How shallow is too shallow?

"I dunno, looks too shallow" I said.  I was about ready to move on to deeper water when BOOM! a bass inhaled my buddy's topwater frog at the end of his cast in what looked to be ankle-deep water.

We're talking water so shallow you're dragging your boat across the bottom of the lake.

Water so shallow that your trolling motor is digging into mud and sand even though its as high as it goes.


In the springtime, fishing shallow water can be a blast!  Don't make the mistake of thinking water is ever too shallow as I almost did.  Topwaters like hollow body frogs and and horny toads are a thrill to fish in water that is only inches deep because you can literally see fish creating a wake as they charge toward your lure to eat.

The problem is, these fish can be spooked very easily in shallow water.  If the fish sees or hears you before you see them, its game over.

To solve this problem one must have a perfectly tuned setup to allow for max-distance casting.  This means having a quality reel with the brakes and tension knob set as light as possible, a rod longer than 7' with a Moderate Fast or Fast action, and a lure with a bit of weight to it.

Combined with a good 50-60lb braided line, this setup will allow you to put a lure out far enough to get those unsuspecting bass to eat.

Next time you're out fishing, don't rule out the shallowest water in the lake, especially during spring!

Good luck.

Hog hunting -- heavy duty flipping

Up until more recently, a topwater frog would be my go-to bait when fishing shallow vegetation like lily pads, coontail, maiden cane, milfoil, duckweed, etc.

While a frog is great for getting a strike from an aggressive bass in shallow water, little did I know I was pulling my frog right over the top of wary and giant bass that just didn't want to come to the surface for a frog.  Perhaps they've seen it before, perhaps they are just in a bad mood.  Who knows.

What I do know is that a few years ago when my fishing buddy Marty Sexton pulled out a 1oz tungsten weight pegged on 65lb braided line with a beaver-style plastic, he started yanking giant fish right out from under where my frog had just been -- over and over.  How could this be?  I had confidence in my frog that if I brought it near a bass it would eat.  I started to question what I thought I knew about fishing shallow weeds and have since learned a lot and refined what rods I keep tied up for attacking the slop.

While I used to keep only 1 flipping stick in the boat, I now keep 5+ rods over 7 feet ready to go: a frog rod, a heavy swim jig rod, a heavy flipping rod, and a horny toad rod.  The rest of my big-rod setups are for swimbaits and fishing deep.

I've since learned quite a bit about heavy flipping through trial and error and time on the water, and through asking my buddy Marty a million questions about the specifics he learned while flipping in Florida and southern states often with various BASS Elite pros and local guides.

Here's a few dandies that have been landed in my boat flipping heavy jigs in thick vegetation

 Ben Feldman with a tank

 Myself with a 5.5lb big bass of the tournament

After a few years of trials and tweaks, this is my favorite heavy flipping rig right now and some notes about why:

Rod
Old-school green Daiwa 7'6" Heavy power moderate action with an extra long rod butt.

I've tested a bunch of different flipping rods and this style flipping rod is by far my favorite for flipping a big jig or tungsten weight from 1/2oz to 1.5oz.  The moderate taper helps absorb the shock of braid.  The slower-action taper also helps me really load the rod and pull very hard while absorbing head shakes.  The longer rod butt increases leverage significantly, allowing me to pull harder than with a shorter rod butt.  To me, these are the most important attributes in a flipping rod.

Line
65lb braid like Power Pro or 60lb Sunline FX2 are lines I like.

Rubber stopper
I don't like the generic yellow/red/black weight stoppers.  My favorite stopper is the little tacky cone-shaped stoppers made by Paycheck Baits.  I have noticed that the cone shape avoids slime and snagging up on limp vegetation.  The standard barrel-shaped stoppers seem just a tad more snaggy and cause more fouled lures.  Barrel-shaped stoppers still perform well in most circumstances.

Hook
I recently switched from an EWG hook to a VMC heavy flipping hook with the molded bait guard on the shank of the hook.  I tie a snell knot to the shank of the hook, being certain to thread the line through the hook-point side of the eyelet.  Do it wrong and the hook leverages away from the fish!  Do it right and when you set the hook your hook point swings up.  The result is an awesome hook-up ratio.

