It’s finally happening folks. I’m slowly getting sucked in and re-programed from hoping to scoping. Right now I’m in the “scoping while hoping” stage of the Livescope transitional brainwashing and I’m kinda like a kid in a candy shop with chocolate in all directions. One minute I’m slowly dragging a worm down the end of a point and the next minute I’m chasing a fish or a group of fish 20 yards away, reminiscent of a cat chasing a laser dot all over the house. I can see the draw of being 100% Livescope focused rather than methodically working my way down the bank without the use of any electronics and just hoping I run across a fish. It’s like the difference between blindly shooting into a scattered flock of ducks or selecting a target and focusing on the perfect shot.

Yesterday evening kinda sealed the deal for me when it comes to scoping as I completed the whole gamut of catching fish from top to bottom. Most of the week I caught fish pitching the worm to fish I was scoping, and they were chasing the worm the bottom where they would pop it…..or not. I think the hookup ratio was about 1-10 this week pitching the worm. Another way I caught fish this week was throwing the Keitech/Damiki rig over brush or pitching it to random fish I’d see while scoping but yesterday evening we got into a flurry of surface activity at dusk, and I got to use the 2.8 Keitech/Damiki for fish right below the surface. That was a new experience for me, and we had fish surfacing all around the boat at times. If the fish didn’t show themselves on the surface, I could scope out their location and we could cast to them. It was pretty cool to watch a group of fish a foot below the surface and see my bait approaching them in a collision course. Because of the anticipation, swinging on a fish can be premature at times and yesterday evening I found myself missing as much as connecting. Definitely a faster paced environment when dealing with schooling fish on the surface but a lot of fun with the scope.

I fished from Monday through today this week, and I had some decent sacks to show for it. The staging locations often frequented by the older generation of 4-5lbers in late winter or early spring has now been taken over by the younger generation of 1-3lbers. Numbers-wise that’s cool but size-wise it is lacking this week. The big girls are in transition from staging to spawning and they may get just a bit harder to find at times as I’m not a bed fisherman, so the size of my fish may be down for the next week or two. On the bright side, numbers will be up and there are going to be plenty of aggressive fish all around the shores of our lake for the next few weeks. If you are a bank fisherman, it’s your time to shine and there are plenty of parks that you can stretch a line on some shallow bass from the shore.

It seems that the bulk of the fish are still oriented to the bottom but there are a lot of fish hanging out over the top of the brush or in small groups, just kinda cruising around the brush piles. Since we have bottom oriented fish and suspended fish right now, we have options, and lots of them. I only needed 2 options this week, but I also threw the chatterbait and spinnerbait around a bit in the wind with no joy. It was the worm and Damiki/Keitech combo that did it for me this week. The good thing about the Keitech bite is that I’m no longer dragging it on the bottom at the speed of a three toed sloth but using it similar to the spybait in the summer, with a very long cast around a point, a ten-count drop and a slow, steady retrieve. Just like the spybait, the rod just kinda loads up when using finesse gear and a fish hammers the bait with that long cast. Here’s a video I made from spring a few years back and the slow rolled Damiki pattern.

In the past I’ve had good success with dropping my shaky head straight down under the boat when I’ve seen suspended fish chase my bait down on the 2D, so it only makes sense that I could have success pitching my shaky head to suspended fish I’m seeing with the Livescope. That pattern worked well for me with the shaky head as I cruised down the bank, I was either throwing the shaky head at targets on my mapping or pitching the shaky head to targets on my Livescope. Time after time I watched the suspended fish on my Livescope chase the worm down and the more aggressive the fish chased the bait determined whether they would strike the bait or not. Sometimes they didn’t let the worm get to the bottom before grabbing it. I caught a few this week that grabbed the worm on the drop.

