There are times I feel guilty playing dirty tricks on these fish but it’s all in good fun and a lot of times the fish swims away with nothing but a sore lip and a bruised ego. This week the fish were waiting on me to give them the ole “plop-plop-plop” over the top of the brush pile with the 120 Choppo again, but I blew their little fish minds and mixed it up this week. I noticed that when I threw the Choppo over the brush piles early this week the fish were slow to react to the constant plopping or chopping sound of the Choppo and there was little to no schooling like the weeks before. They were tired of the Choppo and they had gotten used to the chopping sound of the Choppo. With the exception of a few overnight newbies to the brush pile it was the same old schools of bass at the brush pile, and they knew the chopping sound meant trouble. I could see the fish swimming around the brush but the Choppo had little effect on the fish. They had fallen for the Choppo’s constant steady plopping sound for the last 2 weeks and they were done with it. They had figured it out so I gave them the old razzle-dazzle “rip’n stop” with the Choppo.

I haven’t used the rip’n stop technique with the Choppo lately, but I used to use it this time of year with the Choppo and the 130 Whopper Plopper when it became a little harder to call the fish to the surface as the water heats up. Years back my buddy Jake Wohlers painted a 130 Whopper Plopper knock-off and he called it the “J-rip”. At the time I had never had the pleasure of ripping a Whopper Plopper and I wondered why he would use the name “rip”. I asked him and he told me that they had been catching them by ripping the 130 rather than the steady retrieve I had been using exclusively. I tried ripping and killing the big J-rip on my next trip out and to my surprise it was a great success and another great option for the whopper plopper type baits. This week I brought the old ripping technique back into play and that’s how I caught about 80% of my fish. I found out earlier this week that the fish were used to the constant chopping technique I had been using but they didn’t expect the ripping technique and just about everywhere I went there was schooling, followed by either a blow-up, multiple blow-ups, and about 50% of the blow-ups resulted in a hook-up. I reduced the size of the Coppo 120 to a slightly smaller 105 which netted me a lot more smaller fish this week.

With every school that came to the boat with a caught fish, I could see bigger fish beneath the caught fish swimming around whereas last week I was catching nothing but the bigger fish on the 120 with a steady retrieve but for whatever reason this week, they weren’t as interested in the big 120. I could actually cast the smaller 105 a little further and one of the key features of ripping the Choppo is the amount of water it splashes out in front of the bait and the amount of water it displaces around the bait when you rip it and kill it. The amount of displaced water around the bait is important, especially when the surface is flat because the displaced water confuses the fish much like a choppy surface with a little wind. When the fish sees all that displaced water around the bait, the fish thinks it’s a distressed bait and takes a whack at it. Unfortunately, they are somewhat cautious of the bait and the hook-up rate was slightly lower. Lots of blow-ups but not a lot of hook-ups, and a lot of times the bigger fish would let the smaller fish react to the bait as they would be swimming a few feet beneath the schoolers.

We had pretty extreme temps this week but if you could stand the heat, the fish didn’t care, and they were usually putting on the feed bag early in the morning and then again in the hottest part of the day. Mornings were pretty awesome with that big ole moon in sight and a lot of surfacing fish. If I was in the right place at the right time, I could put the 105 Choppo in a “Perfect Ghost” pattern right in the area and they would react to it. The fish were very active in the morning, but the grind was the hottest part of the day. Rewards were bigger in the afternoons, but you also had to contend with no wind and lots of summertime recreational boat traffic if you were in the creek. The afternoons didn’t really bother me so much as I spend about 4-5 days a week in my sauna for 30 minutes and the temps in the sauna are 130-170 degrees for the 30 minutes I spend in it. My body starts pouring sweat quickly and it’s just a matter of staying hydrated with lots of water and covering my skin from the sun.

The trend this week was numbers in the morning and big girls in the afternoon for me. I could catch a few big ones early here and there, but in the heat of the day the big ones took over the show and got way more aggressive. Here’s a couple of those fish I caught on a mid-day Monday trip out to the main lake.

There were two other baits that I used successfully this week and one was the G-fix 80 Duo Realis Spybait in an American Shad pattern. I tried my old faithful spybait color pattern, but the fish only had an interest in one pattern, and it was American Shad for me. Once I caught a fish or had the fish school on the Choppo I could pull back away from the area and then cast the little spybait around the area and pick off another fish or two. It was just a matter of casting the spybait as far as I could and giving it a 10-15 count before a slow retrieve back to the boat. Here’s a video I made a while back that explains a little more about the spybait and how I use it. It’s a tactic that is coming into play now as the water continues to heat and the thermocline becomes more defined.

The last technique that I used to put fish in the boat this week was the drop shot. The population of fish on brush has exploded over the last week and competition for a Lanier Baits Blue Lily worm is getting stiff in the brush. If I was directly over a school of fish this week or I saw fish in the brush, I had my drop shot rod at the ready and I had it baited up with the 5-inch blue lily pattern. Here’s a link to the Lanier Baits Blue Lily and I recommend getting some for the summer month ahead:

https://lanierbaits.com/shop/ols/products/fruity-worms/v/FRT-WRM-BL-LLY

Yesterday I made my final trip of the week and I caught fish on all 3 baits listed above but ripping the 105 Choppo over brush this week was the big-ticket ride for me. The blow-ups would come from nowhere at times and sometimes I could watch the fish school around the bait before inevitably one would take a crack at it. Other times a big one would come from nowhere and just blast it into the air and attack it when it came back down. It was a fun week for topwater and I got to hone my spybait/drop shot skills for the upcoming few months. Water temps are pushing the upper 80’s now and the lake has dropped a few inches below full pool. The corps is only generating for a few hours a day and during the week it’s generally during peak usage hours. I got a new I-phone this week and didn’t figure out how to take pictures till yesterday.

If we thought this week was hot, wait till next week, it looks like a scorcher. Here are a few pictures from yesterday’s trip.