Also, this style hook results in a more-weedless presentation than an EWG hook.  The bait-holding knuckle by the eyelet of an EWG hook can get held up on vegetation while a straight-shank flipping hook makes a perfect wedge shape with the soft plastic causing less snags.

Plastic
I like a beaver style bait and there are a ton of companies making them.  I prefer Netbait's for the slightly thicker midsection vs Reaction Innovations sweet beaver.  I like the Missile Baits D-Bomb too.

Jig alternative
If I use a jig, I prefer Dirty Jigs no-jack.  It's got a nice shape, an awesome hook, and they stand up.  Oldham's are nice too.  I haven't used many others that I like.

Colors
For clear water I really like Okeechobee craw.  It's green pumpkin on one side and sparkle blue on the other side.  Looks like a bluegill!  Straight green pumpkin and spayed grass are my next favorites for clear water.  In dirty or stained water I really like black with blue fleck or black with red fleck because it gives a better silhouette.

Rockin' Bass

A 21" 5.01lb bass off a deep rock pile in the Twin Cities metro area

Summer is here!  That means the deep bass are getting fired up right now.

There's nothing better than bombing a cast as far as you can up over a rocky hump and getting bit near the end of your cast.  Your rod loads up often from getting snagged in the rocky bottom.  Its often easy to mistake a bite for being snagged on the bottom, so you have to really focus on movements in the line and rodtip, keeping a sensitive feel for the 'bite'.  As I always say, hooksets are free, so even if I'm not 100% sure that the negative feedback in my rod is a rock or fish, I'll often give it a hookset for good measure.   Half the time its a rock.  The other half the time you think its a rock, but then the rock starts to move... and off in the distance you see a giant bass come to the surface to do backflip, only to head back to the depths to try and get away.  Fish on!!

Its a sight you have to see.  Or even better yet, experience for yourself.

Here's what I look for when targeting the monsters of the deep:

Rocks.

Yup, that's about it.  Find rocks on points, humps, saddles, weed edges, or even in the middle of nowhere.  To do this you need a good map and a good depth finder.  A GPS is a great tool to have as well.

Idle your boat over these spots slowly while watching your graph.  If rocks are there it's usually quite obvious.  The bottom of the lake will appear different than over a sandy or muddy area.  The bottom should appear jagged, with thick solid readings on the display and almost no weeds in sight.  If you have a GPS mark it!  If no GPS toss a marker bouee out over where you think the rocks are.  A good way to practice reading rocks on your depth finder is to go over an area you know for sure has rocks, and examine closely.

The best way to confirm what's down there quickly is a heavy football head jig or a heavy carolina rig (aka C-Rig).  I like to cast a 3/4oz weight on 12lb test fluorocarbon line and a 7'6" rod with good flex to work the bottom quickly and effectively.  Cast beyond where you think the rocks are and scoot your jig/rig across the bottom until you run into rocks or gravel.  Make sure you don't lose contact with the bottom!  The deeper it is the slower you have to go.  Once you feel the rocks or gravel slow down and work it very slowly.  Inch it along.  You can feel where the rocks are and the size of the rocks by noting the distance your rodtip travels between the start of the hesitation to the stop of the hesitation.  Gravel will feel much much different than 2' boulders (visualize your jig being dragged over these two objects).  Sand or mud will feel like dead, smooth weight.  As I'm sure most of us already know, weeds will feel mushy and become exponentially 'heavier'.

So give it a go next time you are out bass fishing!  Since these spots can be very small relative to the rest of the lake, always be courteous of others out on the water.  You don't want to be right on top of someone else.  Being at least about 1x casting distance away is the norm on most lakes (some lakes/rivers have a different norm).

Also keep in mind, not all spots that have rocks will be good.  In lakes with a bunch of rocky areas you may wind up checking all of them and finding fish in only 1 area.  The fish you do find will be worth it.

Have any other tips worth sharing?  Post below!

Spawning Bass -- like a ticked-off dog

Make that bass growl!!

The bass are just now starting to spawn!  This is the best time to get out and sight fish bass in the shallows, or, in dirty water, pitch up into shallow water and wait for your line to jump!

With the early warm weather we've had this year the bass are spawning earlier than ever.  I recently found 5 male largemouth prepping beds for their female partner to drop her eggs.  These fish are aggressive, territorial, and willing to chomp on nearly anything you put in front of them. 

