It was then that a fish struck, his first Coosa River bass.
While we were talking about the fish, he told me that he had paused his retrieve to listen what I was saying (probably something pointless, annoying and ridiculous) and the fish struck while the lure was falling. That struck a chord in my head, and I started throwing my spinnerbait shallow allowing it to pendulum with the taper of the bank; reeling it only fast enough to keep the slack out of the line.
We tried it on every piece of bank, main river shoreline, pockets and points until the main pattern started to develop. We found that most of the bites came from riprap points with docks on them as the lure was falling – we started catching more fish on the spinnerbait.
The secondary pattern for the day came when I was allowing the spinnerbait to fall next to a grass patch in a little pocket. I got what I felt was a strike, but when I set the hook, my lure only felt like my spinnerbait had some grass on it, but it kind of planed sideways. I quickly realized that I had a small bream hooked.
By small, I mean three inches, but it planted a thought in my head that if this sized bream was up shallow, then perhaps the bass would be eating them. I reached into my tackle box and looked for the shallowest running, bluegill- colored squarebill I had, and picked out Bill Lewis Echo 1.75 squarebill in Sunrise Perch.
I would use that lure to parallel the riprap banks between points and would scrape it around the water willow edges as well. I caught a few more fish, including the biggest of our day’s outing, a two and a half to three pound largemouth.
All told, we caught 12 to 15 bass, and a little “tattletale” bluegill that helped us catch a few more bass than we would have had I not caught it.
THE PROS WERE RIGHT
I talked to my father-in-law after the day was over and we praised ourselves for paying attention. I say “day,” in truth, we were on the water for about five hours in total;
which included lunch at Local Joes Barbeque in Little Bridge Marina near our home, and a little sightseeing. But, we had a great time, and caught a few fish too.
Had we continued doing what we started out to do – slow rolling the spinnerbaits – we may have ended up catching one or two fish. However, by following the example of the pros, we saw the little clues, adjusted to them and had a fun day. They weren’t tournament winning fish, but they were fun, and that’s what the day was all about.
All too often as anglers, we get too locked in to our preconceptions and it makes us miss something that might be the key to a day’s outing, or we don’t trust our instincts enough to allow ourselves to begin putting the puzzle pieces together. Either way, the best in the world have been telling us these things for years, and if we start learning their lessons, we may become more effective anglers ourselves.
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