied to pumping weedlines and rock shoals in northern lakes during this pre-spawn period—provided, of course, that the state fishing season is open.
There is an interesting history behind the Rapala Plug since it initially was introduced in this country in 1959. (Many anglers call it the “Ra-PAL-uh,” but if you want to pronounce it as the inventor, Laurie Rapala, pronounces his last name, say “RAP-ul-uh.”) For the past four years I’ve worked with the Normark Corporation, which imports and distributes the Rapala, and so I know Ray Ostrom and Ron Weber. They’re the two guys who discovered the plug over in Finland and brought it to the U.S. to check it and test it out. They and their friends caught so many fish on it that they finally got the U.S. distributorship on it. They tell some exciting stories about the first year it came on the market.
No balsawood types of minnows were on the U.S. market back then, and the old floating/shallow-running plugs of that era were like the Heddon floating River Runt in that they floated at rest and wiggled slowly on the retrieve. The Flatfish and the Lazy Ike were similar. But this small, thin swimming balsa minnow was great for twitching on the top. It had a lifelike, quick little wobble underwater and would pop back to the top real quick on slack line. The high flotation caused an exciting wiggle which bass and other sportfish had never seen before.
Ray Ostrom said that in several of the natural lakes in the Minneapolis area, guys used the Rapala and started catching bass immediately and caught fifty to a hundred in a day. These were taken on the initial dozen or so Rapalas Ray and Ron brought back to this country. There was such a demand for the plugs that Ray and Ron, who had a small tackle shop, started renting out the baits for fifteen to twenty dollars per day. Whoever rented a Rapala had to put up a deposit, and if the guy lost the lure, he forfeited his deposit. This was also done in Florida with the first Rapalas in that state.
Finally in 1959 Ostrom and Weber acquired the distributorship for Rapalas in this country. The plugs cost two to three dollars apiece, but because of the demand and quite often in the tackle shop itself, the plugs were marked up to four, five, and six dollars. The Rapala for a long time was an “under-the-counter” bait. You had to ask for one, because you wouldn’t see it on the shelf. Many tackle-store operators reserved Rapalas for themselves and their friends.
One thing that added greatly to the demand for Rapalas was a feature story in Life magazine about 1960 on Laurie Rapala and his lure. Billy Westmorland, a pro and friend of mine from Celina, Tenn., remembers well when the Rapala craze hit Dale Hollow Reservoir, his home lake. He was guiding back then, about 1960, and boat-dock operators wanting newspaper publicity on the fishing out of their docks supplied him with one Rapala at a time. Westmorland says his customers wanted to buy the lures but couldn’t because there just weren’t any for sale.
The fishing-tackle industry credited the Rapala’s introduction into American waters for bringing back the “hard bait” market, which had sagged in the late 1950s after the plastic-worm craze struck.
Ostrom and Weber tell me that to get shipments of Rapalas in from Finland takes almost a year because of the procedure involved. They first have to negotiate the price and figure in the current exchange rate. Then they have to contract for X number of plugs. Then the Rapalas are slowly built by hand. Each one is hand-carved and hand-tested, and it is a very laborious process. After months and months have passed, the plugs are ready for shipment. Then comes the delay in exporting the baits. They have to go through customs, and then they’re held in U.S. ports until they’re finally cleared and counted and finally distributed up to Normark. From there the baits are shipped to the distributors and then to the tackle shops.
At first, Normark was a small company, and they didn’t have enough front money to order a million Rapalas. They had to pay cash for a year in advance, and it was hard for the small company to come up with from $200,000 to $500,000 against sales which would occur the next year. This is why for the first couple of years there was a continual shortage. Normark just couldn’t get the financing to order enough plugs.
This shortage of Rapalas really helped create a demand for American-made plugs which are similar to the plug from Finland. The original Rapala was more in demand than the American baits, but the fact that it was so unavailable led to millions of dollars in sales for other companies. Two of the early American long minnow-type baits on the market were the Rebel Minnow (made by Plastics Research and Development at Ft. Smith, Ark.) and Jim Bagley’s Bang-O-Lure (manufactured by the Bagley Bait Co. at Winter Haven, Fla.). The Rebel and the Bang-O-Lure got hot not only because they caught fish, but because fishermen had to settle for them when they couldn’t get Rapalas. Bagley was able to carve out Bang-O-Lures quickly and sell and distribute them in a month or so. With plastic injection molding, Rebel was able to mass-produce their lures in a hurry, too.
My first experience with the Rapala was on the Eastern Shore of Maryland on the Chicamacomico River in 1961. I was fishing with Lynn Torbett. Lynn, who died a few years ago, was a casting expert. He machined his own casting reels. He’d take his Pflueger Supreme reels and lap the gears with toothpaste to get them to run faster and smoother, and he even drilled holes in the reel handles to make them lighter. He used very light parabolic rods and light lines, 8-to-12- pound-test. His bag was long-distance casting accuracy, and he was probably the finest caster I’ve ever met. Torbett machined out a Pflueger Supreme for me several years ago, and we could take a No. 11 Rapala, which weighs only ¼ ounce, and throw it with a casting rod. You can’t do this today with even our modern casting gear, even with a lightweight Ambassador reel, though you can throw a No. 13 Rapala fairly well. Lots of bait casters today use the No. 13 Magnum Rapala, which is 5 ½ inches long and fatter than the regular model, or the No. 18, which is about 7 inches long.
The small No. 11s were relegated mainly to Spinning and spin-casting tackle, and this is another reason the Rapala became so popular. In the late 1950s, American fishermen were being swept up with the spinning-tackle craze. The little 
-ounce and ¼-ounce Rapalas were just perfect for novice and veteran fishermen alike with their spinning or pushbutton (spin-casting) outfits, and the lures were universally used. Virtually everybody could catch bass, trout, northern pike, or some type of gamefish on these little floating-diving-swimming plugs from Finland.
My first bass over 10 pounds in Florida ironically was caught on a No. 11 Rapala out of a small lake in the Ocala National Forest in 1976. That fish weighed 10½ pounds. I had a four-wheel-drive Suburban, and we found a 200-acre lake with no launching facilities. With that Suburban, we launched my bass boat. I’d taken light spinning tackle—8-pound line and a 6½-foot rod—and started twitching Rapalas along the north shore where there were some spawning areas. That’s how I caught that bass.
The biggest bass I ever heard of on a Rapala was an 18-pounder caught from Wall Lake, about twenty miles out of Palatka. Larry Mayer did a newspaper story on Lonnie Petty, the man who caught the monster. Petty, who used to operate a country bar near his Putnam Hall, Fla., residence, was fishing with a No. 11 Rapala, Zebco pushbutton reel, and 8-pound line back in January of 1964 when he caught that fish. Petty said the bass headed out to deep water and the line got caught on one springy strand of bullrush, and the rush kept giving and caused the fish to tire out. I hope I’m that fortunate if I ever hook one that big on 8-pound line—or even on 30-pound line, for that matter.
In clear, shallow water where bass typically spawn, light Spinning or spincasting tackle makes a good match with a Rapala.
The pattern which produced that 10½-pounder for me on the Rapala is a dandy one involving spawning bass. A spawning bass hits quite often, and this is particularly true with surface plugs. He’s not hungry; he hits the plugs out of protective reasons, and he’s trying to kill the bait. The best day I ever had with a surface bait at Santee was with a large propeller-type plug, the Diamond Rattler. The bass were rolling on the bait that day and were hitting it with their mouths closed. I finally changed the hooks and put real sharp trebles on the bait and actually foul-hooked the four largest ones I landed that day—two 9s and two 8s. One of them was hooked in the tail, two were hooked in the side, and one was hooked on the side of the gill plate. These fish weren’t trying to eat the bait, although they were striking it hard.
The same thing happens when you fish a Rapala or a plug similar to it for spawners. When the plug is thrown right over the bed, it intimidates the bass. It’s barely twitching for seconds right over the bed, and finally the bass comes up and sort of rolls on it to push it away. Maybe half the time he’s eating the plug, but quite often his mouth isn’t even open. A Rapala has three fine-wire Aberdeen treble hooks, which are extremely sharp. If the angler’s quick on his Reflexes when the bass rolls on the plug, lots of times he can drive the hooks into the area of the mouth. He might hook the fish on the side of its jaw, its face, or even on the side of its body and still land it.
The pattern for fishing the Rapala for spawners means going out and finding the spawning areas first. A good fish thermometer will work. When you find a spawning bed, go slow with your trolling motor or get out and wade. If you find several bass in a little pocket, you really need to work slowly and cautiously. Fish the Rapala early in the morning or late in the evening or during cloudy weather. The technique is to throw 2 to 3 feet past the spawning bed. When you’re in shallow water and are looking toward the bed, it often appears to be a little closer to you than it actually is. This is because of the refection angle of the water. When I’m casting to the bed, I purposely throw a couple of feet past the actual outline of the bed.
This type of fishing needs to be done on a completely calm day. Wind messes up this pattern because it drifts the plug away, and if the bass is there on the bed, he doesn’t have to be concerned with the lure because it drifts away by itself. But if it’s completely calm, the plug hits a foot or so from his bed and lies there motionless. Keep sufficient slack line in the water and don’t put any pressure on the lure, because any tension would cause it to move. Let the plug lie there for ten to even thirty seconds. The bass really gets nervous at this point, and usually it’s the small male bass that gets the most nervous. He’s normally more aggressive than the female, and he’ll often be the first to rise up and slap at the bait.
After ten to thirty seconds, give it that first small twitch. Don’t even make the bait go beneath the surface. Finally after about three twitches, make it dart under for the first time. If he didn’t hit it during those twitches, he’s apt to be looking at it. Now the bait is probably a few feet from the bed. Run it 2 or 3 feet beneath the water and let it float back up to the top. Then run it down for 2 or 3 more feet and let it float up to the top again. Usually if a bass is following it that first couple times it dives, he often will nail it when it floats up that second time. At this time the plug is still halfway between you and the bed, so you can reel it back in. Occasionally you’ll be reeling it in a foot or so beneath the surface, and you’ll come over another bass or another spawner you didn’t see, and you might get that one to hit. This swimming action back to the boat accounts for 10 to 15 percent of my strikes with this pattern, even though these can be considered some what accidental.
This is one reason the Rapala and similar plugs are more effective than the old surface plug which floats all the time. With the strictly floating plug, when you’ve fished the ambush point (in this case, the spawning area), you finally reel in the plug and it skits along the top, and you get very few strikes on a regular surface plug during that last part of the retrieve. With the Rapala, you get those bonus strikes on the last part of the retrieve.
Sometimes the topwater twitching technique doesn’t work. After a couple of casts where I’ve worked the lure in those small twitches and didn’t get the fish to hit, I might try a faster retrieve. I know the fish is there, and I’m trying to provoke him. I cast repeatedly and run the lure faster right over the bed. Sometimes after six to ten casts, each time swimming the lure over the bed, the bass blows his cool and hits out of anger in addition to his protective instinct. I don’t really give up on a spawning bass.
As I’ve explained previously, the male not only is more aggressive and less cautious than the female, but he spends three weeks guarding the nest, so chances are you’ll catch a lot more males. Sometimes you’ll still see a big female bass, but she won’t strike. After I catch the male, I release him and usually return later, because with topwater fishing, the first cast is probably the most important cast. If the female doesn’t hit after eight or nine casts, I figure she’s a real trophy and I’ll return and try again for her later. I like to go back about thirty minutes later. Bass don’t have a long memory; when they spook, they normally get over their wariness in fifteen to twenty minutes. In thirty minutes I sneak back there and try to make that first long cast perfect.
Generally you need light spinning tackle for the long cast, because most of the spawning waters are in clear, shallow areas. If there’s any wind blowing, you probably won’t be able to cast properly. A small Rapala floats in the wind. On that first cast, give the lure another ten-to-thirty-second pause and then the series of slight twitches. This is most effective for a big female, and after you’ve caught the male, she usually hits on that very first cast when you return.
Another thing about spawning bass is that you definitely need to be ready for a tiny strike. For some reason—I’ve never been able to figure out why—lots of times when a big female hits a topwater plug of any description, she sucks the bait in so delicately that it looks like a bluegill has barely pulled the plug under. What she does is fare her gills and create a suction or vacuum which pulls the plug under and into her mouth with no wake, boil, or swirl on the surface. The plug sort of just disappears, and that’s exactly what happened when I got that 10 ½-pounder on the Rapala.
When I was a kid, I fished Heddon’s Tiny Torpedo for smallmouths in the Potomac River, but I had never caught any lunker bass on a propeller-type surface plug. My first serious experience with these prop plugs was in 1967, when I met Jim Strader out of Florida. Jim had come to Santee-Cooper for me to guide him. He had heard about my success with Santee’s big largemouths, and he had designed a new plug, the Diamond Rattler. The plug is a cigar-shaped propeller plug about 4 inches long, and it has little glass diamond-like eyes with two very sharp English-type treble hooks with round-ground points like the old Mepps Spinner hooks of several years ago.
When Jim met me that morning, he said he was promoting a new bait which he really wanted to fish at Santee. He wanted me to fish the plug, too, and he was confident we’d catch a lot of bass on ‘em. I reminded him the time was July, the water was 85 to 88 degrees, and the weather was clear, and that we’d catch ten times more bass on worms than on his propellered topwater plug.
Billy Goff and I had a theory called “big bass, high noon.” We’d go to the heavy stickups and thick cypress trees and catch bass on plastic worms on the hottest days of summer at high noon. Writers like Earl Shelsby, who was with a Baltimore newspaper back then, had done stories on us catching big bass in the middle of the day. But the whole thing had been with plastic worms, and none of us really had ever tried surface plugs then. The bass were in about 5 feet of water which was fairly clear, and they were way down in the shade beneath those heavy branches.
Anyhow, Jim Strader said he still thought he could catch a few bass on his Diamond Rattler. He had a blue one, and he said blue was the best color. We started out first thing in the morning and went to some grass beds and lily pads. Sure enough, he caught a couple, including a 6-pounder, on his new plug. I explained—sort of dismissed it—that he’d caught those bass because the sun hadn’t gotten up yet on the water. Jim was working the plug pretty fast, and one thing about hot weather is that you often can work a surface plug quick over a lot of weeds, whereas in the early spring you have to slow it down. Bass have high metabolism rates when the water’s warmer, and they’ll hit a plug pretty fast.
About nine o’clock the bass quit hitting in the shallow water, and I told him that for us to catch any really trophy bass, we’d have to go to the heavy, deep willows and fish about 5 feet deep in the center of the lake and the center of the bays. He still was confident he could catch a few of ‘em on his topwater plug, but I thought his optimism was com pletely ridiculous. No bass would come out of 5 or 6 feet of water to hit a dumb ol’ topwater plug in the middle of the day. About an hour later we were fishing in these heavy willows, and Jim gets a strike. The bass was about 8 pounds, and he smashed the plug pretty hard. The fish was already on the top, and with 20-pound line and a fairly stiff rod, Strader rolled him right on out past the last couple of limbs and into open water. The bass jumped five or six times. I really was amazed at a topwater strike like that in clear weather in hot July.
Of course, I’d been worm fishing, and I thought the bass I’d been catching were on the bottom, but I figured out that many of the fish weren’t always on the bottom. Some were probably only a couple of feet deep in the shade of the bigger limbs. Jim, who is a very accurate caster, was putting his plug right in next to the logs and limbs.
Next we came to some cypress trees, and again he could cast his heavy plug beneath the overhanging limbs to the shady side of the trees right next to the trunk. That’s what I was doing with plastic worms. You needed to have your lure right against the trunk on the shady side beneath the limbs. There was almost no wind, and his Diamond Rattler lay there for fifteen to twenty seconds, and the very first time he twitched it, a 6-pounder blew all over it. I couldn’t say much at this point; I knew the bass were in the shade, but the fact they were hitting topwater plugs really freaked me out! I had caught several bass on surface baits in the spring around the shallow weeds and the spawning areas, but certainly not in the middle of the summer. We were fishing deepcover, 5 and 6 feet of water, in the middle of the lake, and he was catching big bass.
Finally about noon I told him I just had to try one of those plugs. I caught one almost 8 pounds, and we ended the day with four big bass. I had caught a few on the worms, but the largest bass were the ones we got on topwater plugs. We took some fine photos of those big bass, and Jim Strader subsequently used some of the pictures in his advertising.
