(Editor's note: The following is the latest installment in a series of fishing tips presented by The Bass University. Check back each Friday for a new tip.)
Avid bass anglers spend all winter looking forward to the pre-spawn and spawning periods of the spring. Why not? The fish haven’t been pressured in recent months, they’re typically up shallow, and everyone can get in on the fun. But when they’re done bedding, the party’s over.
Even seasoned bass pros believe in the idea of post-spawn doldrums, but Oklahoma star Jason Christie doesn’t believe that there’s such a thing as a “post-spawn funk.” He just believes you need to reassess your strategies.
First, you need to figure out when the bass are leaving their breeding grounds. He looks for four main signs. If the water’s clear enough, the first and second are empty beds and balls of fry. The third sign is when you catch a few fish and they have “the big head and lean body.” The fourth clue is when the offshore schools start to grow. One day there may be a couple of fish, the next day a few more, and then on day 3 there are hundreds. Those fish, which could be easily caught early on when “he forgot he got caught 74 times last summer,” are now spooky.
The good news is that they don’t all head out at once. Typically there are multiple waves of spawners and they leave the shallows in the order they entered them. Christie’s goal is usually to track the group that entered first, because they’re often the biggest. In a bout of last-minute tournament desperation years ago, he accidentally discovered that when they leave, they often initially go deeper than they’ll reside at any other time of year.
“They do their thing and then go as deep as they can,” he said. That might be 35 or 40 feet on some lakes, versus 15 or 20 on others. “They stay there about two weeks.” When they’re out there, a swimbait is often the best tool to lure them in, but if they hesitate to bite he’ll pull out a flutter spoon to generate “competition within the school.”
When their super-deep period is over, those same fish will move up in the water column in reference to the thermocline. Christie said a number of surface baits can be productive at this time, including a Pop-R, a Zara Spook and a Pad Crasher frog if there’s vegetation, but he added that a wake bait often gets overlooked. He likes the jointed Cordell Redfin, and he’s also a dedicated fan of the small Bandit Footloose crankbait.
The biggest bait change he makes, though is in his flipping presentations. Whereas he doted on a jig early in the year, after the spawn he’ll switch to a slightly more subtle soft plastic, like the Yum Christie Critter creature bait. Especially in clearer water, it provides a more natural profile than the jig, and gets both big bites and numbers of bites. He also believes that a soft stickbait is among the deadliest presentations possible. In fact, he believes that if you take a novice or youngster out this year and tie on a Yum Dinger with a splitshot tied a foot above it, they may catch more and better fish than you. He hasn’t employed that strategy in a tournament yet, partially because with limited practice it’s critical to cover water, and also because he doesn’t “want to get caught on camera doing it.”
As spring turns to summer, the fish will continue to funnel offshore, and that’s when his Garmin Panoptix truly become his best friend. He used to go to venues like Kentucky Lake and hope to find two schools of fish per day in practice to be competitive. Now, because he has better tools – and so does everyone else – he tries to located 10 schools a day. He doesn’t worry about “post-spawn funk” as much as finding the winning fish and staying with them.
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