Shad, bream spawns drive Lake Wylie bass crazy this month

Lake Wylie bass are in a frenzy over shad and bream

Lake Wylie, on the border between North Carolina and South Carolina, southwest of Charlotte and north of Rock Hill, offers some of the best bass fishing this month in either state. And that’s because of two, much smaller fish.

Chris Nichols of Carolina Angler Guide Service said that shad and bream will both spawn on 13,400-acre Lake Wylie, typically at either end of the month. And the move of those fish to the shallows will trigger great bass bites.

“If you’re talking about bass fishing, you have a couple of things going,” said Nichols (704-860-7951). “The shad spawn early in the month. And the bream will spawn on the first full moon in May.

“A lot of shad will spawn early in the morning in shallow water, along rip-rap banks or red-clay points,” he said. “Because you’ve got a lot of shad in shallow water, there will be a lot of bass up shallow. They’re feeding on shad, and you have an outstanding topwater bite from first light for about two hours.

Find bream beds, and you’ll find plenty of bass

“Baits like Pop-Rs and Whopper Ploppers, maybe even a big bait like a Zara Spook, will catch fish. A Spook will be better in open water; you can work a Pop-R up against a rip-rap bank better. If they won’t quite come up to the top and hit a topwater bait, you can throw a swimbait over those points — something white, shad or translucent, a lot more subtle — or even a willow-leaf spinnerbait.”

The shad spawn is usually done by mid-May. Typically, when the full moon falls later in the month, the bass will turn from shad to bream. This year, there could be some overlap with a May 7 full moon if the water is warm enough. But the big push may come with the June 5 full moon.

“In every sheltered cove on Lake Wylie, you will have some bream beds. You can basically just ride around from cove to cove and be able to see them,” Nichols said. “If you have side-imaging on your depth finder, there are a lot of beds off the bank, in 3, 4 or 5 feet of water. You can’t see them visually. But side-imaging allows you to see all of them.

“Fishing around bream beds for bass is a good, seasonal pattern. You can catch some nice bass, 3 to 5 pounds. A lot of times, by the end of May you have a lot of fish moving offshore, but a lot of the bigger ones will stay shallow for the bream spawn. Just about every bream bed you find will have one to three bass in the vicinity.

“You need to fish a topwater with a very erratic action. You have to make it look like a bream struggling.”