I’ve been throwing topwater plugs for a long time, and I recognize their limitations, but a propeller plug for feeding bass is a super- strong pattern. You need fairly clear water, and the pattern usually works from 2 feet to 6 feet deep. If the water’s clear enough, they’ll hit a surface plug in 6 feet of water. This is a very old pattern which old-timers used in the summertime. They’d go out on the water at the crack of dawn and be back in by the time the rest of the people were getting up around the resort, and they’d get three or four big bass on a good morning. All a lot of ‘em used back twenty-five years ago were prop plugs like the South Bend Nip-I-Dee-Dee, the Heddon S.O.S. or the Wounded Spook, and the Creek Chub Injured Minnow. Those were big ol’ fat plugs with propellers on both ends, and they were heavy enough to cast good with 25-pound braided nylon line and the level-wind casting reels of that era.
The best and probably the major feeding time of the whole day is the first two hours of the morning. That’s when the old guys went out—when it was just light enough to see, and somewhere about eight or eight-thirty a.m., the sun got on the water and the activity quit. Many times you’ll not see any fish breaking on the lakes. Part of the pattern is the fact that no matter what I’m fishing, if I see any surface activity, I know the prop plugs will catch those fish. These are feeders in that area actually feeding. A prop plug excites them and makes a lot of noise. It draws fish from a long distance away. Those short twitches which make the propellers churn the water are really effective on feeding fish.
I basically look for shallow points, shallow brush, or shallow weed beds during the first two hours of dawn. I move the prop plug fairly quickly. Throw it out and let it sit four or five seconds, give it a short twitch, and then repeat this procedure. With the ambush points, I use a different system. I throw to a single tree, bush, or stump, and once I twitch the plug 4 or 5 feet past the ambush point, I don’t think he’ll hit if he hasn’t done so already, and I retrieve the lure back quickly and throw to another ambush point. Along shallow weedlines or shallow points I retrieve the lure all along the area, because the bass could be anywhere along the point or weeds.
One spring I was in Tyler, Texas, for a store promotion. It was May, and the bass had finished spawning. We went up to Lake Palestine, which is a timbered reservoir characteristic of many of the Corps of Engineers lakes in Texas. Texas has 179 major reservoirs with a total of over 2 million acres of water. The guide took me into a big cove where he said the bass had spawned a week or two before, but now the water was 75 degrees. I had my 18-foot Ranger bass boat. He said we needed to get in behind a bunch of logs, and right away the boat got hung up in the logs. I made a few casts with a spinnerbait and a worm and caught a couple of small ones, but way back in there where we couldn’t reach with the boat, I saw some bass chasing shad. We didn’t have any waders, but I suggested we jump out of the boat anyhow and go wading back into there. So we did that. I had some plastic worms in my pocket and also a Devils Horse wrapped up in a piece of paper. (The Devils Horse is one of the modern favorites in the propeller-plug family, and it’s been that for probably twenty years.)
A lot of logs were lying under the surface. I tied on the Devils Horse and threw it back where the shad were jumping. I was twitching it along in little short spurts when about a 4-pounder blew over it. I wasn’t ready for him and I didn’t have heavy enough line, and the bass dived down in the heavy brush and hung the plug on the log. That’s the problem with logs and brush fishing when you’re not using heavy line. Much of the lure usually is on the outside of the fish’s mouth, and when he goes beneath the brush, the plug gets snagged on something. This is true with a crank bait as well as a surface bait.
The bass was hung on the log and was thrashing around, and he put so much pressure on the hooks that he straightened them out and got off. That’s what usually happens with a good-sized bass when he gets hung up like that. I got my plug back and bent back the hooks and proceeded to catch another one of almost 5 pounds. This was early in the morning, and for the next two hours those bass continued to feed. I went back to town for the store promotion with my limit, and they weighed a little more than 30 pounds. We had a pair of 6-pounders and some 4- and 5-pounders. My companion said he had a small pond which he’d like to put those bass in, so we put them in my giant live well in the boat and that afternoon took them out to his pond and released them. They all survived, and they’re in his small pond to be caught again another day.
Topwater patterns really can pay off if you observe the conditions and particularly if you see any fish breaking early in the morning. Put on a good prop plug and cover some water and work it fast, and you’re liable to hit some of the most explosive fishing you’ve ever had. It might not last long—maybe only twenty or thirty minutes—but it certainly might be memorable.
Two of the most popular lures for this pattern are the Cordell Spot and the Heddon Sonic. I like the small 
-ounce Sonic in a yellow finish, and I use the ½-ounce Spot. These are similar plugs in that they’re sinking and also are fast vibrators. I throw them with both spinning and casting tackle, but with high-speed reels.
This is mainly a springtime pattern to use when the water is 50 to 60 degrees and the bass first come up on the dingy clay banks and points. You can burn these plugs down these crummy-looking flat banks and catch a lot of bass. Guys like James Thomas of Birming ham, Ala., and Junior Collis of Decatur, Ga., do especially well in spring tournaments with this pattern. In lakes like Gaston in North Carolina, all Thomas does is throw a small yellow Sonic on these flat-looking banks. Junior uses spinning tackle and about 12-pound line, and he fishes the dingier waters of Lake Lanier, Hartwell, and Clark Hill with a ½-ounce Spot. He looks for clay banks, puts his trolling motor on high, and makes a cast every 15 to 20 feet, and his trolling motor’s running three to four miles an hour. He fishes all day like that, and sometimes he catches thirty to fifty bass a day.
Burning the Spot is a water–covering technique, and it’s hard work: long casts and quick retrieves of the heavy swimming plug, hour after hour. But it’s rewarding.
There’s really not much skill involved in “burning the Spot,” but there’s a lot of thought and hard work involved. First, it’s like using a crank bait, but you’re making more casts and retrieving a bit faster than you would with a crank bait. If you burn one of these baits all day long, you’ll cover more water than with any other method of fishing I’ve ever seen. There’s no other method where your lure travels through more feet of water than when you’re burning the Spot. You need to be in excellent physical condition to do this. A lot of fishermen aren’t able to make these long casts and fast retrieves all day long for eight to ten hours. These lures have a lot of lead in them, and they cast a long way, and this is good because you’re fishing flat water and you need to cover a lot of it. You’re not fishing dropoffs, and you’re not really fishing targets all that much. You’ll occasionally see a stump or a stick coming out of the water, and you’ll want to throw near that, but these lures aren’t like crank baits; they won’t bounce over obstructions or through heavy cover. You don’t want to try to bump the stump as you would do with a crank bait or a spinnerbait, because the Sonic or Spot will get hung up.
This type of fishing usually is for pre-spawners when the water is about 55 degrees. The banks usually are sloping, and you should stay a cast-length out from the bank in water less than 10 feet deep. Good places to fish this way are in the backs of major creek channels where the channel itself is pretty silted over and is no longer very defined. The last mile of that creek might be a massive flat and often has a few stumps around. Junior Collis will stop half a mile from the end of the cove and with his trolling will work around the sides of the cove. Again, he’ll get out on the main lake and find clay points without much definition or deep water nearby, and he fires that Spot up to the bank and hums it all the way back.
When you’re humming that Spot, it has a very definite throb, and this throb is one of the most important parts in working the lure. You really need to identify the feel of the throb, because you seldom identify the feel of the strike. What often happens is in that 55-degree water, the bass hears the plug or feels the vibrations from it, or both, and he is apt to follow it and hit it from behind. Probably 75 percent of the time when you get a strike, the only thing you detect is the stop ping of the plug’s vibrations. When the bass hits, the plug quits vibrating. With the small Sonic when the wind’s blowing, at times the only thing I notice is my line moving off to the side. I’m using a graphite rod and am really watching, but this line movement is the only indication of the strike. Sometimes the fish moves toward you, and you don’t see the line move. But if you’re paying close attention, you’ll quit feeling the vibration. I like graphite rods for this fishing because you can feel the throb better. Graphite is more sensitive. Set the hook at even the slightest interruption in the throb. It also pays to watch your line, and set the hook when the line makes the slightest deviation in the arc it’s making as you’re retrieving the bait while your trolling motor is moving the boat.
A lot of fishermen miss a lot of bass when they’re burning the Spot. A big reason for this is that they don’t sharpen their hooks enough. Super-sharp hooks are especially important in this type of fishing.
There’s another situation which arises that is almost the reverse. In Louisiana there’s a bait made which is called the Rattletrap. The manufacturers advertise that with the Rattletrap, you’ll get the most jarring, vicious, startling strike you’ve ever experienced with a crank bait. It’s a good late-spring and early-summer bait on the flats in lakes such as Toledo Bend where there’s timber and stickups and where you’re fishing for suspended bass around the trees and in deeper stump fields and creek channels. The Rattletrap looks like the Spot. It weighs about the same and burns through the water with about the same vibrations.
But for some strange reason—and I figure it’s just a quirk of the bass—when the water temperature’s 65 to 70 degrees, instead of hit ting it from behind, the bass sort of angle in from the side and really smash it. The strikes are very vicious and hard, and the bait is moving fast anyhow. Mary Ann and I agree with the advertising on the lure box. We fished the Rattletrap at Percy Priest in Tennessee, and we had super-vicious strikes. We fished it again at Toledo Bend in the spring before her Bass’n Gals tournament, and the bass really nailed it. They just stopped it cold!
The same basic principles apply to the Sonic, the Spot, and the Rattletrap. All three are high-speed, underwater-swimming, fast- vibrating lures. They’re not crank baits because they don’t float, and the way to fish ‘em is not so much at ambush points as with crank baits and spinnerbaits, but rather along shallow banks and flats and the ends of coves. These are useful tournament lures because during practice or even in the actual competition, if you want to know if there are fish in a certain area, you can find out in a relatively short time with them. If you spent one hour burning the Spot in a big fat, you would have made over 200 casts, and you’d get some indication if there were any bass there.
One other consideration is that when you burn these plugs, you probably catch bass which are feeding and hungry more than any others. It’s not particularly a Reflex-action bait because you’re not primarily throwing at ambush points. You’re mainly catching bass which are roaming and feeding. That’s why they chase down these fast-swimming baits. Early morning and late evening are prime times to look for feeding fish, and then you want to cover a lot of water. You might also check the Solunar Tables and fish these lures during a major period. When you find them feeding good on a fat or a point, you can limit out in an hour with these vibrators.
A totally different pattern exists with a slow-sinking plug such as the Countdown Rapala or that slow-sinking River Runt which the late Lynn Torbett used. Counting down is a relatively new pattern in my repertoire. It’s not something I’ve been doing long. They have made a Countdown Rapala for years, and it looks just like the floating models, but it’s an entirely different lure for entirely different uses.
The Countdown is a lead-filled Rapala which sinks fairly fast and swims and wobbles along. It also has a good wobble while it’s sinking. Don’t throw it into 2 or 3 feet of water as you do with the floating models, but instead fish it on relatively shallow structure, such as on a rocky point. One of the best places to fish it is in the shade of a weedline. One of my favorite places to fish it is on a point. I try to estimate in my mind how deep the water is by judging from the slope of the point out of the water. Doing this takes a bit of mental geometry. If I think the fish should be about 10 feet deep, and from the slope of the point I judge that I’ll find 10-foot water 100 yards out, that’s where I’ll start fishing the Countdown.
On my first cast, I’m counting to myself … one … two … three … as the plug is sinking. (This is why the name “Countdown”; you can actually count it down to the desired depth.) If it hits the bottom on a count of ten and takes about ten seconds to sink, I’ll figure the water is close to 10 feet deep. I also might check my locator to see exactly how deep it is. I don’t want the lure to run 10 feet deep because it would get hung on everything on the bottom. On the next cast—if I can get that first one in without hanging up—I’ll count it down to eight or nine and start my retrieve with the plug about a foot or two off the bottom. You have good depth control with this plug.
This is a technique I learned as a teenager years ago from Jason Lucas, my favorite fishing writer back then, in his book Lucas on Bass. He didn’t use a depthfinder, and he didn’t care much for plastic worms, but he made some amazing discoveries in fishing. The most important thing he ever wrote about, I think, was counting down a sinking lure. I count down every sinking lure I use, whether it’s a Countdown Rapala, plastic worm, grub, jig and eel, or whatever. Every single cast I make with a worm (other than a floating worm), I’m counting as it sinks. I even do this in stickups; stickups are in different depths of water. If I’m catching bass on plastic worms 3 ½ feet deep in stickups, and I throw to a 5-foot-deep stickup and don’t get a strike and then I throw to a stickup 2 feet deep and don’t get a strike, this makes me aware that nearly all the bass—if not all of ‘em—in the area I’m fishing are hitting at 3 ½ feet deep. When you’re throwing 40 feet away from you, lots of times you don’t know if there’s a ditch or depression there or if the bottom’s fat or there’s a hump in that spot. But you can learn what’s out there by counting. I count every time I make a cast with any lure that sinks.
One thing about a Countdown Rapala is that it’ll hang up on everything it bumps. You can’t bump anything with this plug and not get it hung up. And other than wasting time trying to get your lure free and blowing that cast and that shallow spot, keep in mind that Countdown Rapalas aren’t exactly as inexpensive as plastic worms! A Countdown Rapala is an open-water lure, but it can be used in areas with cover as long as you count it down properly and get your depth control worked out. Another thing to keep in mind about depth control is that when you make a long cast with a sinking plug, you’re pulling the lure at a horizontal angle during the first part of your retrieve and it swims at that depth pretty good. But as you keep retrieving, you’re building up line on your reel and you’re pulling at a sharper upward angle on your lure. For example, if you make a 50-foot cast and count the plug down to about 6 feet, it might be running right at that depth for the first 10 or so feet. But if you’re turning your reel handle two revolutions per second, by the time you get the plug back to 20 feet from you, you’ve got a bigger line buildup on your reel and you’re moving the bait faster when you crank your reel handle two revolutions per second, and you’re also pulling the bait upward and shallower instead of horizontally. So to keep that 5-to-6-foot depth, the closer you get to the boat, the slower you need to retrieve. It’s not easy to keep this consistent depth control; doing so takes quite a bit of practice. Lots of little tricks like this you can learn, but don’t be disappointed if you don’t master them overnight. I certainly didn’t, and neither did Bill Dance, Homer Circle, Tom Mann, Rick Clunn, or any of the experts I know.
When in open water, a countdown Rapala can be deadly.
One way to learn to maintain this consistent depth control is to use your locator and find a big flat where the bottom is almost as level as your living-room floor. If the water’s, say, 9 feet deep everywhere out there, make a long cast and count the lure to the bottom. If it took you nine counts, the next time cast out long again and count to eight. When you get the lure about halfway back to you, let it free-fall to the bottom. If you were retrieving it 8 feet deep, it should reach the bottom on a one-count. If it hit the lake floor on a three-count, you were bringing it in only 6 feet deep at the moment you let it fall. This is a good way to practice and learn depth control. Remember, too, the size of your line affects the speed at which the lure will sink. A Countdown Rapala will sink slower with a 14-pound-test line than it will with 8-pound-test. Different reels affect this, too, because they have different speeds. By practicing and working out the system, you can learn to maintain an almost totally horizontal retrieve. It’s all a matter of timing, and once you get it down pat, you can get this lure to run at any depth you want it to run.
Some fishermen stick their rods straight down in the water almost to the handle and maintain depth control that way. It works, but I don’t like to do this because I’m all out of position for the strike. I prefer to work out the system and occasionally check by letting the lure free-fall halfway through the retrieve, as described above.
This counting down is very popular at Watts Bar, Dale Hollow, and Percy Priest in Tennessee. The boys up there take No. 7 Countdown Rapalas and run ‘em on 6- or 8-pound line with spinning tackle. Most of the lakes up there are gravelly, with a few stickups and stumps and chunky rocks. They like to fish particularly on points with the wind blowing in, because that little No. 7 Countdown closely resembles a small threadfin shad. They throw it across the point and count it down to whatever depth they want it to run, and they retrieve it at a slow speed.
You really need to run the Countdown slower than you would a crank bait such as a Bomber or a Fat Rap. The difference between a Countdown and a conventional crank bait coming across the same point, even if they’re similar in size and color, is that you have to run the crank bait much faster to get a desired depth. There are times when bass won’t hit a fast-moving lure, but they’ll hit the slow-swimming bait. I do like to use crank baits, but there are times when the fish might be deeper than the crank bait will go. If the bass are down 15 feet, there’s not a small crank bait in your tackle box that will reach them. Even if you have a crank bait that will run 11 feet deep, you can’t get it down there immediately, and it might be moving too fast for the fish.
