Back in the 1980s, when I was just getting into the outdoors writing gig, some of the bass fishermen who were very successful in local and regional tournaments around the Carolinas had a saying.
“You work in January, you win the rest of the year.”
January was a month that many fishermen spent putting in brush piles all over their favorite reservoirs, so they had more spots where they could catch fish once the weather warmed up and fishing really got rolling.
Sinking brush piles was part of the fishing game, and it remains so today, not just for those hunting bass, but also for the thousands of fishermen who target the tastiest of all freshwater fish, crappie.
The two species are especially fond of hanging around cover on or just off the bottom, places where they can hide and ambush food as it swims past, and if your crankbait or tiny crappie jig looks like something to eat – or if you’re a crappie fisherman using live minnows – you can be in for a treat.
Over the years, maybe no bass fisherman in the Carolinas was more associated with brush piles than the ageless David Wright of Lexington, NC, who by himself and along with partners Gerald Beck and Jeff Coble, has banked tens of thousands of dollars fishing around brush piles they sank during the winter.
“Well,” Wright sheepishly admitted, “I’m probably on top of the list of brush rustlers. I don’t know when it started, but it was probably Gerald and I and Abe Abernathy (a crackerjack Greensboro, NC, angler).”
Bring a chainsaw
How did Wright do it? In the winter, a chainsaw was his primary weapon, not a crankbait rod, as Wright was one of the legion of great crankbait fishermen that came from the crowd that called High Rock Lake home.
In his mid-70s, Wright is still catching bass. He might admit to still putting out a few brush piles, although forward-facing sonar has enabled him to find countless pieces of cover that he never knew were there before.
What does Wright look for in a piece of brush he sinks and fishes?
He wants it to be of decent size, not too thick, pointing in the right direction, on a place he’s never caught fish, and in fairly deep water.
He starts with a tree of decent size, and he likes hardwoods. Abe Abernathy, he said, had a preference for pin oaks, and High Rock legend Homer Biesecker loved holly trees. Once Wright selects a tree and cuts it down, he trims the limbs back so that only a few feet remain, with limbs about wrist-thick or better able to hold the truck off the bottom – creating a hiding place underneath for bass. He doesn’t want it too thick; it’s too hard to get a lure through the limbs to a fish’s hangout.
Mini food chain
“I’ve got some trees I put out 30 years ago that only have a couple of limbs left,” Wright said. “I wouldn’t know it without forward-facing sonar, but I can scope it and see two limbs left.
“The main thing about the cover you put in has to do with it collecting algae, then plankton, then minnows, then the bigger fish. That’s the idea,” he said.
In other words, a brush pile jump-starts a mini food chain.
Wright usually ties a cinder block or two to the base of the tree and drags it into position with his bass boat. If he plans to fish it from shallow to deep, he’ll put the trunk on the shallow end and the top of the tree in deeper water. That way, when he’s retrieving his lure, it’s easier to work it through the limbs. He might tie a couple of 2-liter plastic bottles to the top of the tree to hold it off the bottom.
“I had one in 7 feet of water in Potts Creek (High Rock) that had one end off the bottom and was standing up, and it was one of the most-successful ones I had.”
Wright is also careful not to sink brush piles on a spot where he’s already catching fish. He is looking to create new spots to fish – maybe the end of a featureless flat with nothing to really hold fish.
If Wright had his druthers, he would sink entire stumps, plus root wads, because bass are attracted to them more than brush.
Crappie time
When it comes to crappie fishing, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who fishes around brush more than Chris Bullock of Fountain, NC, who guided for years on Kerr Reservoir on the Virginia-North Carolina border. When a huge number of crappie fishermen went to multi-rod spider rigs, Bullock kept going on a milk run of brush piles, hitting them with tiny jigs and loading the boat for his customers.
Now retired from guiding, Bullock likes to sink his brush piles along creek channels and points, and his pieces of cover are more brush than trees. He doesn’t mind brush that’s thicker than a bass fisherman would prefer. He always wants it standing tall, and he would rather sink it in warmer months, when leaves are present.
“I like a willow oak, fairly thick but not too thick. Any kind of hardwood will do,”Bullock said. “I like to put them out any time of the year when they have green leaves. You start the food chain with green leaves and microorganisms; they bring in the minnows and crappie. I have put them in right after daylight one day and come back and caught fish on them the same day.”
Bullock likes tall brush piles. He wants to sink them in 10 to 18 feet of water and cut his brush so the top is 8 to 12 feet below the surface. He’ll weigh down the bottom end with cinder blocks or plastic gallon jugs filled with sand, and he’ll tie in several empty jugs to the top limbs to help float it up.
Check regulations
“If you don’t put on jugs to float it, it’s subject to fall over, especially if you get some current. You can still catch fish on them, but they don’t look as good on the depthfinder,” said Bullock, who tries to trim off the top limbs level, creating a “flat top” to the brush that makes it easier to retrieve a jig around without getting hung up.
“I’ll put them next to a channel drop, on the end of a point, on the upstream side of a point or the downstream side of a point.”
Bullock has used Christmas trees or cedars, but he will clip out most of the limbs, leaving spaces of a foot or 2 between limbs. Often, he’ll let a Christmas tree dry up until the needles fall off, set it on fire to clean things up, then extinguish the fire and put the tree out.
Before forward-facing sonar, Bullock would have his brush piles marked as waypoints on his depth finder. He’d approach each pile, drop off a couple of marker buoys around it, cast to the edges and count the jig down, usually a foot per second, until the jig was at the top of the brush pile, then begin his retrieve. With FFS, he can watch the lure fall and even watch the crappie come out of the brush and hit it.
“I want to fish all around it,” he said. “Most bass guys will cut the smaller limbs off, and they don’t want the bigger limbs to be more than a foot or two long.
“If I can get one or two or three crappie to come out and look at it – and not bite – I’ll change jig colors,” Bullock said. “If they still don’t bite, I’ll get right over top of the brush and drop straight down and hold the jig right there.”
Bullock cautions fishermen who are thinking about putting in their own cover to check local regulations. Adding brush is prohibited on some reservoirs, and some reservoirs have other restrictions.
“Check with your local authorities to make sure you don’t need a permit to put anything out – or any other regulations,” he said. “You can put brush out at Kerr, but you can’t cut anything off the bank and put it in – you have to cut it and bring it in with you.”
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