It takes special tactics to draw a strike from a spawning bass. One Lake Norman pro shares his know-how.
Anglers see it, bass feel it and nature signals the change. The sun and warmer temperatures are here, and that means bass are headed to the bank to commence the yearly spawn. Not every bass in a given lake decides to make the move at the same time, but instead, waves of bass will flood the shallows looking to make a bed and begin spawning.
In North Carolina, the spawning season begins in March and lasts until May, but be ready, because if the water temperature is close to the mid-50s and the moon is almost full, the first couple of bedding bass will be ready before you know it.
Few fishermen know spawning fish like bass pro and tackle manufacturer Shane Lehew of Mooresville, whose history fishing tournaments shows him a real threat when sight-fishing is the name of the game. In a Bassmaster College Series event on Lake Norman in 2013, Lehew, fishing for UNC-Charlotte with teammate Eric Self, won by more than nine pounds.
Approaching bedding fish can be a tricky thing, because every fish acts differently, and some are further along in the spawning process than others. The only way to know how to approach a bed, according to Lehew, is to keep a watchful eye and stay patience.
“Typically, if it is a tournament situation, I will stay way off of the fish and make my first cast with a wacky rigged trick worm-style bait like the Bizz Baits Dizzy Diamond,” Lehew said. “It is lightweight and doesn’t make much of a splash, so you don’t spook the fish. A lot of the fish will actually rise up off of the bed and eat the worm while it’s falling.”
Lehew likes to use a 7-foot, medium-heavy Fitzgerald spinning rod with a reel spooled with 16-pound braid and a 6- to 8-pound fluorocarbon leader. His bait — for color, he prefers green pumpkin candy — is rigged weightless with a 1/0 Gamakatsu Aaron Martens drop-hot hook.
Lehew can tell quickly if the fish will be easy to catch or a tricky battle. Some fish may be “locked” on the bed and are easier to target, while others can be much harder to entice to bite. There are a couple subtle clues that will tell you if a fish can be caught.
“Usually, you can tell if the fish is going to bite fairly quickly. If you flip in the bed and the fish starts going out of the bed and making tight circles and comes back pretty quick, that fish is usually catchable,” Lehew said.
Those catchable fish are an easy target for anglers, but finicky fish, depending on their size, may be worth the battle and wait.
“If you cast in the bed and the fish makes huge, wide circles or swims off the bed and sits a good distance away, that fish is probably not ready,” said Lehew. “If it is a fish that I think will really help me, I will come back and check it just to see if it has locked down.”
Playing the waiting game can pay big dividends on a big, kicker bass, but time is money in tournament fishing so leaving to return later may not be ideal. Lehew knows that every minute counts, and there are multiple factors that contribute to a fish locking on a bed much faster. He believes sunlight and timing are the biggest factors in targeting bed fish.
Aggression is also a factor in fishing for spawners, because irritating a bass by keeping the bait in an undesirable area can ultimately annoy it enough to bite. Most times, the reaction is one of killing the bait as opposed to feeding.
Lehew will often use a bait that imitates a crawfish, a Bizz Bug in green pumpkin color, to irritate bass. He’ll fish it with a half-ounce bullet weight and fish it on a 7-foot, heavy action Fitzgerald baitcasting rod with a Shimano Chronarch reel spooled with 15- to 20-pound fluorocarbon. He likes a reel with a fast gear ratio so he can winch bass from any cover that might fray his line, then get them to the boat faster.
When Lehew hits the lake and the water temperature is close to the mid-50s, bedding fish are always a possibility. Hot-water discharges like the one on Lake Norman and two on Lake Wylie heat up faster than others, and they’re the first places he will look. Other than hot-water discharge areas, Lehew has some preferences when it comes to searching for big females.
“Most people will head to the back of the coves, which are a good place to look, but I have found that usually the short pockets directly off of the main lake hold bigger fish, and I like to start looking right on the point,” Lehew said. “Some of the biggest fish I have caught have almost been considered main lake.”
When Lehew positions his boat to target a bedding fish, he keeps the sun at his face so he doesn’t cast a shadow on the fish. Doing this means you need a pair of sunglasses that measure up. Lehew keeps a handful of Costa’s to get specific jobs done.
“I like to keep a few different lens colors in the boat with me,” he said. “My three must-haves are an amber lens, silver mirror and even a pair with the green-mirror lens.”
Find a pair of sunglasses, get to looking at the shallows and be patient because around any corner a bass of a lifetime could be waiting in the shallows to be caught.
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