But you can fish a Countdown deep and bring it slowly across a point. Most of the strikes are discernible; you don’t have much difficulty with this factor because you’re usually fishing the bait slow and the plug does not wobble with a violent action as a crank bait does. You’re not putting much pressure on your lure. The line isn’t slack, but it does have a slight bow in it. When they hit it, they usually knock the bow out, and you feel the strike. The hooks are extremely sharp, and you don’t miss many fish with it. Often you’re fishing it slow and in clear water, and they zero in on it and engulf it. Sometimes they take the small Countdowns way down in their throats, and you need a pair of needle-nose pliers to extract the hooks.
This is a pattern I reserve for early spring. In many of the shad lakes in the fatlands—reservoirs like Toledo Bend, Sam Rayburn, and Santee-Cooper—there are creek channels back through big flats. When you get back in the cove, it might be big, half a mile wide, but the water is pretty shallow. The entire fat might be only 4 to 8 feet deep, but the creek channel is another 5 to 10 feet deeper. Most of the time I crank the creek channel, which is a little bit dingy in the back of a major cove.
Big females come back in the creeks in early spring before they spawn and lie up on top of the creek ledges.
Big female bass come back in the creeks in early spring. Just before they spawn they lie up on top of the creek ledge, and the depth ranges from 3 to about 8 feet. I work my boat down the center of the creek. In timbered reservoirs it’s a little easier to stay in the creek channel, because you can look at the trees and tell where the channel is. In an open reservoir the creek channel ledges are lined with stumps, and it’s more difficult to follow the creek. In the latter you need to put out buoys to mark the channel. There are apt to be just as many fish in an open cove as in a timbered cove, but it is easier to fish in a timbered cove.
One February I was fishing Sam Rayburn with Jim Walker. February isn’t considered a top bass month for Rayburn, but an extreme warming trend was in progress when we got there. The water was pretty dingy, and nobody had been catching any bass anywhere. The shallow water had really warmed up, and I told Jim I thought there might be some bass working in the creek channels and we might get them to hit crank baits. We went to the back end of Ash Bayou and found 55-de-gree water instead of the 45-degree water in the main lake. It was just a perfect temperature for crank baits. There were a lot of old oak trees on the edge of a small creek channel we went into. The channel was hard to follow because it was less than 10 feet wide and it twisted and turned.
Jim and I went down the center of the creek as best we could and cast to the sides of the trees. Because the big females were looking for the warmest water they could find, they were on the sunny side of the trees. They were only 3 feet deep in about 5 feet of water, and sometimes we’d see the swirl of a fish after the plug. The trick was to bump the edge of the tree, and that often produced strikes. I caught mine on an old brown Bomber, that had been in my box for years. Jim and I had ten bass over 5 pounds that day. We had some smaller ones, too. Later that day we talked to several guides and other fishermen who had spent the day mostly on the main lake. They caught some bass, but nobody had big ones like ours. What I think happened is we found the best available water temperature for those big pre-spawners, and that’s why they were there. That pattern lasted all week, and that also is one of the first patterns to develop in the early spring. Jim Walker died as a young man. He was my age, but a couple of years ago he had a heart attack which was fatal.
Often in the summer I turn the trolling motor on high and go up the creek channel, casting at every tree.
Since most lakes are not timbered, most creek channels are in open water in the coves. The way I approach this fishing is to run back into the cove until I hit a bottom depth of about 8 feet. This is about as deep as I can crank a crank bait effectively. I put out a marker buoy there. If I have a contour map of the lake, I’ll look on it for a major bend in the creek I’m on. A creek bend usually has a better dropoff, and the structure aspects of fishing creek channels are important. Chances are, this major bend is undercut, and any stumps which might have been there probably have exposed roots which stick out over the water. This is a good suspending place for bass, and the severity of the dropoff often indicates that the bend will hold bigger bass and more of ‘em. I keep working back toward the end of the cove to shallower water until I get shallow enough that I can see the stumps. With Polaroid glasses, they’ll appear as dark spots in the water. This is as shallow as I’ll fish with a crank bait, although occasionally the bass will be shallower. If they’re in a foot of water, this isn’t a crank-bait depth, and in that case I’ll probably go to a spinnerbait or a plastic worm or something else.
Five-foot depths on the bends of the creek channel are usually very good places to fish. Sometimes you need to mark these spots with a marker buoy or two. It’s important to stay in the deeper water in the creek and throw the crank bait on the flats. I like to throw it 10 feet past the edge of the creekbank and make it bump bottom. With luck, the plug will hit a stump. This is the key to this fishing, as often the stumps are right on the edge of the channel. Even if before the lake was impounded the area you’re fishing was a farmer’s field, the farmer probably left the trees on the edge of the creek through his land. Look at any farm and you’ll almost never see the trees cleared along a creek which runs through the land.
While you want to bump those stumps, you don’t want to get hung up, so you need to use a crank bait with a big lip which will defect off the stump. Sometimes I cut the lead hook off the front set of treble hooks on the plug, but I prefer not to do this. I’d rather use heavier line if I’m getting hung up a lot and try to rip the lure loose. With 25-pound line I usually can rip the lure free by half straightening the hooks out. The Bomber is an excellent lure for this because it’s relatively snagless. The deep-diving Bagley B baits also are good. I helped design the Fat Rap series, and the No. 7 size is good for this creek channel pattern. The No. 7 has a large lip and bounces off stumps real well. Almost any crank bait with a large, extended lip is relatively snagless.
Pre-spawn bass will often hold on brushy ledges of a creek channel, usually at 5 to 10 feet in clear water or 3 to 6 feet in dingy water.
Minor creek channels in flat or gradually tapered coves located on the north side of the lake can hold concentrations of pre-spawners. The timber can be either permanently submerged or just temporarily flooded.
I mentioned this pattern relating to pre-spawn fish, but there’s another time cranking the creek channels pays dividends. In Oklahoma there are some 800,000 acres of reservoirs, including timbered reservoirs like Kerr in southern Oklahoma and 102,000-acre Eufaula.
These are super crank-bait waters, but for some reason Oklahoma’s often so muddy, cold, and windy in the spring that you don’t often have good creek-channel fishing in the spring. Some of Oklahoma’s best crank-bait fishing occurs during the hot summer, because it might be the only time of the year when the water clears up. The bass are there the whole time, but they really start feeding good only when the water starts clearing up, even though the water temperature might be 80 degrees.
We pretty much fish exclusively on the creek channel edges during the entire summer. Probably 90 percent of our summer fishing is done there on Kerr, Eufaula, and Lake Oolagah. These are large lakes with a lot of timber, dingy water, and shallow creek channels. I fish these channel edges with crank baits, spinnerbaits, and worms, but when I really think they’re feeding and I want to cover a lot of water, I use a crank bait. I can find the bass with it better, too. Often in the summer I turn my trolling motor on high and go up a creek channel and cast at every tree. In the summer they’re usually in the shade of the trees. I throw to the shady side and bump the tree and retrieve back. I make one cast per tree and keep on going up the channel.
Bass in the summer often are concentrated, just as pre-spawn fish get bunched up. You’re apt to find an area where every tree has a bass. Maybe all thirty trees around one bend have a bass. You might not get all of ‘em to strike, but they’re apt to be there just the same. You’re likely to get several strikes and maybe catch five or six of ‘em, and they easily could be 5-pound or better fish. We usually get several 5-pounders on crank baits in the summer in Oklahoma, and I’ve heard of 40-and 50-pound strings getting caught on crank baits. My experience has been I don’t catch ‘em all on crank baits. When I catch two or three on crank baits, I’ve located the school. Then I might go to a worm or a flipping jig and pull up to those trees and flip a jig or a worm in there on the shady side, or I’ll slow-roll a spinnerbait through that same spot. Changing lures sometimes helps, but the bait certainly is a fast way to find ‘em.
If we were to add up all the stumps in all the lakes, rivers, and ponds in this country, we might come up with something like 8.2 billion trillion stumps. And there probably is no stump in less than 10 feet of water in any southern reservoir which hasn’t at some time or other had at least one bass on it.
When I speak of bumping the stumps, I’m thinking mainly about the stumps on the points and on the creek channels. Sometimes I find stumps on an underwater ridge or a submerged island on a shallow lake. On the exposed areas—the points and shoals—wave action usually causes erosion, and the dirt, sand, or gravel bases of these stumps are washed away. Then instead of being merely a stump flush with the bottom, it is almost suspended, with roots coming out in all directions, looking like an octopus. The more the stump is eroded, the better the ambush point it makes for bass. It becomes a dynamite spot for a bass in spring, summer, and fall.
To fish these eroded stumps, I have to prepare for heavy fishing, because I know I’m going to get hung up. Since I’m usually fishing dingy water, I’m using a large crank bait with a big lip to bounce off the wood and very heavy line. The big line is not necessarily for the size of the bass, but because I’m getting hung up a lot and I want to be able to pull the plug loose as many times as possible. With 12- or 14-pound line, I’d lose a lot of lures, but you can rip most of ‘em loose with 20- or 25-pound mono. Another reason for the heavy line is it prevents the plug from going as deep as it would travel on lighter line. I might be fishing a point and want to hit only the tops of the stumps and not run too deep. With 12-pound line, the crank bait would go considerably deeper, and when it hung up, I might not be able to reach it with my rod tip to poke it loose. It’s human nature to get exasperated when you start hanging up a lot, and you tend to pull too hard. If you’re using lighter line, you’ll break off some plugs. And lots of these crank baits today cost four and five bucks apiece.
This young angler caught the bass of his life near an eroded stump.
When I think of bumping the stumps with a crank bait, I think back to the B.A.S.S. tournament at Ross Barnett Reservoir in Mississippi in 1973. The craze in crank-bait fishing which was spawned by Fred Young’s hand-carved balsawood Big-O was getting into full swing. I’d located some bass in front of Pine Island, which is in the midsection of the lake, and they were on the south bank. The wind was blowing hard from the north. I had only one bait they’d hit—a hand-carved balsa plug made by Mike Estep of Oak Ridge, Tenn. It had a black back and chartreuse sides. Since it was the only thing they were hitting, I decided to run it on 25-pound line so I wouldn’t lose it. I got back into 7 or 8 feet of water to throw up on those 2-to-4-foot flats with stumps along the edge of the drops.
My game plan was going good except that during the first day of the tournament, the wind blew thirty miles an hour! When I got to my area, the wind was whitecapping the water across that bar. Four or five others had found those same bass. Tom Mann had found ‘em, and Bobby Murray knew the bass were there, and so did Billy Westmor land. A lot of us had planned to go fish that area, but the wind was nearly impossible to deal with. I was determined to fish it anyhow. I threw my anchor out and tried to hold the boat that way. This didn’t work, so I ended up running my big engine in reverse and running the bilge pump to pump out the water which was sloshing in over the stern. I also ran my trolling motor as fast as it would go against the wind. Fishing that place was almost impossible, and I was continually getting hung up. I didn’t want to run up to the ridge where the shallow water was, so I had to pull the plug loose and hope like heck my line wouldn’t break. Two or three times my line did break, but my plug floated up and was out there bobbing in the waves. I’d wait for it to drift away from those bass, and then I’d circle around in the rough water and go net my plug.
I fished for three days in that rough water and ended up catching a little over 72 pounds of bass to win the tournament, simply because I got out there and stuck it out. I had only that one lure they were hitting. The last morning I caught nine bass which were good ones. One of ‘em was over 6 and another was over 5. About one o’clock that afternoon I was trying for my tenth bass, and I hung the plug up and broke the line and it didn’t float up. I had several other similar plugs, and I tried them, but they didn’t work. I even had some other Estep plugs almost the same size and color, but they didn’t produce either. Finally I managed to catch one more bass, which made my limit. But the point is I had the secret lure the fish wanted.
Bumping the stumps with a crank bait is saturation fishing; you just keep fan-casting around until you bump something. You might want to make three or four casts to the same stump, because lots of times they won’t hit on the first couple of casts and you have to anger them a little. But often they strike out of Reflex action on the first cast. Sometimes on my crank baits I use in the stumps, I replace heavier hooks with lighter wire hooks. I don’t want to use hooks which won’t straighten out partly when I pull the bait off a stump with 20- or 25-pound line. I have had bass hit when the plug pulls loose from the stump. It zings off and I start the retrieve, and that bass has been watching it wiggling there on the stump and all of a sudden it shoots off the stump and then wobbles away, and he pounces on it.
When I speak of throwing into a crowd, I mean throwing into a whole bunch of bass. Lots of times I’ll be fishing a variety of lures when I run into this situation. I’ve gotten strikes on other lures, and when I’m bringing that bass up to the boat and the water’s at least reasonably clear, I’ll see another fish following the one I’ve got on or my partner has on. Then I’ll pick up a crank bait and throw in there.
One time when this happened, I really capitalized on this little trick. I was fishing with Pete Churchwell of Tulsa, who at the time worked for Lowrance Electronics, and we were using worms at Grand Lake. I needed to catch a couple of big bass for some publicity photos for Lowrance. We’d fished all day and hadn’t had any luck at all with big fish. Pete made a long cast to a willow bush leaning over the water, and he had a strike and set the hook. His rod bowed over, and the fish took some drag and boiled at the top. When it boiled, I saw a second boil right by it. When his bass came past the boat, I thought I saw another bass with it. He said, “Get the net!” and I said, “Wait a minute—another big bass is following your fish.” I had a crank bait on another rod I hadn’t been throwing, and I picked it up and threw out right next to his fish, which was about a 5½-pounder. I cranked the plug down about 3 feet and paused it for a second, and wham! Another big bass had hit my plug, and we managed to get both of ‘em.
Pete started to rig up another worm, and I said there was a school of ‘em there, and the fastest way to catch ‘em would be with a crank bait. I threw out and caught a second bass and then a third one. Pete got a crank bait tied on, and we were making double casts. As soon as one of us got one on, the other guy would throw right in near the hooked fish, and he’d get one. The ten to fifteen bass that were there would be chasing after the bass which was hooked. We sat there and caught ten bass, and seven of them were 5 pounds and over. This happened in about ten minutes.
I like to keep a rod rigged with a crank bait handy, so if I suspect the one I just hooked has some excited friends, I’m ready to take advantage.
The average fisherman would have made a mistake here. He would have caught the first one near the willow bush on the worm, and then he would have put it in the live well after looking it over leisurely and guessing how much it weighed. He probably would have taken his De-Liar out of his tacklebox and weighed the bass, and likely measured its length, too. Maybe his wife or buddy in the boat would have dug out the camera and taken a picture right then. Then he would have rerigged his worm and three or four minutes later he would be ready to make another cast. He might have even moved on down the bank to another willow bush. By this time, those bass would have lost their frenzy and would have calmed back to normal. Quite possibly he wouldn’t have gotten another strike.
The point is to keep in mind the possibility of a school of fish, and sometimes it really pays off to have a crank bait ready for such an occasion. When my partner hooks a fish, if I have even the slightest idea there’s another bass or several more right there, I pick up a crank bait and throw in there. That’s the quickest way to find out. Throwing into a crowd really means throwing into a school of bass. When bass get worked up and are super-excited, you don’t want to give them any time to cool off, and with a crank bait, you can keep them excited by making several quick casts and whipping the plug through them. Even if they’re not hitting every cast, you’re creating more excitement that you would by throwing a plastic worm repeatedly to that spot. Even if you catch a fish on a plastic worm, it certainly doesn’t hurt anything to throw back to that spot two or three times with a crank bait. Sometimes this will add four or five bass to your stringer in a hurry. Even if you’re worm fishing, have a crank ready on another rod for such situations.
Back in the early 1970s, I drew Ricky Green for a partner in an old Project: Sports Incorporated tournament at Lake Ouachita in Arkansas. He’s a fine pro who is noted as a spinnerbait fisherman. He’s a super caster and a good crank-bait fisherman as well. We flipped a coin to decide whose boat we would take, and I won, so we went in my boat. He asked what patterns I wanted to fish, and I said I had five or six points, and he said he had five or six more. We compared notes and discovered we were on the same pattern. We were doing about the same thing with similar lures in similar depths of water and in about the same areas.
I pointed out that if we were finding bass on these ten or twelve points, there were another hundred spots on the lake that were identical to those, and I suggested we hit as many of those points as we could after we fished the ones we’d tried. He agreed, and we worked out a game plan where we’d alternate running the boat. For one point he’d run the boat and I’d be up front, and then we’d switch around. We’d come in fast straight at the point, and 100 feet from it we’d shut off the big engine. The bass we’d found in practice were in 6 to 8 feet of water out off the points, and we were keying in to what we figured would be 6 to 8 feet of water. The forward momentum of the boat would carry us on in, and about 40 feet away from the point, we’d turn the steering wheel to broadside the boat. The guy up front got the first cast, but we’d both fire long casts across the point, and we’d crank our crank baits down. The pattern was to crank all the way down until we hit the bottom and then we’d pause and let the bait float up about a foot and then we’d crank it back down to the bottom and pause it again. Somewhere between the time it hit the bottom and floated up a foot or so, the bass would nail it.