I managed to catch all 5 of those bedding bass, releasing them to watch them swim back to their beds.  Mind you, this was on the MS river -- the only legal place to target bass in MN right now.  Unfortunately, Minnesota is one of the only states in the entire country that bans bass fishing on lakes this time of the year.  Most people don't realize that Minnesota is the exception to the norm.

Even B.A.S.S., an organization who's goal is to protect bass through responsible tournament fishing practices condones bass fishing during the spawn, and holds many tournaments where bed fishing takes place without detriment to the fishery.

There should still be some bedding fish to be caught come bass opener, but not as many as previous years with the early spring we have this year.  You might have to go north to find a good spawning bass bite this year!


My favorite technique for bed fishing is pitching a texas-rigged tube or creature bait right into the middle of the bed and twitching it as slow as possible.  The bed will appear as a 2'-5' diameter light-colored patch on the bottom of the lake, often covered in clean gravel/shells from the fish sweeping away the sand/muck with it's tail.  You want to be as far away from the bed as possible while still being able to accurately cast to it.  Using a highly-visible plastic, like a white tube, can help detect bites.  When the white disappears, the fish ate it!!  Polarized sunglasses are a must-have in order to see what's going on under the water -- as being able to see the fish and how it reacts to your lure can make a huge difference in your success rate.

I like to compare a bass's mentality to that of a dog... you poke at it enough or find something it doesn't like, and then repeat repeat repeat, eventually it will snap.  While you can't hear the fish 'growling' like a dog would when its ticked off and about to react, you can visually see the bass becoming 'upset' that your lure repeatedly is visiting its nest.  When you see the fish turning sharply to nose your bait, you know its ticked off and ready to bite!  Like this:

Here's a couple big girls getting ready to spawn that were landed in my boat this year:

Steve Loraus with a nearly 5lber.

Marty Sexton with a nice one.

"It's like a conveyor belt!"

A couple years ago I was showing my friend Marty the ropes of vertical jigging on the river as I knew it, but the current was moving pretty fast and that can make it difficult to learn vertical jigging.  To jig vertically, you must keep the boat even with the current, which often means the bottom of the river is zingin' by at 2-3 mph+!!

I'd find the bottom and start jigging, but when I'd look back Marty would still be letting out line trying to 'find the bottom'.  Little did he know he was already ON bottom, but the movement of the boat relative to the bottom of the river was still pulling out line, giving the illusion of the lure dropping indefinitely.

The best way I could explain it at the time was: "look. [the bottom of the river] is like a conveyor belt!".  The trick is knowing the difference between your jig dropping through the water column and your jig being pulled away by the bottom of the river, as if on a conveyor belt.


Anyways, here's a quick write-up I made a couple years ago on the technique of vertical jigging at the river:


#1) BOAT CONTROL

This has got to be the most important thing to master for successful vertical jigging. A bow-mounted trolling motor with a foot pedal is best.  You have to constantly be making small adjustments with your trolling motor, keeping your line as VERTICAL AS POSSIBLE. Even a small angle in your line is no good!  Factors to adjust for are wind, current, and line angle.


#2) TECHNIQUE

Never drag your jig on the bottom!  My jig spends about .5 seconds on the bottom, then about 3-5 seconds at 1' off the bottom. Rinse and repeat! The only reason to 'tap' the bottom is to make sure you lure is still close to the bottom. When you are drifting with the current the depth is almost constantly changing. Be ready to reel up or let out line in a moments notice. Don't let the lure sit on the bottom for more than a split second!


#3) ADVANCED STUFF

Once you master the boat control and technique, its time to start experimenting with 2 rods since you are allowed 2 rods on the river.  Its very difficult to master handling 2 rods and the trolling motor at the same time.  I can barely manage to do it myself.  There's a lot going on especially when the depth fluctuates and the current swirls and the wind blows.

Setting the hook while fishing with 2 rods is a challenge as well. You have to keep the line tight while setting down the other rod and fighting the fish at the same time. Be prepared to lose a few fish before you get this down.

Be sure to experiment with different jigs, different weights, different colors, different plastics, etc. Fishing with 2 rods helps save time when narrowing down what the fish want.