Everywhere I fished for the last week or so held a lot of fish. I don’t really use a graph but I let the fish tell me where they are. It’s been easy lately because the creek has been glassed over in the morning and I can see the surface for a long ways. I just sit and watch until I see fish surface. I either make a mental note of where I saw the surface activity or I go to it and start fishing right away. If it’s just a single bass and he only surfaces once I may not go to that area, but if I see a fish surface multiple times or I see multiple fish, it goes on my list of places to fish. Sometimes I’ll see fish surface way off in the distance and make a mental note and go there later. 9 times out of ten the fish are still there and active.

Carp and gar can be an issue when it comes to watching for surfacing fish. They can fool the heck out of you while sight fishing. Yesterday we kept seeing fish roll in a little bay and when we got to the bay we realized we were in the middle of a giant carp orgy. Gar will do the same. If you watch enough, you can tell the difference. The bass and stripers are mainly pushing bluebacks to the surface and then chasing them down. They are very aggressive and they will rip across the surface in pursuit of the blueback. Sometimes the bluebacks will be jumping across the water to get away.

The bass and stripers are very aggressive, feeding on the surface and the carp and gar are just coming up and rolling or breaching the surface in a social manner. I can tell the difference most of the time. Most of the fish I’ve been catching are relating to shallow areas like points and reef markers but they are staged in 20-40 feet of water and running up on the shallow areas to chase the bluebacks.

There is also a little shallow water bite for us right now as we approach the shad spawn. Usually the afternoons evenings are better for us to fish shallow water cranks. I think the bass have been moving up shallow in the evenings and over night with the bright moon and then pulling out in the mornings to chase bluebacks on the surface over a little deeper water. My plan here lately is to hit them early on the surface and then go to the rocks and docks. Cranks on the rocks and spinners and little squarebills around the docks.

Something else that I found that was noteworthy pertaining to colors. This is the time of year that we switch to a more natural shad color like black over silver. When I researched my videos from this time last year I can see where we were using a black over silver (zebra shad) jerkbaits and some cranks in the same color pattern and we were doing pretty well. I have been hitting the banks with a blue over chartreuse without much luck which is normally a great color choice but I’ve been doing a lot better with the natural shad, black over silver when using a shallow crank or jerk.
Here’s a few videos and pictures of some of the action and fish this week.