The fishing wasn’t red-hot that day, and we didn’t catch ‘em on every point, but on every three or four points, one of us would catch a bass. We’d make three casts apiece on the point and then hit the starter and take off like the proverbial bat for the next point. We never even took time to unzip our life vests, and we didn’t waste any time. Usually we didn’t even put the trolling motor down. We added up the points we fished, and the tally ran to seventy-five points that day. On two or three points we caught three or four bass per point. 1 caught twenty-two bass that day, and Ricky had twenty-three. We were within a bass of each other, and our weights were almost identical. We each weighed in ten bass which totaled slightly over 20 pounds. Right near the end of the day I had caught about a 5-pounder and ended up with a pound or so more than he had.
Some points have hidden structure, such as a dropoff, patch of stumps, or boulders. A locator helps you figure out the best route for your crank bait.
This was in May right during the spawning season, and some bass were spawning whereas others either had finished nesting or hadn’t started spawning yet. Not all the bass spawn at the same time. The points were excellent places because of all three of these conditions being present, and Ouachita is well known for its point fishing. The water had been a little dingy, and there was a little bit of wind and overcast weather. One of the major considerations for point fishing, I think, is the wind, and what I like to find are points with the wind blowing in—not any super amount of wind, but a ten-to-fifteen-mile-per-hour breeze. I don’t want it whitecapping, although I have caught ‘em on points when it was whitecapping.
When you’re fishing a point, those initial three or four casts usually are the most important. They need to be well placed. First I try to establish just how deep the bass are on the points. I keep marker buoys handy and throw them to the shallow and the deeper parts of the point, and I’ll try all different depths on that point. Finally when I get a strike, before I even get the fish in, I reach down and throw a marker out to where I think the fish hit. After I catch one, I’ll cast back five or six times to that same spot. Even if I don’t catch one, I still want to establish the exact depth and the structure that’s there. Some points have hidden structure and cover you might not be aware of, such as a dropoff, a patch of stumps, or a big boulder or two. I get out on the point and use a locator and probe around to find exactly what’s there. I want to find out if the bottom is rock, gravel, or mud, and sometimes poke around with my rod tip or a push pole to find out these things. Knowing what’s there could be an extremely important part of the pattern. For example, on a gravel bottom, it could be they were in there feeding on crawfish. On a mud bottom, they might be feeding on shad. If they were feeding on crawfish, I’d want to use a crawfish-colored crank bait; if they were hitting shad, I’d want to use a shad color.
Running the points is a matter of efficiency. It’s one of the reasons I run a big, fast boat. It’s not that I merely want to go sixty miles an hour down the lake. If points are the pattern, then I want to be able to fish seventy-five of ‘em in a day, if that’s what it takes. If I think the bass might be on the points, then I’ll check it out. This is one of the fastest patterns to check out that I know of. In one hour of running points, I can hit perhaps ten points—one every six or seven minutes. I’ll try different types of points, including some which the wind is blowing in on, some which are rocky, some with gravel and some with mud bottoms. I’m trying to establish a pattern, and when I find a bass or two on a point, there’s usually a definite pattern. It might be a rocky point, whereas the others I tried weren’t rocky, and the bass also are apt to be at a certain depth on a certain type of dropoff. Ricky Green and I were looking for a certain depth on a certain kind of bank, and by near the end of the day when we pulled in on a point, we could pretty well tell if we were or weren’t going to catch a bass. We had hit so many points that day that we really knew the pattern.
In general, the windswept points have been the most successful for me. I have seen times when I didn’t catch ‘em on points where the wind was blowing away from the point, but I could go across the lake to points where the wind was blowing in to the point and catch ‘em there. The wind needs to be at least pushing the water in front of the point.
One thing I’ve noticed when scuba diving is that I can be still underwater on a point and stuff will come drifting by in front of my face mask. There might be a one mile-per-hour current moving suspended particles along. The wind will be blowing, and it pushes and circulates the water. I don’t know whether bass simply are inclined to feed better in the wind or if the baitfish look like they’re distressed and more vulnerable then, but I’ve always done better with crank baits on overcast, windy days than on bright, calm days. Bright, calm days are usually the worst there are for crank baits.
Working the weedlines with a crank bait really takes some skill. It’s not simply a toss-and-retrieve type of fishing. I’m talking of weeds such as coontail moss, elodea, water cabbage, moss, and other aquatic vegetation which is only partly visible if at all visible. Often the weeds cranked are completely invisible, and the only way I know they’re there is by using the locator.
When your crank bait runs into a bunch of weeds, they’re a total nemesis. You can’t crank into a bunch of coontail moss or milfoil without getting your crank bait trashed up, and with a glob of vegetation hanging on it, you’re not going to get anything to hit it. An extremely sensitive feel is needed here. When I crank down and hit the vegetation for the first time, I stop cranking instantly. Maybe the plug will float free. If it’s still caught, I give it a hard yank and sometimes it will tear free, and then I let it float up again to clear the weeds before I start cranking it. Sometimes you’ll get a strike as it’s floating up. Again, if you feel a tick when you start cranking, then let it float up again, but the problem here is sometimes the ticks are light strikes. You’ve blown the opportunity to catch that bass if the tick was a light strike and you let the plug float up.
In most instances I’m not really cranking over the top of the weeds. I’m throwing to the weed edge where it quits growing and drops off to a bare bottom. That’s the dropoff and the structure for the bass. Parallel casting is how I usually work the weedline, but this is difficult because you don’t always know where the weedline might bend. If I cast and don’t feel any grass, I throw nearer to where I think the grass line might be, and I keep doing this until I tick the moss. I’m very carefully feeling for the weeds so I’ll know where the line is. A graphite rod is helpful for this fishing, although at other times when I’m throwing crank baits, I don’t normally use a graphite rod because I get hung up so much. But in moss and weeds you don’t get hung up that often and it’s good to have the extra sensitivity of graphite.
Except for the closed in spawners, bass like the coves and projections along the outer weedline. You have to probe with your lure to locate these irregularities.
One thing very important about cranking the weedlines is to keep in mind that this is structure. And the irregularities of structure are what pay off. Therefore, a straight weedline is not nearly as good as a broken weedline. Where that weedline changes, for example where there’s a nook or a little point, is usually where most of the bass are. If you’re really watching closely, you might come to a spot on the weedline where a 100-foot nook goes back, and in the back of that nook is where you’re apt to find a concentration of bass. A little point of grass which strikes out 20 feet farther than the other grass also is apt to be where the bass are. It takes careful observation to detect those kinds of places. If suddenly you bump into some grass, then you know the grass extends out on a little point, and you might have to use marker buoys to figure out where the grass point extends out to. Two places they’ll usually be on a grass line are at the end of a grass point and in back of a nook.
Sometimes you’ll find a grass line which runs straight and then maybe 20 feet on out in the lake there’ll be another small rise again and another patch of grass along it. Those are really hard to find because you’re casting the grass line and you don’t know that little grassy island is out there isolated. Again it relates back to structure in that some of the best structure is isolated structure. Sometimes about the only way to find these isolated spots is by running and watching your depthfinder and being observant. It doesn’t help here to look at a contour map, because it won’t tell you where the weeds actually grow.
In working the weedlines, you don’t need to use the deepest-running crank bait in your tacklebox. Often the bass are suspended along the weed edges, and they might be only 4 to 6 feet deep. Shallower crank baits often are excellent. If you find a big moss bed or grass patch all 5 feet deep, it wouldn’t hurt to stay out in deeper water and throw in on top of the moss or weeds and retrieve out to the edge. They will be on top of the moss or weeds in the flats, but the bigger concentrations will be on the edges of the vegetation.
This is a clear-water pattern. You’re not going to find deep moss or deep vegetation in a muddy lake. The best time to fish this clear water is when there are low light conditions, and again if the water is clear, the cooler water temperatures pay off better. A light wind or breeze will help somewhat because it breaks up the light penetration into the water. There is much more light penetration from the sun down through slick water. That added light helps them detect your line and see the lure too well. With some riffles or chop on the surface, they don’t get that good a look at the lure as it comes past. In ultra-clear water a very fast retrieve sometimes works best because they don’t see the bait as well and it can fool them.
In clear, weedy waters, the best crank-bait colors seem to be the chromes, shads, and the other light colors. But in a muddy lake where you’re cranking stumps or creek channels, the best colors are the crawfish colors, reds and chartreuse colors—the bright colors. In very clear water is one occasion when you can benefit from using light lines. At times then I use spinning tackle with 8- or 10-pound line. This will enable you to get your crank bait considerably deeper. Also, that lighter line will pay off better in super-clear water.
Weedline crank-bait fishing is an entirely different type of crank-bait fishing. When you’re cranking the weedlines, you really need to pay close attention and keep thinking structure.
The grub lure has been around in saltwater fishing for a long time—probably twenty-five years or more. They used the old Salty Dog grub for seatrout and channel bass off the coast. It’s been a standard. Never had it been used much in freshwater bass fishing until late 1970 or early 1971. This type of lure has a jig head with the hook protruding upward through a soft or semi-soft molded plastic body. Usually the body mimics a grub but it can be an imitation of some other live and tasty morsel.
The guys most responsible for the freshwater application of the grub were the Murray brothers—Bobby and Billy—from Hot Springs, Ark. Bobby Murray used the grub in the spring of 1972 when he won the B.A.S.S. tournament at Ouachita. I came in second; he beat me by a pound.
After the tournament was over, he gave me a couple of grubs and told me how to use ‘em. I’d heard rumors about grubs, but I wasn’t crazy about light Spinning tackle and I wasn’t too excited about them. Finally a month later I was back in Oklahoma and I went up to Grand Lake. It’s similar to Ouachita in that it’s clear and has a lot of rock shoals and very little cover. It has a lot of spotted bass and largemouths and a variety of pan-fish and other gamefish. I put the grub on and started jigging around some of the bluffs. My first fish was a white bass, and then a crappie, and finally I started catching some Kentuckies. I was fishing the grub much as I would work a regular jig. I was just swimming it along rather than “tweaking” it.
Eventually I learned how to “tweak” or jig it properly as a structure lure. A guy named Jack Perry was doing an article for Field & Stream, and I took him fishing and told him I had a brand-new bass lure which just had been developed and wasn’t really on the market yet. I also told him how I’d been catching a lot of fish on it. That day we caught 300 pounds of assorted fish. We had only seven bass, and they ranged up to 5 pounds, but what was so amazing is we had thirty-seven drum, and these ran to more than 5 pounds. I caught a 29-pound buffalo (it’s similar to a carp) and had a couple of 2-pound channel catfish as well as some crappies and white bass. All of them were caught on the grub.
Three basic styles of grub. These are very effective deep-water lures for jigging on structure.
I don’t know of any other lure in my tackle box I’ve experimented with and caught so many different species of fish on as the grub. Through the years I’ve caught just about as many other species of fish on the grub as bass. The grub is a very effective deep-water lure for jigging on structure.
That summer on Grand Lake, through experimenting I came up with a way to tweak the grub. How I do this is either make a short cast or merely open my bail and let the lure go to the bottom and then jig it. Instead of simply pulling the lure up off the bottom as I would a worm or a jig and eel, I actually bounce it off the bottom. I use a 5 ½- or 6-foot stiff graphite rod and 6- or 8-pound line. I want the grub to jump violently off the bottom much as a crawfish does. A grub is the size, color, and shape of a crawfish. A crawfish jumps off the bottom and then falls back down, moving in little short motions or spurts. This must be what the grub imitates.
But by tweaking it, you have one other advantage, and this is that lots of times bass will soft-mouth a lure as it’s sinking back down. You’re keeping the slightest amount of back pressure on the lure and you’re watching your line closely, so you’d think you’d feel the strike, but lots of times you don’t! The strike almost always comes as the lure is sinking. By tweaking it— ripping it upward—you set the hook in bass which hit it undetected, ones you didn’t know were there. You’re setting the hook blindly without even knowing there’s a fish around. This tweaking also enhances the action of the grub; I get more strikes when I tweak it off a foot or two and then let it flutter back down. I keep a slight bit of back pressure on it and watch the line as it sinks, and again, as with all jigging lures, 98 percent of the strikes occur on the fall.
My biggest day with the grub came that autumn when I qualified for the Project: Sports Tournament of Champions. It was held on Lake Amistad on the Texas-Mexico border. Bobby Murray and I were the only two grub fishermen there. I went way up the lake on the Mexican side and found an old vertical ledge in a cove. On the top of the ledge was 10 to 15 feet of water, but it dropped straight down into 100 feet of water, and there were mesquite bushes on the edge of it. Rather than casting, I just dropped the grub down through the bushes to the top of the ledge. The advantage here of jigging it vertically is that if you jig it directly straight down, it frequently dislodges itself if it hits a bush or any other cover. If you jig it around carefully through the cover, you probably won’t lose more than a few a day, and grubs are cheap. If you’re vertical, you actually can tweak pretty heavy brush and cover.
My partner that first day asked me what I was going to do and I told him I was going to grub the ledge. He said he sure as heck didn’t know what that was, and he added that he was going to use plastic worms. I put out two marker buoys about 20 feet apart and fished right between them where the ledge was. All I did was open the bail on my spinning reel, and the grub dropped to the top of the ledge. I was watching my locator, and in addition to the mesquite, I thought I saw a school of fish. As it turned out, I pulled up right on top of a school of largemouths, and the first eleven times I opened my bail and let the grub sink, I caught ten largemouths and missed one. My partner had made a long cast off the ledge, and instantly I hooked one and asked him to get the net. He put his rod down and netted my first bass.
Then I dropped back down and he picked up his rod and I was yelling for the net again. He put his rod back down and netted the second one. I finally had five or six bass in the boat which he had netted, and he still hadn’t retrieved his first cast. After that, he says, “Now, wait a minute! You net your own damn fish and let me fish awhile.”
I had a limit in the boat, and those bass totaled 23 or 24 pounds. Finally he asked me if I had a grub that he could borrow. I said I did, but really I was planning to leave the spot immediately. He said he didn’t have his limit yet, and I reminded him this was the tournament of Champions and that I’d found this spot and I couldn’t afford to let him sit there and catch the bass I’d found. He got a little upset, and I said I’d make a deal with him. I’d give him a grub and show him how to use it and let him catch one or two bass on that spot, but then we were going to leave that hole. He went along with that idea and dropped his grub down there and followed my instructions, but he didn’t react quick enough to his first couple of strikes and missed them. I’d seen his line move, and he didn’t notice it or feel anything. Finally he caught two, and I said, “Okay. We’re gone!”
Well, the next day, it was exactly the same deal on that spot. I caught my ten and left again. On the third and last day of the tournament it was real windy and I couldn’t get on the ledge and couldn’t anchor because I didn’t have a long enough rope. All I could do was make a few wild casts, and I managed to catch a couple of bass in those 3-foot waves. I had to go back into a cove and tie up to some trees and fish plastic worms, but I did manage to win the tournament by 5 or 6 pounds. Tweaking the grub enabled me to win.
Lots of fishermen ask me when to use the grub. I consider it a summer structure type of lure. I usually fish it in water over 10 feet deep and down to 40 feet deep, and normally I fish it on points and ledges and in creek channels. I generally reserve a grub for more open areas, whereas I reserve the other jigging lures (the heavy spoons, tailspin lures such as the Little George, and plastic worms) for heavy cover. The grub is a clear-water lure, whereas the spoons and worms sometimes don’t pay off as well in crystal-clear water. On a lake like Mead in Nevada or Powell in Utah, I’d likely fish the grub because the spoon might be too gaudy and flashy. An advantage to the grub is that you can fish it with as light as 4-pound line, although I prefer 6- and 8-pound. With light lines you should use a jig head with a sharp Aberdeen hook. This makes for easy penetration when you set the hook.
You really need a depth finder to pinpoint the structure for a vertical method like jigging. I often use two, one on the transom and the other on the bow, to give me a kind of stereo effect when I’m scouting structure.
I mainly fish the grub in the structure months— June through October—when the water temperature is 70 degrees or higher. It’s more of a summer and fall lure than a springtime lure, but I have seen it work right around spawning season on deeper points adjacent to the spawning areas in clear lakes like Bull Shoals. An advantage of the grub over the plain jig is that the grub is a much faster lure. The grub is a school-bass lure, especially with Kentucky bass. I think it’s the most effective lure ever devised for a school of medium-sized Kentucky or spotted bass. Spots eat many crawfish, and the grub is a very quick way to check if they’re there. You can drop a grub down into a school of spots, and you might catch only one or two before you spook ‘em, but I’ve never gotten over a school of them and dropped the grub down and jigged it without catching at least one of ‘em. If I don’t get a strike, I’m convinced the Kentuckies are not there, and I don’t even think about using another lure in that place. In a school of Kentuckies, there’s always at least one aggressive fish. Spotted bass are smart fish, and maybe I’ll find ‘em with the grub and catch one or two, and they’ll sort of spook off. Then is when I might take a small bear-hair or deer-hair jig and pump it slowly through there and catch more. Or I might tie on a 3- or 4-inch plastic worm and crawl it along through that area, and I might even try to catch a couple by jigging a spoon.
Today there are several different sizes of grubs on the market. I use a medium size about 3 inches long most of the time, and I usually use it on a ¼-ounce jig head. Sometimes I go to a slightly smaller head— about -ounce—and if the wind’s strong, I might go to a -ounce. A grub head is different from a regular jig head in that the grub head has a tiny spur on it. When you run the grub on the hook, you continue with it up on the lead, and that spur helps hold it in place. With just a plain jig head, the grub will slide back down the hook and bunch up at the bend, or it will twist on the hook. When I rig the 3-inch grub, I always have the tail fat rather than up and down. (One of my favorite grubs is the little Vibortail, which has a little fin near the tail and looks like a minnow. There’s only one way for it to be attached.) On the Bagley and Mann grubs, the tails are fat and should be run on the hook so that when they’re sinking or being jigged, the tails are fat with the surface of the water. This gives it a better flutter and makes it sink slower.
I don’t know if the grub is as good for smallmouths as the hair jig and pork rind, but I’m convinced the grub is a better Kentucky bass lure, and it’s also an excellent lure for largemouths in clear lakes and particularly on rocky points. I like to fish it on rock ledges and rocky, gravelly points without much cover. It’s a very fast way to learn if there’s a school of fish present.
About the time I started guiding at Santee-Cooper in 1963, a guy about my age from Summerville, S.C., named Tommy Salisbury became serious about his bass fishing. We got acquainted and really hit it off, and for nearly fifteen years now we’ve been very good friends. Tommy had fished three or four bass tournaments, and he asked me when I was going to enter a tournament. I told him that when I entered one, I really was going to be prepared! Well, I decided to go to Toledo Bend with him for a Bass Anglers Sportsman Society tournament in January of 1970. It was my first tournament, and I especially wanted to do well.
Tommy and I sent off and got a bunch of topographical maps, and we really did our homework long before we left South Carolina and drove to Texas. We marked creek channels and high spots and everything that looked good on the topo maps, and we went out there ten days early. We got out there about three o’clock one morning, and there was ice on the trailer steps at Pendleton Bridge Marina. It was really cold. Tommy had his boat and I had mine, and the best day either one of us had was three bass the first three days we were there. We fished mostly jigs and eels. And we’d heard about jigging those Texas spoons, so we jigged them in the creek channels.
We ran into Billy and Bobby Murray, and they were catching bass, and they showed us how they were jigging their spoons. Toledo Bend was only three years old then, and the trees had all the branches on ’em. The Murrays were pulling their boat through the branches and dropping their jigging lures right down alongside the tree trunks, and they were catching bass. We started doing what they were doing, and we started catching some fish.
The weather started warming up, and about three days before the tournament it got up to 80 degrees. Tommy and I agreed to meet one day about lunchtime at the Texas Bluff area. Tommy was headed there, and he came across a cove and smelled some fish. He thought maybe they were bass, so he suggested we go back there. The cove was almost solid trees in 60 feet of water. I had a spinnerbait on and started throwing it, and every little alley I could get the bait through, we’d see ten to twenty bass coming out of the trees after it. And the water was 50 to 60 feet deep below them! We finally measured the water temperature, and for the first three feet, the water was 55 to 58 degrees. Below that it dropped about 10 degrees. Those bass were up near the surface sunning themselves. That afternoon we caught about seventy-five bass. The next day we split up, and each of us looked for similar coves where the water was slick. Where we found slick water, we could run the spinnerbaits and catch, ’em close to the top.
The morning of the first round of the tournament, we got out on the water with the rest of the boats. It was just getting daylight, and we saw this big, black cloud coming. It was what the Texans call a blue norther. The wind blew, and it rained and stormed, and man, did it turn cold! This all hit within five minutes after Ray Scott shot the gun. Tommy fished with Glenn Carver, who now owns Mr. Twister lures, and they jigged spoons about 20 feet deep in Slaughter Creek, and Tommy was in eighteenth or nineteenth place after the first day. I’d drawn Joe Palermo. (I told earlier about having five rods rigged up with five spoons and catching six bass in a row while he was catching one and trying to get the hooks out of it.) I culled bass—releasing the smaller ones—after about nine a.m., and I soon got into the top twenty-five.
There were two different jigging patterns on Toledo Bend during that tournament. There were school bass suspended 20 feet deep over 50 feet of water on the river channel. These were mostly 1 ¼-to-l ½-pounders, and they were what I caught the first day. The second day I drew J. B. Warren from Arkansas. He and Jack Price had found five or six super holes full of big bass in the creek channels. J.B. was conf dent about his chances of winning because he and Price had all these big bass located. The first day he’d caught only five or six, but they were in the 4-pound range. He took me into a creek. He was fishing a jig and eel, but I’d been fishing spoons for a couple of weeks, and I knew they were hitting spoons. He caught the first one, about a 4-pounder, on the jig and eel.
I told him I was going to try a spoon. The water temperature was about 50 degrees, because another cold front had hit, and the way to fish the spoon was to raise it up about 2 feet off the bottom in this heavy tree-and-brush cover and almost lower it down by keeping slight back pressure on the lure as it fell. These were cold-water bass, and cold-water bass don’t strike hard; they just sort of stop the lure. I use fuorescent line and watch for the slightest twitch when I’m fishing this way in cold water. If the bait doesn’t sink back all the way, usually it’s a fish and you need to set the hook. That day they were halfway hitting at the spoon and missing it, and the lure would fall on their backs. I’d feel the hesitation and set the hook, and two or three of the bass I caught with J.B. were foul-hooked in the side of their gills. The bass I caught were mostly 3-to-5-pounders, and I weighed in 39 pounds that second day. It put me way up in the standings with one day left. J.B. had a slow day, and that evening he told me he didn’t stand a chance to win, but I did, and he said he wanted me to go back to that creek channel he knew about and stay there and win the tournament on that hole. I told him I didn’t want to do that and that I wanted to honor his hot spot.
The third day I didn’t go to J.B.’s hot spot. I went to another creek with my partner, Jim Saxton from Texas, and we jigged spoons around different high spots. I caught 26 pounds and finished second. But the odd part about it was that when I came back to the weighin, J. B. Warren asked me if I’d gone back to that creek he and I had fished, and I told him I hadn’t. Well, as it turned out, he hadn’t gone back there either! It was the hottest place on the lake, and neither of us had fished it! I figured he should fish it, and he figured I should fish it. Nobody fished it!
Here again, I count down the spoon as I do my other underwater lures, and this is important. Lots of times when you’re drifting and jigging, you’ll find a little mound or a dropoff much easier and quicker if you’re counting the spoon down. In the winter and cold water, I don’t lift the spoon more than 2 feet off the bottom, but in the summer you can jig it much faster and lift it higher.
The biggest tournament I ever won with a jigging spoon was at Santee-Cooper in the 1975 South Carolina Invitational B.A.S.S. event. I fished the lower lake (Moultrie) and jigged with a Hopkins Spoon. The water temperature was 75 degrees during the first week of June when the event was held, and there was a lot of wind. The bass were active, and I lifted the spoon much higher, and they hit much harder. I was using a large popping type of rod, and I’d lift the spoon 4 to 8 feet off the bottom. With a 6-foot rod, you can lift a spoon 15 feet off the bottom when you put the rod tip almost to the water and then bring it back over your head and finally your shoulder. We learned this jigging the spoons for striped bass at Santee, and we found the rockfish like a much higher lift and much more violent jigging motion.
Jigging fish are structure fish whether they’re stripers or black bass. In the summer a good jigging spot could be a submerged hill, a point, or the edge of a creek channel. But in the winter, creek channels generally pay off better. Bass generally like high spots in the summer and creek channels in the winter. I prefer jigging heavy spoons rather than casting lures because jigging is more direct. The only time I cast is when I’m looking for fish, but I miss a lot of fish casting because I don’t have the direct control of the lure. The best way to catch ’em is to get vertical and drop the lure right down on the fish and jig it on the structure. I don’t fish the spoon shallower than 15 feet because deep-structure fish are 15 feet or deeper. Most of the deep-structure lakes where you can catch bass good by jigging spoons are clear-water lakes, and particularly in the summer those bass on structure are at a minimum of 15 feet deep and often 20 to 30 feet deep. I have caught ’em deeper. I came in second in the B.A.S.S. tournament at Sam Rayburn in 1971, and the best string I caught there, about 30 pounds, was by jigging a spoon 46 feet deep. Those were the deepest bass I’ve ever caught in a tournament.
I get asked by fishermen when I use the spoon and when I vertical-jig the plastic worm. The spoon is for both warm and cold water, whereas the worm is strictly a hot-weather bait. In the summer the bass on deep structure will be at the thermocline levels in water 60 to 80 degrees, and this is a good time to jig the worm. Jigging a spoon really gets ’em excited. But I do a lot of changing up. I might be jigging a spoon and catch two or three bass and then they quit hitting the spoon. Then I drop a worm or a grub down there, and often I’ll catch more after changing lures. I have seen times when they would hit the worm and not the spoon, but usually when you run into a school of bass, you catch a couple right quick on whatever you’re using. The spoon is simply the fastest way to find them. Nothing sinks as fast as a spoon. When I jig a worm, I use 6-to-8-inch worms rigged regular Texas-style, but I usually use a - or ½-ounce lead.
Once you’ve located structure like this, you can fish it very effectively with a spoon; unlike a grub, a spoon will usually come free when hung up.
Four of the popular jigging spoons on the market today are the Hopkins, Bomber Slab, Salty Dog by Bagley, and Mann-O-Lure. One thing about these heavy spoons with their heavy treble hooks is that you might jig one of ’em all day without losing it. When it hangs in heavy cover, you can keep jiggling it and the weight of it often will cause it to knock loose. You might not believe it, but you can jig the same cover all day with a single-hook Johnson Spoon (the Silver Minnow), and even though it has a weedguard, you’re apt to lose ten of ’em in a day! The weight of the Silver Minnow is not compacted, and it won’t shake loose like a heavy metal-bodied jigging spoon.
My standard tackle for spoon jigging includes a heavy worm or flipping rod and at least 20-pound line. I often use 25-pound, and like Stren Fluorescent line because I can watch it and detect light strikes.
No section on jigging spoons would be complete without mentioning Blake Honeycutt from Hickory, N.C. The Hopkins Spoon was around for many years in saltwater fishing before it ever caught on with fresh-water anglers. And Blake was one of the pioneers of adapting the Hopkins to freshwater bassing. He’s a master at jigging the spoons, and he also holds the alltime B.A.S.S. tournament record for the most pounds caught in a three-day tournament. Back in July of 1969 he caught 138 pounds, 6 ounces—thirty-four bass—to win the tournament at Lake Eufaula in Alabama. There was a fifteen-bass daily limit for that tournament. Blake also was one of the first to master structure fishing. He used to fish with Buck Perry, also from Hickory, who is known as the grandfather of structure fishing.
A heavy-weighted worm designed for deep-water structure produced this 9-pound bass on Georgia’s West Point Lake way back in 1987. Note the antique depthfinder!
Honeycutt says that at times you can take a Hopkins Spoon and try to hold it a foot or so off the bottom real still and not move it, and bass will come up to it and knock the heck out of it. He believes the water current is causing the spoon to move back and forth just a little bit when it’s suspended off the bottom. This might be, but I believe, too, that from using the spoon, a little bit of line twist develops, and when you’re holding it still like that, the line straightens out and causes the spoon to turn a little bit, and this is what attracts the bass.
We got onto using the jigging spoons early at Santee-Cooper, as far back as 1963, but back then we used them exclusively for stripers. The first bass I ever caught on one was one time when I was fishing with another guide, Bob George. He’s an expert rockfish guide, and we were out fishing for fun for stripers, and I caught about a 4-pound largemouth off Pinopolis Point in the lower lake. Then I started trying the jigging spoon in shallower water where the largemouths stayed. Most of the stripers we caught jigging were out in 40 to 50 feet of water. On the 20-to-25-foot-deep bars, I started catching some largemouths on the spoons.
Jigging spoons will catch the big largemouths which are down deep, but the reason I don’t think they catch more big bass is that a lot of the 7-to-10-pounders are in shallower cover rather than down 20 to 30 feet deep. At Santee during the seven years I fished regularly there, I caught twenty-four bass over 10 pounds, but only two of them ever came off deep structure. However, the jigging spoons are super for catching bass from 2 to 4 or 5 pounds, and that size I’m sure after when I’m in a tournament.
The most popular of a few tailspin lures on the market is the Little George. Tom Mann, the manufacturer, named it after the Alabama governor, George Wallace, and Tom says Wallace got quite a kick out of the name. It has an oval-shaped lead body and a spinner which revolves on a wire behind the body. The spinner revolves as the lure sinks as well as when it’s pulled upward. Tom’s sold probably a zillion of ’em, and one of the reasons is it’s not like a Hula Popper that you can fish for fourteen years without losing it. Having one Little George is like having one potato chip; it’s not enough. You’re going to leave some Little Georges hanging on stumps and lodged between rock crevices in deep water.
I like the Little George more for casting than for vertical jigging. If I’m fishing a bar, shoal, or dropoff, I make casts with it. These tailspinners can be verticaljigged, and they’re great lures, but they don’t get to the bottom as fast as the spoons do.
This pattern brings back some very fond memories of the late 1960s when I was at Santee-Cooper. I did some experimenting by taking a black Johnson Spoon (the Silver Minnow) and attaching a 4- or 5-inch tail section of a black plastic worm. The first good bass catch I made on it was in the spring of 1967 in the lower lake near the mouth of the Diversion Canal. Two weeks later I was guiding a Mr. Smith, and I was telling him all about catching several 8- and 9-pounders on the black Johnson Spoon with the worm trailer.
I rigged one up for him, and he threw out by this grass bed, and he hooked a 6 ½-pounder which really ate up his spoon. He fought the fish to the boat and I netted him, but he didn’t say a word. I’m all excited and telling him about this brand-new technique and how great it is. I’ll never forget what he then said.
“Son,” he said slowly, “I’m seventy-six years old, and the Johnson Spoon was my father’s favorite bait.”
I was catching those bass in May of 1967, and by May the next year, I’d figured out something most of us didn’t realize. We thought that after April, Santee’s bass were through spawning. We didn’t realize that during May and even early June, we could look around and actually find a few spawners. In May of 1968 about the middle of the month my customers and I caught two or three bass from 8 to 10 pounds per day, and this lasted for a week. We got them on the black Johnson Spoons, around the full moon. The full moon in June also produced well in the grass. At that time, however, the grass beds were dying, and the next year there’d be only two-thirds as much grass as the year before. From one standpoint this was good, because it tended to concentrate the bass more.
Finally by May 1969 I’d gone to big, heavy popping rods, 30-pound line, and hooks that I’d bent out on the spoons to make them a little bigger. I also switched to Bagley’s Hardhead plastic worms, which were a harder plastic. And I’d figured out to throw into the wind so the grass I was pulling the spoon over was bent toward me and the lure would slide over it better. When fishing clear water, you often want the sun at your back because your visibility is then good, and fish don’t like to look into the sun. But when you’re grazing the grass, you won’t see much anyway and the fish are more likely to see your shadow than to see you. So I also learned to throw into the sun as much as I could in order to keep my shadow down.
That year was a super year, and in that month of May was when I set all my personal bass records at Santee. My customers and I caught forty-two bass over 8 pounds that month. On May 14, I caught ten largemouths which totaled 87 pounds, and they all were caught on that ½-ounce No. 2 Johnson Spoon with the black worm trailer. Five days later I caught ten on the spoon that totaled 79 pounds, and three of them were each over 10 pounds. Both days were cloudy days.
A couple of things Tommy Salisbury and I discovered about our “grazing the grass” pattern with the Johnson Spoons was, first of all, unless it was a cloudy day, we had to catch our bass before nine o’clock in the morning or at dusk when the sun got off the water. Between nine a.m. and dusk, the pattern was dead if the weather was clear. We had one good hole, and we got to wondering if those bass would hit at night. I was guiding two college students one day, and I talked them into getting up at three a.m. and going to that hole. We fished for an hour and a half without a strike. We waded all along those grass beds and threw everywhere, and finally the sun started showing through the trees.
I saw a boil and threw over there and caught a 1 ½-pound white bass on the Johnson Spoon, my first and last white bass ever caught on the spoon. I told the guys we’d messed up and that there weren’t going to be any bass coming in there. Finally it was full daylight, and just before the sun broke completely over the trees I caught a 2-pounder. When the first rays of the sun finally hit the grass bed, a herring about 10 inches long went skipping across the surface, and I threw in there and caught an 8 ½-pounder. One of the college boys caught one about 8 pounds. Then we got a 7-pounder. This continued until about nine o’clock, and then they quit. But in an hour and a half we caught a bunch, and our ten biggest weighed 70 pounds. And we’d fished there for an hour and a half before we got the first strike.
The best fishing always came during the first couple weeks of May when the green grass grew up and laid a mantle on the surface. Before that we caught some bass on the Johnson Spoons around the brown grass. I run my spoons on the surface or just an inch or two under, but Tommy Salisbury likes to skip his spoon across the top and use it strictly as a topwater lure.
Tiny Lund, the racecar driver who owned a fish camp on the lower lake, used to fish for bass only with a black Johnson Spoon and a worm behind it as I did.
Despite the fact that a Johnson Spoon has a single hook and a weedguard, I don’t lose many bass on it. When I first started fishing it, I was using a 6-foot rod and an Ambassadeur and 20-pound line, and I lost several fish. The 20-pound line is marginal; 25 and 30 is better. That’s what I want. The other problem is that with that heavy spoon, you have a tendency to make a long cast. When I was on a big grass bed, I’d find myself making 100-foot casts, and when they hit way out there, I couldn’t get the hook set good enough on ’em. To set the hook properly, I went to a popping rod and a casting rod with a big salt water handle. I wanted something I could hold in my stomach for leverage.
Probably the most important aspect of grass-bed fishing is to point the rod at the spoon. If you hold the rod high, then you don’t have any way to strike back good. Also the low rod position enables you to work the spoon better.
This pattern works very well in Florida. A Johnson Spoon probably catches more bass over 8 pounds in Lake Okeechobee today than anything other than a live shiner. In fact, it probably catches more than the shiners, because shiners aren’t all that popular down there. It’s a great springtime lure for spawning bass, and down there January and February are big spawning months. The spoon also works good in Wisconsin and Minnesota in the lily pads and weeds, and in Canada for northern pike as well as bass. I like the black spoon for a dark day and the gold one for a sunny day.
Even in Oklahoma and Texas, you don’t think of having grass beds in lakes like the grass and milfoil in North Carolina’s Currituck Sound, for example. But the Lone Star State and the Sooner country has grass called pond weed. It grows usually in 2 to 4 feet of water, sometimes a little deeper, and it has oblong leaves about 1 ½ inches long. Snaking the spoon right on top of the grass really pays off, and the heavier the grass, the slower you can work it. Work it slow in that heavy cover, because there’s so much stuff for them to get through to hit the spoon.
I’ve experimented with all sorts of trailer hooks on the Johnson Spoon, but none of ’em performs well. You’re fishing so much heavy vegetation that a trailer hook just doesn’t work good. I advise you to forget about even trying a trailer hook.
Some guys thread their plastic worm on the weedguard of the Johnson Spoon and then run it up to the bend of the hook. This gives the lure a different action, but I don’t rig it this way very often. I guess it’s just that I’ve seen so many bass from 8 to over 11 pounds blow up on it the way I rig it that I’ve never seen any reason to change. My biggest on the spoon weighed 11 pounds, 3 ounces.
Some guys really like the Weed Wing Spoon which Johnny O’Neill designed. It’s a very fast spoon, and it’s great in hot weather, but one thing I’ve found out is that when the water’s in the 50s to low 60s in the spring, the big bass don’t move real fast for the spoon, and a slower retrieve catches lots more of ’em. The hotter the water, the faster they move for a spoon. Another good spoon on the market is the Timber King, which Charles Spence of Memphis, Tenn., manufactures. It’s similar to the old Rex Spoon made years ago by the old Weetzel Bait Company in Cincinnati.
Tommy Salisbury and I thought our grazing-the-grass pattern was strictly a springtime deal, but we later found it would work to some degree in June, July, and even August. We caught some bass then in the grass.
One thing to remember is that in different lakes in different regions, the aquatic vegetation changes. At Santee we fished Johnson grass. Lake Kissimmee in Florida has the same type of grass, but in Okeechobee, it’s pepper grass. At Currituck Sound, which is probably the finest Johnson Spoon water on the continent, it’s Eurasian milfoil. Toledo Bend has milfoil and some pond weed. And if you fish the Johnson Spoon in your uncle’s farm pond in Illinois, you might be fishing lily pads. Regardless of the type of vegetation, the spoon approach still works, even if you’re using it in reeds.
Think big bass when you’re grazing the grass.
I used to look down on livebait fishing at one time in my career. Back then I didn’t realize its potential or what a fine way it is to catch trophy fish. My first experience with big river shiners—and I’m talking about the 10-to-12-inch wild shiners which weigh up to a pound—was in Florida with a guy named Chuck Mooney. He’s formerly from Ohio and is a guide down in central Florida, and he’s caught some 200 bass over 10 pounds, with his biggest I6 ¼ pounds. I met him during a Bass Anglers Sportsman Society tournament in 1970, and aside from any tourney fishing he does, he’s strictly a shiner fisherman. All his really giant bass are caught on these large shiners.
My first bass over 10 pounds on a shiner was caught at Water melon Pond in Florida in 1970 in August while fishing with Chuck.
This was back when Watermelon Pond was a full 7,000 acres. Now it’s only about 3,000 acres. Back then it was probably the best lunker hole in Florida. What we did essentially was anchor out in the center near small potholes 10 to 15 feet deep. We also drifted across some pot holes with a float and a shiner on about 6 feet of line. We’d get only a couple of fish a day, but very seldom would we ever get a bass under 6 pounds. Normally what we caught would be from 7 to 10 pounds or a little bigger.
I was all keyed up. I’d been fishing at Cape Hatteras and was using a surf rod and had 40-pound line on the reel and my drag set real tight. I got a strike, and he really pulled that float down, and Chuck said to let him take it for a while. When I hit him, I struck back so hard that I sloshed the bass right up to the top. I had to pull him through some lily pads with stems as thick as my thumb. That fish weighed 10 ½ pounds, and he probably would have wrapped up and broken 20-pound-test line. But my 40-pound cut through the lily pads and I finally landed him.
One thing about shiners I found out is that you just can’t buy those big river shiners anywhere for the kind of bass fishing Chuck talks about. Basically you have to go out and catch your own shiners. A few guides and commercial outfits go out and trap them. When you can buy them, they normally cost from four to six dollars per dozen. A 12-inch shiner is probably a five-year-old fish, and in a pond it would take so long to raise them that size that it wouldn’t be proftable. Of course, you can buy lots of 3-inch shiners, and that’s what lots of fishermen use.
Trolling live bait on big lakes is a great way to get into big bass.
About half the fun of shiner fishing is catching your bait. First you have to go out and put the bread out and bait up the spot. You also can use oatmeal or meal cake or something like that to attract the shiners. In most of the Florida lakes shiners are found around coontail moss and underwater grass out from lily pads in the backs of bays and coves. After you put the shiner bait out, you have to wait anywhere from a couple of hours until even the next day, and then you come sneaking back and anchor real quietly on the spot. You catch them with a hook and line, and they’re hard to catch. I like to use a 12- to-16-foot cane pole with 8- or 10-pound line and about a No. 12 trout hook with a small shank and an itsy bitsy split shot a couple of inches above the hook. Normally you fish from 3 to 10 feet deep for shiners, and I use a tiny float which is very sensitive to the slightest nibble. I use either a very tiny piece of wadded-up bread or biscuit dough about the size of a mediumsized garden pea. Some guys even use tiny gobs of peanut butter. Fish right over your chum spot, and watch your float real close. Even though these shiners are ½ pound or bigger, they’ll suck in that bread or dough much the same as a carp would do. Lots of times the float will just quiver a couple of times, and they’ll steal your bait easily. Shiners fight, jump, and thrash around about like a trout. They just go crazy, and they’re a lot of sport to catch.
You need a big live well to put three or four dozen shiners in. I usually use a bassboat live well with a pump which circulates lake water to keep them fresh and alive. Don’t put your hands on the shiners any more than you have to, because their scales will fall off and you’ll kill ’em. If you can, swing the shiner into your live well and flip him off the hook without touching him. You have to be careful when you open the lid on your live well because shiners will jump clear out of your boat. You need a real lively shiner if you want to catch a superbig trophy bass.
When you’ve got several dozen shiners and you’re ready to go bass fishing, you need to rig up your heavy tackle. What I mean by heavy tackle is line that’s at least 20-pound-test, and really 20-pound is rather light. I prefer 25-to-40-pound. In creek channels and deeper areas of the lake, you probably can fish deeper with lighter line if there’s not too much trash. But quite often when you’re trolling or drifting the weed edges, which are the shallower edges where the lily pads start, you really need to use heavier line because the bass are hunkered up in heavy cover. When they hit and go back into that grass you can set the hook and still pull ’em out of places like that with 40-pound line.
The trick is to put a giant live shiner on about an 8/0 hook. I like to use two hooks when I can, such as a 5/0 or 6/0 hook in the front and maybe an 8/0 hook in the tail. Sometimes in open water where there are no weeds I use a treble hook in the shiner’s anal fn and run a 40-pound leader up to my front hook and then extend the leader up to the float. Even if I’m drifting, I like to use the float to see when I’m getting a strike. The float helps tell you where the shiner is, such as a couple of feet out from a weed edge. The float really is your reference point concerning which direction the shiner is moving.
If your shiner is real lively, he gets scared and nervous when a bass comes toward him. The shiner starts quivering, and the float twitches and jumps. Lots of times the shiner comes to the top just before the bass grabs him, and the shiner actually jumps out of the water three or four times. A really big bass often misses the shiner on two or three surges before he catches him, and this adds to your excitement and anticipation. The shiner keeps jumping and the bass keeps charging, and after three to five big swirls the bass gets him and the float goes under. If you’ve got a treble hook on and you’re in a lot of cover, I set the hook quickly, as with a plastic worm. I just drop the rod tip and reel up the slack and bust him hard to try to move him out of the cover. When he first hits the shiner, he might get it crossways in his mouth and both hooks could be hanging on the outside. If it’s open water and I can let him run for ten seconds, I’ll do that. After he moves off 5 or 6 feet he’ll usually stop and turn the shiner in his mouth and engulf it. Then you’ve got twice as good a chance of hooking the fish. There’s a lot of visual contact in shiner fishing when you’re using a lively shiner and you get that explosive strike on the surface and the bobber goes under.
When you set the hook, one thing a big Florida bass likes to do is jump right away. He usually doesn’t run to deep water when he’s around the weed lines. In Florida when you hook one which tries to jump but doesn’t clear the water, a standard rule of thumb is that you’ve got one on over 10 pounds. I have seen 12-pound and even 14-pound bass clear the water, but that’s an exception. Huge fish usually slosh around on the top, with the shiner in their mouths.
I think most of the trophybass hunters in America prefer to fish shiners in central Florida over any other place in the United States. For some reason southern Florida doesn’t seem to have the strain of really big bass. They catch fewer bass over 10 pounds from Orlando on south than they do from Orlando on north. The biggest trophy bass come from Orlando to Jacksonville between Lake Kissimmee and Lake Jackson at Tallahassee. This seems to be the area where the genetically largest bass are. I’ve caught my biggest ones in the smaller lakes. In Lake George I’ve never caught many giant bass, but all around Lake George in the Ocala National Forest there are some 200 smaller lakes from an acre in size up to about 7,000 acres. I prefer those 500-to-l,000-acre lakes where I can get my bass boat in and out. I winch my way in and out of those lakes. One main reason I prefer those smaller lakes is they don’t get the fishing pressure many other lakes get.
One of my favorite tricks when I can afford it is to fly a day over these lakes, and I’ll especially look for one which doesn’t look as if it’s had any travel. The road to it looks overgrown and there’s no trash around the shoreline, and it doesn’t look as if anyone’s been in there for quite a while. On the average I spend two weeks a year fishing for trophy bass. I fish with my wife, one of my cameramen, and possibly with one of the trophybass guides such as Dennis Rahn. In the aver age two weeks we land three to six bass over 10 pounds. Even though I’ve caught a couple a day, you don’t catch them every day. A good average is one every two or three days.
For open water I like to use two treble hooks—a 5/0 or 6/0 in the front and an 8/0 in the tail. When fishing around or through cover, a single weedless hook is better.
The time of year which seems the most productive with shiners in those smaller lakes is the colder winter months when the water temperature’s in the 50s. From 50 to 60 degrees seems to be the ideal water temperature. The good fishing starts as early as December, but January usually is a better month. February is an excellent month, and March usually is the best month. I’d say February and March are the two months when trophybass fishing with shiners is best. Generally the biggest ones you catch are prespawners. Of course, in some of the bays and warmer springs they’ll spawn in January and February, but the majority of the central-Florida bass spawn in March. Just before they spawn and the water’s 50 to 55 degrees the big female bass aren’t taking artificial lures well at all.
Many fishermen know that until the water gets over 60 degrees, Florida bass don’t hit plastic worms good. They hit surface lures some, and they’ll hit crank baits some, but Florida bass basically like to hit lures in hot weather. I don’t like to use artificial lures in Florida except during the summer months.
Trolling shiners is generally the same as drifting them, except in some lakes with structure such as Rodman Reservoir and Lake Eloise near Cypress Gardens. In these latter the structure might be trenches or potholes, and in them I like to take marker buoys and put them on the dropoffs where the depth drops from 10 to maybe 20 feet. With three or four markers I’ll outline that hole, channel, or point. Then with my trolling motor I’ll fish a shiner real deep. I don’t need to use a float for this type of fishing because I’m in open water with very few obstructions to get hung on. Sometimes I mark my line 40 feet from the hook with a black felttip marker. Then I let about 70 feet of line out and use a small weight to slowly bump that shiner along the dropoffs as I circle the structures. When something shakes my bait and I can tell something heavy is pulling on my shiner, I open my bail (on a spinning reel) or push the button (on a freespool bait-casting reel) and let the bass take out line. Then I reverse the trolling motor and run toward where I think the fish is and reel in slack. When I hit that 40-foot mark I put on my line, I’m at the right striking distance; feel I can set the hook better 40 feet away than if I was 90 feet away. If I’m in open water I’ll let the bass take the shiner in deeper, maybe for twenty seconds before I set the hook. If the water’s real clear, I’ll use lighter line, such as 17- or 20-pound-test.
One time I troll is if it’s a calm day when I’m not getting much minnow action. When you hook a shiner through the lips and troll him, he’ll live a lot longer, because he’s getting lots of oxygen. The problem with a single-hook system like that is you really have to let the bass swallow the bait. But you can do that by going back to your 40-foot mark on your line and getting all the slack out.
One of my favorite hooks for big shiners is the Kahle hook, which is made in Minnesota. Throughout Florida, where they do a lot of shiner fishing, you can find Kahle hooks in most any tackle shop. The Kahle is a real big offset hook with a huge bend in it. Even though the shiner’s head takes up part of the bend, there’s still enough throat left in the bend to set the hook point properly. Some of the biggest bass I’ve ever caught were taken while trolling shiners rather than just drifting them along the weed edges.
I usually use a muskie rod—a Fenwick 5 ½- or 6-footer—which is big and stout and has a straight handle with a saltwater reel seat. It has power; you’ll never break a muskie rod on a bass. The rod also has a long butt which you can stick into your stomach to get a better hook set. Some worm rods such as Fenwick’s and Lou Childre’s are No. 6 actions. Based on a number system, a shiner rod would have to be a No. 10. It has to be about twice as stiff as the heaviest, stiffest worm rods. You not only have to drive a very large-diameter hook through a bass’ mouth, but you also just cannot afford to miss a single strike when you’re shiner fishing. You might get only one or two strikes all day, and you have to have it all together—complete efficiency.
Every year when we go to Florida in February, we try to do a film on shiner fishing. For the past four years I’ve fished with Dennis Rahn, and for four years in a row we’ve caught a bass over 10 pounds on film. This is quite an accomplishment considering we had only a few days. We’ve had two over 12 on film. One day I was fishing with my wife, Mary Ann, and it was raining and we couldn’t film. Dennis said we’d try the old Ocklawaha River because lots of times in real cold weather some big fish move up into the warmer waters of the Ocklawaha. It’s fed by Silver Springs and has a little bit warmer water following major cold fronts, and fish migrate up that river at these times. We looked for the sharpest, deepest bends in the river, and in some of those the water is 40 feet deep.
We had anchored out in the river, with the sharp, deep dropoff bend about 30 feet away. We were fishing in a circle around the bend, and there were a lot of logs and trees jutting out into the water. We had saltwater rods and reels with 40-pound line and double trailer hooks, because there are so many trees and logs there that the second a fish hits, you have to set the hook. If you get one, he’ll be over 10 pounds, but if you let him go three seconds he’ll be underneath a log and you’ll lose him. Actually you let the shiner swim up real close to the log so that he’s just about 4 inches from the log. The bait’s right up on top, and you have to keep him from going beneath the log. You let the shiner swim back into crevices and holes in the cover, and then you pull him back out. He keeps cruising up and down the bank and makes a 100-foot circle while staying up against the bank.
Finally after a few minutes a great big bass hit Mary Ann’s shiner right by this big log. She set the hook just right and caught a I0 ½- pounder. It was her first 10-pounder in her life. A tornado warning was out, and the wind was howling about forty miles per hour, but we were fairly well protected by the big trees around the shore. Well, one hit me, and I waited too long before setting the hook, and he got under the log on me and wrapped up my line and I finally had to break him off. I rerigged and threw my shiner in again and about that time this big limb came crashing down out of the tree and fell on my line. At the same time I had a bass taking my shiner, and I set the hook with the big limb over my line. I reeled this bass, which was about 10 pounds, up into the limb and he got all tangled up in it and I ended up losing him too.
Mary Ann threw out a shiner away from the cover out in the middle of the river. The shiner was the biggest one we had in the live box, and this tremendous bass crashed it about three times. I could see the bass and I guessed it at 12 pounds. Well, she set the hook and rolled it up on top and finally got it into the net. It weighed almost 12 ½ pounds. She had two big ones and I hadn’t caught anything.
My wife, Mary Ann, used shiners to catch these “little fellows”— 9½, 10 ½ and 12 ½ pounds!
A little later she had a shiner out and a bass about 9 ½ pounds crashed her shiner by a log, but by this time it was raining hard and she was cold and miserable. Anyway, she caught the 9 ½ and that one gave her three big ones, and I’ve still not caught my first one. It was about noon and I took her back to the motor home, and she told me to go back out and fish because I was still after a trophy; she was going to get warm and take a nap.
I went back out and did some trolling and did manage to catch two bass. One was almost 10 and the other was about 9 pounds. We ended up with five fish that day, and the five of ’em weighed almost 50 pounds.
The most exciting shiner fishing I ever saw was back in the early 1970s when they first impounded Rodman Reservoir. There weren’t any boat docks on Rodman and not many people were fishing it. There were many trees in the water, and probably this discouraged people. It was a navigational hazard to fish it unless you ran your boat slowly and were extracareful. It also was hard to get into. You had to go through the locks if you came from Welaka, and there were just a few little ramps along the Ocala Forest. For the first five or six years thousands of bass grew big in this 14,000-acre lake, and they were pretty much unmolested.
Back about 1973 or 1974 I started fishing Rodman, and I saw right away that it was the best bigbass hole in Florida. Rodman was better than Jackson was when it was hot, and also better than Watermelon Pond was when it was hot. From 1972 through 1974 it was the best lake in the country for bass over 10 pounds. I was doing a film in 1974 with Glen Lau for Lowrance Electronics. There was a lot of under water camera work involved, and we’d been out filming all day. Dennis Rahn was on the lake that day and had caught a 12-pounder. I knew the bass were biting, and I’d brought along thirteen shiners in hopes I’d have a little time to fish that day. It was sundown when we finished our film work, and Glen commented that I hadn’t had a chance to fish that day. I told Glen to go on in and that I had thirteen shiners along and planned to fish until dark and then I’d meet him at his house.
Glen leisurely went back to the boat dock, and on his way home he stopped to get gas. I had only thirty or forty minutes to fish before black dark. I think he also stopped to get a sandwich at a convenience store. Anyhow, when he was turning into his driveway I had caught up with him and was right behind him.
What I’d done in those forty-five minutes or so was pull up to a spot near the canal they’d dug through Rodman. I put down my anchor and put out four rods with shiners, and almost instantly all four bobbers went under. I landed three of those four fish. One of ’em was about 10, another was about 9, and the third one was about 7. The fourth bass broke my line. The next time I baited up with two rods and threw them out, and I got strikes on them. In just 20 minutes I used up my thirteen shiners and ended up with ten bass.
When shiner fishing in rivers, look for the bigger fish in the deeper water around the outside bends or turns, especially where there are fallen trees, brush piles, or other debris. The double treble hook is appropriate for fishing next to this cover.
Glen asked me if I’d gotten a strike, and I said that as a matter of fact I had. I said I’d gotten a limit, and he didn’t believe me. He said I hadn’t been out there long enough to have gotten a limit. I had ’em on a rope, and Glen was saving a lot of bass at that time for underwater work on the movie Bigmouth and films for The Fisherman series we did with Homer Circle, and he needed big bass to put in his big aquarium. I’d kept ’em alive in my live well, and we put the rope full of ’em on his big scales and they weighed 73 pounds.
That was the fastest action I’ve ever seen. Back then at Rodman there were actually schools of these big bass, and I’d gotten into one. They often roamed the middle of the lake, and when you caught one, five or six or eight bass would follow the one you’d hooked right up to the boat. Quite often you could just anchor at that point and cast all around and doggone near catch your limit right from that one spot. There’s still a lot of big bass in Rodman, but it’s nothing like it was back in 1974. At the hole I had where I’d caught those ten, in a month’s time I caught a total of sixty bass 6 pounds and over. I really didn’t catch all that many bass over 10 pounds from that hole; I probably averaged one every two or three days.
On one of my best days at Rodman I had an 11¾, an 11¼, a 10½, and a 10¼.1 also had two bass right at 9 pounds.
But my best day was with Glen Lau’s eleven-year-old son, Davie. We fished one day in April of 1975 when I was finishing up some film work. When I took Davie with me, Glen told me not to spoil him by letting him catch too many fish because he’d think bass fishing was too easy. But I really did spoil him. I let him set the hook, and he caught an 11 ¾-pounder that day as well as a 10 ½ and a 10 ¼. Imagine that! An eleven-year-old with three over 10 in one day! I also caught a 10-pounder, and we weighed our top eight bass and they hit 68 pounds.
“Running” the shiners is a completely different pattern from drifting or still-fishing with shiners. When you run shiners, you’re seeking out heavy cover and remaining stationary while the shiner does the moving. You let him go beneath the cover. The hyacinth beds in Florida are where running shiners really pays off. Some of the central-Florida lakes in particular have huge shelves of hyacinths which stick out from the bank. Typical lakes with these masses of hyacinths are any lakes along the St. Johns River system. Probably half the lakes in the Ocala National Forest—and these are public lakes—all have big patches of hyacinths.
The wind blows the hyacinths around, and they move from day to day. When you find hyacinths which have blown against a good edge with deep water beneath them, let your boat drift up to the edge or anchor about 10 feet out. Put a single hook near the tail of the shiner above the anal (bottom) fn of the baitfish and don’t use any weight. The weight of the hook holds him upright. Cast him to the edge of the hyacinths, and by pulling him backward a little bit, you get him to run away from you. Cast him softly, because you want to keep him as lively as possible. Keep fiddling with him and give him slack so that he runs away from you and goes beneath the hyacinths. The bass almost always lie in the shade beneath the hyacinths, and sometimes they’re 10 to 20 feet back beneath the hyacinths.
If the shiner is running high in the water, he’ll get wrapped in the hyacinths, so you need to keep him running as low as possible. The roots of the hyacinths hang down about 2 feet, and if you keep him running low, he’ll get back beneath them without hanging up. Maybe out of a dozen shiners, only three or four will make good runs beneath the hyacinths. Many of them will circle out to open water, and others will run beneath the hyacinths a few feet and see a bass and then they’ll head out toward open water. They’re not dumb; they don’t want to become lunch for the largemouth.
When you get a shiner back there 15 or 20 feet, he might wrap up slightly around the hair roots of the hyacinths. Just let him sit there. When a bass hits him, he blows the shiner upward. Lots of times you’ll see the hyacinths rise up in a huge bulge. That’s the bass boiling up and engulfing the shiner.
Quite often it’s hard to tell if you’ve got a bass on or if the shiner is doing the moving. It takes some practice to tell the difference. When you pull back, if you all of a sudden feel a surge on your line, you’ve got a bass on. But often when a bass hits, you’ll see the line jump and take off at a fairly steady rate. The shiner moves along in short twitches or spurts.
Even though the shiner is way back beneath the hyacinths, when a bass hits, I like to let him run 10 to 20 seconds before I set the hook. Before you set the hook, the best thing to do is get as far forward in the boat as you can and try to get all of your slack line reeled in. Stretch out forward toward where you think the bass is, reel in the line fast until it’s tight, and then set the hook with a big sweeping motion with the long rod. Then back up three or four steps and set the hook again, and back up some more and set again. Finally after all that hook setting, you’ve straightened your line out and you’ve got the bass hooked.
For this type of fishing I like to use extremely heavy line; I prefer 40-pound-test. The bass that hits way back in the hyacinths still is apt to get wrapped up and tangled in all the vegetation. Getting him out of there is not very glamorous, but he’s apt to be a trophy fish.
Occasionally you can run shiners in lily pads, but in the lilies, the shiner is going to get hung up a lot worse. Pull up to the edge of the pads and let the shiner out and let him run up into them. Quite often you don’t ever get the shiner back, because he will wrap up in them. When you pull him back, you tear him off the hook. When you run shiners, you use a lot of shiners. Sometimes I’ll use six to eight dozen in a day. You’re constantly losing your bait because it gets wrapped up in vegetation. You also get a lot of strikes which pull the bait off the hook. Chain pickerel or “jackfish” are bad about doing this or killing your shiners.
When I’m running shiners, I frequently use the smaller shiners instead of the larger ones. I like the 6-to-7-inch shiners because they run good. The 12-inch ones have power, but they don’t have as much stamina as the smaller ones. A good, lively 7-inch shiner will do more swimming around and will last longer than a big one.
My father-in-law, Paul Colbert, thinks there’s no greater fishing in the world than running shiners. He’d rather anchor 10 feet out from a hyacinth patch and sit there and run shiners back in under the hyacinths all day than do any other kind of fishing. Every winter when he and his wife, Mary, accompany Mary Ann and me on our annual migration to Florida, Paul makes sure we’ve got Dennis Rahn booked up for a few days of guide work so we can run shiners and catch some big ones.
A large, lively golden shiner which is allowed to swim un-weighted beneath a blanket of floating vegetation will often bring out a trophy bass. A single weedless hook will help avoid hangups.
One of the best places in the world to run shiners has been a big hyacinth patch Dennis found three years ago in Rodman Pool. He and his customers caught more than 1,600 bass of all sizes from that two-acre area back in 1976. He’s taken Paul and me in there, and at times the action was so fast that we’d all three have bass on at the same time. Sometimes when the bass are super-active, they chase the shiners out from beneath the hyacinths, and we’ve seen them run the shiners right up close to the boat and blow and swirl and grab them right in front of our eyes a few feet away.
One time J.D. Skinner of Birmingham, Ala., and I were in the Welaka, Fla., area waiting for the start of the three official practice days for a B.A.S.S. tournament on the St. Johns River. The St. Johns, and any water connected to it, was off limits to all the tournament fishermen before the practice round, so I suggested to J.D. that he and I fish a little lake not connected to the river system. I had fished a 200-acre lake called Silver Lake and suggested we go over there and fish shiners and try to catch a trophy bass. J.D. was all for this, so I got four dozen shiners and we took his bass boat and my four-wheel-drive vehicle.
We’d caught a 7-pounder drifting, but not much else was happening. Finally we found a patch of dead hyacinths, which were about the only ones in the lake. We anchored about 15 feet away and started running shiners. I had three or four strikes and caught a 4-pounder, but J.D. hadn’t had a strike. Then I pulled a shiner out to the edge of the hyacinth patch, and a huge bass rolled up and crashed my bait. I gave him a few seconds and then set the hook real hard, but I didn’t get him hooked. J.D. started reeling in and said real excitedly, “Boy, I’m going to catch him!”
“You want to bet?” I asked as I reached into the shiner box and grabbed one and got it on my hook as fast as I could and threw back. There was a big race to see who could get in there first, and my bait hit half a second before his did. Instantly that bass grabbed him. I won’t recount what J.D. said. I let the bass run for twenty seconds before driving the hook home. That bass weighed 12 pounds, 13 ounces. When I rolled him up to the boat, I yelled for J.D. to net him. We didn’t know how big he was, but when the bass came sloshing up out of the water, it scared J.D. so bad that he froze. I was yelling, “Net him! Net him!” and finally he overcame the shock and did.
I’d never heard of catching a bass on a leech until I got to talking with Spence Petros of Fishing Facts magazine. He’d run a few articles in the magazine about guys catching smallmouths on leeches. I was wanting to do some filming three years ago in Minnesota, and I called Al Lindner, Al said he had a good buddy, Grant Hughes, up on Lake Vermilion who had a lodge called Muskego Point. Al told me Grant caught a world of 5-and 6-pound smallmouths all summer long.
I reminded Al that I’d fished for smallmouths a long time and pointed out that nobody catches a world of 5- and 6-pound small mouths just all summer long, especially during August. Al countered by saying August was the best month and that Grant Hughes just murders ’em then and catches dozens of ’em over 5 pounds in August. I said nobody…. Al wouldn’t argue. He just said call Grant.
Well, I called Grant at Cook, Minn., which is on the banks of Lake Vermilion and about a hundred miles south of the Canadian border. Vermilion has about 50,000 acres, and for years it’s been known for walleye and northern pike fishing, and I’d never heard anybody talk about how good Vermilion’s smallmouth fishing was. Grant tells me on the phone he’s about the only one up there who fishes for small mouths. He said that during the seven or eight years he had been there, he’d fished for smallmouths about every day during the season but there weren’t more than three or four other guys on the entire 50,000-acre lake who fished strictly for smallmouths. He said walleye and northern pike fishermen caught smallmouths but almost by accident because the lake had so many of ’em.
Grant also pointed out that during the previous twenty to thirty years, Vermilion’s smallmouths had been virtually unmolested, and if a guy knew structure and how to fish a leech, he could catch nearly a limit of 5-pound smallmouths every day! Within three hours I was all packed up and was driving my Chevy Suburban about seventy-five miles an hour headed north.
This was the third week of August, and Grant had some walleyes and some northerns located. When I first saw the lake, I wasn’t very impressed with it. There were a lot of cottages on the shoreline. Grant stretched out a contour map of the lake, and it showed a bunch of rockpiles way out in the lake, which is not a deep lake. Every couple of miles was a major rock shoal which stuck up 5 to 10 feet off the sand bottom.
I didn’t know how to fish a leech, and I was a bit reluctant to even pick one up. I thought they’d bite and suck blood, but I watched Grant stick his hand down in a bucket of ’em and pull out about twenty which were clinging all over his hand. He simply picked ’em off one by one and went ahead and baited up. These leeches, when curled up, are only about an inch long and ½ inch wide. When they’re stretched out, they are from 2 to 3 inches long. Grant used 4-pound line and a tiny Size 8 or 10 Style 84 hook, and about 6 inches above the hook he put on a tiny split shot. Leeches have both a tail sucker and a mouth sucker. Grant ran the hook through the mouth sucker and back again through it and then through the body. His hook was exposed. He almost vertical-jigs the bait. He fishes the rockpiles, and if you make a long cast to them, your split shot and bait frequently get caught in the rock crevices, and then you spend more time tying on hooks than fishing. You need to use a front locator on your boat and get right over the fish, then open the bail on your reel and drop the leech to the bottom. Then with your trolling motor work very carefully all around that rockpile. Our pattern depth during the week we were there was about 20 feet deep. Jig the leech up 3 or 4 feet and drop it back to the bottom. When you get hung up, you’re directly over the bait and all you have to do is twitch your rod tip a little and you usually get loose.
Don’t set the hook the instant a smallmouth hits the leech. Open your bail and let him run with it for four to five seconds. With 4- or 6-pound line—and I prefer the 6-pound—you don’t set the hook hard when you close the bail. Just set it firm and keep a tight line. The smallmouth exerts a slow, steady pressure, and with a big one you won’t feel any tail movement. The bigger the fish, the steadier the pressure he exerts.
Grant Hughes made a believer out of me real quick. The first bass he stuck was about 5 pounds. He had found some schools of 2-to-3-pound smallmouths, but he didn’t want to fish for them. He had some lunker holes—some rockpiles which produced strictly 4-and 5-pounders. We’d catch only one or two big ones on a spot like that, but during our first full day of leeching, we caught ten smallmouths over 4 pounds, and three were over 5. My biggest weighed 5 ½.
Leeches made my day on a trip this past spring with Tommy Salisbury, my old buddy from South Carolina, and Mike Vierzba of the Stearns Company. We went to Lac LaCroix in Canada with my film crew, and for the first few days we caught several 1-to-3-pound smallmouths, but we weren’t getting the big ones. They were spawning, and we located five or six beds, but all we could catch were the small males. The big females—some we saw were 5 to 6 pounds—would follow our plugs and sometimes roll up at them, but they wouldn’t strike.
This leech-caught 5-plus-pounder helped Grant Hughes make a believer out of me.
Bill Zupp, who operates the camp where we stayed on the lake, said he just had received a shipment of leeches from the U.S. I got to wondering if they’d work on those bedding females. We took some leeches with us, and we got the cameras all ready and I threw a leech on a bed. We saw this big smallmouth moving off, and my line moved off, too. I set the hook, and she boiled up on the surface and gave me a real battle. We were yelling, and the cameras were going, and every body was excited. I finally worked the fish up to the boat, and 3 feet away from the boat, she tore off the hook.
We went on and did some more filming, but I got to thinking about that one bass being on the bed and how she might hit again. So we went back to that spot again. I made two casts in there without a strike, and the camera was on when I threw in a third time. My line started moving off, and I set the hook into that same big bass. We got the cast, the strike, and six or seven jumps from this big bass all on film, and I landed her. She weighed 5 pounds, 9 ounces. That bass on the bed hit twice within an hour. For the previous two days, we’d thrown at that fish with lures and hadn’t got her to hit. But the leech did the trick.
There are times, such as during the spawning season and also during hot weather when the smallmouths are on structure, that lures just don’t produce well. But at these times if you drop a leech in there, you’re likely to get your line stretched!
I’m convinced leeches would work on small-mouths even in places where they don’t use leeches. I told Billy Westmorland about my experience with this live bait and asked him if they ever used ’em at Dale Hollow Reservoir where he lives in Tennessee. He said he didn’t know of anyone who ever used leeches for smallmouths. The largest smallmouths in the world probably are in Dale Hollow, and I’m curious about how effective leeches might be for them.
In some areas, particularly many parts of states such as Oklahoma, the water is muddy at spawning time. For some reason, when it’s very muddy, the spinnerbait is the king spawning bait. Spawning bass normally will hit the worm anywhere, but the spinnerbait gives you the advantage of being able to cover a lot more water in a day. If you’re in an area with a lot of brush, cover, and muddy water, you can work a spinnerbait through a lot of water. Even though they’ll hit the worm, it’s much slower to use.
Since muddy-water spawners are very, very shallow, such as a foot to 18 inches deep, you need a light spinnerbait with a fairly large blade. The large blade slows the bait down. The larger the blade, the slower it runs, and the lighter the body weight, the shallower it runs. I prefer a No. 5 or 6 gold blade if the water’s muddy, but if it’s super-muddy I like a red or brightorange blade. I use copper if the water is semi-muddy. I’ll take a ¾-ounce head and with a knife shave off quite a bit of the lead to lighten the lure. The torque of that big blade on a little spinnerbait would roll the bait in the water, but since you’re running it slow, it doesn’t roll. Hold your rod high and this allows it to run slower, and the blade almost creates a wake.
Since the timbered reservoirs in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas are food-control lakes, by spawning time there is almost automatically high water which gets up in the grass and bushes. Often even in reservoirs without the timber you’re fishing in fooded fields. Since you don’t spot many fish in muddy water, you need to look for movement more than anything else. I try to avoid the wind and find a calm cove so I can detect fish movement. Spawning bass are always moving around. You’ll see carp moving, too, but throw to them anyway.
A muddy-water spawner.
One of the best strings of bass I ever caught was when I thought I was throwing to carp, and they turned out to be half carp and half bass. Mary Ann and I caught ten bass totaling 45 pounds at Oolegah Reservoir in Oklahoma by throwing to where we saw a lot of carp working. We threw spinnerbaits and caught 4-, 5-, and 6-pound spawning largemouths. They were right up where the carp were rolling. Usually carp spawn at the same water temperatures and in the same areas bass spawn in. You can tell the movements of carp from bass because when you spook them, carp take off straight as an arrow, but bass move out for 10 feet or so and then make an arc and slow down. Bass end up about 10 feet from their beds after they make that loop. Then they ease back to the bed.
Spawning bass are notorious for hitting a spinnerbait with their mouths closed. All they’re trying to do is bump it out of the way. I almost always use a trailer hook, and if the area is a little bit open, I sometimes put a treble hook on the regular trailer hook. You can use the shortarm spinnerbait for spawners because you’re running it so shallow and are coming over the logs and submerged bushes. Two good shortarm models on the market are the Scorpion by Bass Buster and the Red Man which Jimmy Houston designed and sold to Norman. You can go to a No. 3 or 4 blade if you shave the head down to about ounce. You definitely don’t want a fastmoving spinner bait, however.
Sometimes if the water’s a little deeper and I think I know exactly where the bed is, I’ll buzz the spinnerbait right over the bed and at the last instant drop it right on her. If it falls right on her, out of instinct she’s apt to inhale it.
When you’re wading for spawning bass, you want to avoid step ping in a nest and messing up the eggs. The bed is usually 2 to 6 inches deeper than the regular bottom. Balance your weight on your rear foot, and slide the foot you’re going to step with as if you’re trying to find your way in the dark in a motel room. Slide your foot and plant it and then shift your weight to it. Also, this helps keep you from trip ping over stumps and logs. If you feel the edge of a depression, that’s likely the bed, so then you can wade around without disturbing it.
Deer-hair bugs are very popular with smallmouth fishermen, particularly the old-timers such as the late John Alden Knight. When I go to good lakes in Minnesota and Canada, such as Lac LaCroix, in June, a dynamite pattern for me is the deer-hair bug for the quiet approach. Most of this fishing is for smallmouths, although deer-hair bugs work equally well for largemouths. I probably have no greater fun than catching smallmouths in those northern waters on a flyrod and deer- hair bug. I use a small bug because a big deer-hair bug is hard to cast. It’s compact and doesn’t have hair legs, which are too wind-resistant. It’s tied on a No. 2 hook and looks like a miniature mouse with its small leather tail. Another one I like has a little tuft of hair coming back by the hook. This hair makes it almost weedless.
When these bugs are dry, they land softly on the water. For some reason smallmouths in those clear northern lakes like a quiet bug. They probably see it coming through the air, and they don’t like the noisy splat of cork or plastic-headed bugs; I’ve found I can catch more on the deer-hair bugs. These smallmouths are seldom in shallow water except around spawning time, and then they’re cautious, wary fish. Early in the morning and late in the evening and on a cloudy day they’ve got their eyes tuned to the surface. When they’re spawning, this could be the best flyrod bass bugging you’ll ever find.
I’m looking for spawners, and again I’m looking in the northern coves in the lake. In these coves I look for large individual boulders and small submerged grass patches. These are key areas. I throw the bug in there and let it sit motionless for a long time. With Polaroid glasses, often I can see the smallmouth rise up to within a foot of the bug and sit there and watch it. If you twitch it too hard, you’ll spook him. But when you twitch it gently, he usually charges right into it. Smallmouths usually rush the bug rather than suck it in as largemouths normally do. Occasionally when they’re really active, they’ll shoot up into the air and come down on the bug and take it on the way down. These are the most exciting strikes you’ll ever get. In fact, I’ve been trying for five seasons to get this aerial-bombardment type of strike on film because it’s just so dramatic.
Here are a few of my deer-hair favorites for northern smallmouths.
Deer-hair bugs don’t make nearly the popping sound on the water that a regular popping bug makes. They’re quiet and resemble a moth on the surface. They’re designed to be worked slowly and quietly. With the weedless type of deer-hair bug I mentioned, you can pull it and skitter it along over the grass and catch bass that way.
Some of the greatest smallmouth fishing I’ve ever enjoyed was a couple of summers ago with Spence Petros at Lac LaCroix on the Canada-Minnesota border. We found a shallow bar out on the main lake, and the bass were on this structure. We’d caught bass around the edge of that bar on crank baits during the day, but that evening the fish moved up on the bar and started chasing minnows on the surface. I suggested we try a bug, and we got into a school of 4-to-5-pounders. Spence caught a 5 ½-pounder—his biggest ever—on a bug, and I landed a 5-pounder. We caught approximately forty bass in a couple of hours until it was pitch black, and our top ten averaged 4 pounds apiece. Five or six times we each had good ones on. Those were the most smallmouths over 4 pounds I’ve ever caught in any two-hour period, and we got them on flyrods and bugs.
Nothing is any stronger in fresh water, and nothing tests flyrod tackle any better, than a big northern smallmouth bass. Four-pound smallmouths on flyrods and bugs are the ultimate.
Popping bugs are one of my favorite patterns for catching largemouths. While the Peck’s Popper with a No. 2 hook and a concave mouth has been my old standby, this past year I found an excellent bug made in Norfork, Va. It looks like the Peck’s bug, but it has epoxy rather than paint and it’s the strongest, finest bug I’ve ever seen. I bounced it off numerous cypress trees along the North River near Currituck Sound, N.C., and I caught twenty to thirty bass per day on it, and yet it still looks brand new. Most popping bugs are fragile; the paint gets knocked off the head and the hook works loose from the cork. But this bug is super-strong.
One advantage with a popping bug is that even with 6- or 8-pound leader, when you set the hook with that limber rod you hardly ever lose a bass. The bug hook is light wire and sharp, and I sharpen them even more. Once you hook a fish, you very seldom lose it. Lots of times a largemouth will inhale that bug and you’ll hook him in his tongue area. This is really a super place to hook one. About the only way you’ll lose a bass on a bug is if he breaks your leader. When he jumps, he doesn’t get the leverage from the light bug to throw the hook that he does if you hook him on a -ounce topwater plug.
All you have to do is nurse him along. Hold your rod high in the air and put some pressure on him—not too much—by holding the line. In lakes with lots of cover, they easily can dive into the brush or pads and break your leader. This is a problem at Okeechobee and Kissimmee and on the east shore of Lake George in Florida. But in an open lake like Lac LaCroix, you never have to worry about even a 5-pounder wrapping up and breaking your leader.
It’s an advantage to have a flyrod and popping bug rigged up in your boat when you’re out fishing for fun. If the bass simply aren’t hitting much and the action is slow, you can tie on a tiny popper with a Size 8 or 10 hook and probably catch some nice bluegills. This can make the day when the bass don’t cooperate. Bluegills will knock a bass bug, but they very seldom get the hook; you need a smaller bug with a smaller hook to catch them. In Oklahoma and some states there’s a species of panfish called the green sunfish. They have bigger mouths than bluegills, and you can hook them on small to mediumsized bass bugs. I’ve frequently caught them on my bass bugs. They’re fun, too, because they really blast into a bug.
Many old-timers insist that bass bugs are among the most effec tive lures you can throw in the summer when the sun’s up bright and the bass are in weeds and pads, because the bugs offer a much quieter approach. Something I experimented with at Currituck turned out to work good, and that was making my bugs weedless. I took some 60-pound steel leader and pushed a 2-inch length of it through the eye of the bug and then right into the cork head so that it came out the top of the head. Then with needlenose pliers I bent the wire and made a weedguard. I could drag the bug over the milfoil without the hook snagging. I missed a few more strikes because of the weedguard, but not enough to offset the advantage of the weedguard.
Thinking of popping bugs and Currituck Sound reminds me of a funny incident I experienced there seven or eight years ago. I was fishing with a variety of lures, and saw a flyrodder wading near an island. Every few minutes I’d see him hook a bass which would jump and thrash around. He was stringing them, and with the North Car olina daily limit being eight bass, he was already culling fish. I could tell he had a bunch of ’em 3 pounds and better. I’d been fishing all morning and had caught some bass, too, but mine weren’t running as large as his fish. Finally I eased up to him and asked him how he was doing. He said casually he’d caught a few, and I tried to be real non chalant and said I’d caught a few, too. I didn’t want to make it obvious I really wanted to know what he was on to. I mentioned that I’d seen him catch a couple of nice ones, and he held up his stringer which had eight all over 3 pounds. His biggest was about 5 ½. His fish made my mouth water, and he was catching and releasing them right and left.
I really was trying to figure out his pattern, and he sensed this. He was an older gentleman, and finally he says, “Well, I’ll tell you what, son. It really doesn’t make much difference what color or size these bugs are as long as they’re these oneinch bugs in a frog color with green feathers.”
This largemouth fell for a popper fished near weedy cover.
I’ve found out since then at Currituck that he’s right. That frog color with greenish-yellow feathers in that certain size he was talking about is far the best bug in that water. I’ll catch three bass on that size and color to one on something else.
I have noticed too that in certain lakes, a certainsized popper in a certain color will be far superior. I can’t find any rule of thumb to this, such as saying in clear water use a light-colored bug. I do know it pays to go into a tackle shop around a good popping-bug lake and ask what their best-selling popper is. The color and size makes a lot of difference in some areas.
I hate to have to worm fish with anything less than 10-pound line. With the Texas rig, I’ve always maintained that with any line smaller than 10-pound, it’s very difficult to get the hook through the plastic and still have enough power to hook the fish solidly.
When I do use less than 10-pound line, such as in this delicate worming pattern, I modifly my worm rigs drastically. If you’re in open, clear water, you can fish the worm on 6-pound line with an exposed Aberdeen hook. Instead of using a large-diameter 1/0 or 2/0 hook, I’m apt to go to a No. 2 Aberdeen hook, which is nothing more than a crappie hook.
Sometimes it’s necessary to rig the worm weedless for cover. Then I rig it Texas-style, but instead of going through the middle of the worm, I’ll put the hook point at the side of it and make the slightest little indention into the plastic. Only a tiny slither of plastic is holding the hook point. This isn’t quite as weedless as the standard Texas rig, but I’m not working this rig in heavy, heavy cover.
Charlie Brewer from Lawrenceburg, Tenn., invented what he calls the Slider and a technique called Slider fishing. He put an Aberdeen-type hook on a small, fat-bottomed jig head. The fat bottom makes the jig head slither down rather than fall straight. On the back of the head he uses a small-diameter 3-to-4-inch plastic worm. For years I’ve fished similarly by using an 1/8-ounce or even smaller slip sinker and a No. 1 or 2 hook with 6-pound line and a short worm with an exposed hook for Kentucky bass on Smith Lake and Lake Martin in Alabama. I swim the worm along the bluffs, and I was doing this back in 1965 when I was in the army stationed at Ft. Benning, Ga.
Charlie calls this method a “do-nothing” method. I’d get parallel to the rock bluff and throw out and let the worm sink about ten seconds and slowly wind it back. The two techniques are basically the same. In clear water the fish have so much vertical and horizontal visibility that this small lure attracts them from long distances.
One helpful thing which Charlie Brewer pointed out about his “do-nothing” retrieve with Sliders was the delay in setting the hook. I used to set the hook the instant I got a strike when swimming the small worm, but missed a lot of fish. When Charlie feels the pressure from the strike, he keeps reeling. Pressure from his tight line keeps the bass from being able to spit out the lure. The hook is against some part of his mouth. Finally after a few seconds the fish usually turns and goes the other way, and then is when Charlie sets the hook. The fish’s mouth is away from him. When I was setting the hook with the fish facing me, it would be easy to pull the bait out of his mouth, and I’m sure that at times I did exactly that. The principle is virtually the same as described in the section on weedless lures when I talked about fishing the plastic frogs. Let them take the lure and hit them when they turn their heads and go away from you. Charlie has told me that sometimes out of ten strikes, he gets all ten fish.