My favorite target area this week was probably docks. Sometimes they were around the docks and sometimes they were in between the dock. I just had to throw the worm around or look at my Livescope to get an idea where they were. The shallow docks were really in play this week as well as those empty slips and a few spud poles. It seemed like the dock bite was more prevalent in the afternoons, so I mainly spent my morning on points with the Livescope, focusing on brush piles out on the ends of points. I was either sitting off a point and throwing the Damiki swimbait around the brush or throwing the worm up into shallow water rocks and then heading to the docks in the early afternoons. That’s not to say there aren’t fish on the docks in the morning hours, I just think it’s better around the docks in the afternoons. Perhaps it’s the black floats heating up in the sunny afternoons or it could be the shade that the docks provide. Either way, the docks probably produced the best numbers, but the rocks and points produced the best quality for me this week. My worm choice was the Zman big TRD on a 1/4 ounce Boss jig head and my swimbait choices were a Trixster Kamikaze head or Lanier Bait Damiki head with a 2.8 Keitech.

The lake level is about 6 inches above full pool and the corps have throttled back their generation periods. The water temps kinda dropped back down a bit this week and when I left the water today it was around 56 out in the creek. Right now, is a good time to be on the water as there’s a lot of active fish and we should have some very nice spring days ahead. Here’s a few of my memorable fish this week.

Things are right on schedule in the creek right now and we’re quickly approaching another spawning season for our bass population. I haven’t seen any spawners here in the back of the creek yet, but the water has been cold and stained so I don’t have much visibility around our dock and out in the cove. We’re still about 10 days away from the next full moon and those 10 days should be good overall when it comes to feeding fish. The bite window for the fish is getting wider and wider and this week there was a good mix of 2-4lbers eating in a lot of areas in the creek. The biggest task for me this week was finding the bigger fish and putting a pattern together to find where the bigger females hang out, especially early in the morning hours because that’s when I’ve been struggling for the big fish bite. The rocky secondary points in the sunny afternoons usually provide a bigger female or two and a little spike in my adrenaline, but where to find those same females early in the morning has been my biggest question this week. I think I found my answer about mid-week when I noticed that my bigger morning fish usually came from the deep dark shadows where I’m pretty sure those predatory bass instincts are just waiting for something to invade the dark shadows of a steep rock bluff. That was my target this week.

This week it’s been more about mapping than it has been about scoping. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve pretty much had my scope on all week, but my eyes have been more fixated on making casts in a certain zone rather than a certain target. I’ve made some progress with scoping this week and I was pretty proud of myself yesterday afternoon when I was picking bass off the top of brush, “cast to catch” with the scope. I have yet to catch a 5+ scoping but I’m sure that will happen very soon. This week it was mainly about the shaky head, and I had the opportunity to get out early in the morning a couple days during the week. I’ve been throwing the little Keitech around early in the mornings this week but random long casts with the Keitech/Damiki head hasn’t started producing random large fish yet. That bite is just around the corner for me but for now the shaky head is still producing the best bang for my buck. The key has been to fish it slow and the 10 second rule is in effect. If you’re not familiar with the 10 second rule, it’s the amount of time between the time the worm hits the bottom and when you first move the worm. Short hops and 10 second pauses between hops. These fish are like cats when it comes to worms, they’ll sit there and stare it down and if it doesn’t move, they’ll pounce on it after a few seconds pass, especially if other bass are in the area. These spotted bass are very competitive when it comes to a possible food source, so the more bass there are around your bait, the better chance you’re going to get bit. Unfortunately, most times the bigger bass are smarted and let a smaller more aggressive bass get the meal, and I wind up hooking a 2lber while a 5lber is escorting my 2lber to the boat. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the phrase: “Dang, you see the one that was with him!” That’s usually my luck, I’m bringing in a pesky little buck bass while that big momma is following the buck to the boat.

Even though the worm accounted for the bulk of my fish this week it’s a good idea to keep the little swimbait very handy and ready to cast. Last Friday I was approaching a secondary point to fish around a brush pile and as I was picking up my rod, I heard a splash and saw a big swirl out over deeper water, at the end of the point. I thought that maybe it was a loon, but I made a cast into the swirl area with my little swimbait and immediately hooked up with a solid 3.5lber. On my very next cast into the same area with the swimbait the rod loaded up again but this time it felt like a dump truck fell on my swimbait. It was a great fight to the boat with finesse tackle and the little Trixster Baits Kamikaze head with a 2.8 Keitech. It’s my biggest so far this year. Here’s a picture.

In my last report in early March, I embedded a video showing the target areas I frequent during the early spring when fish are staging. The lake is full of these areas and the lake is full of bass so any of those secondary points and underwater outcroppings can come into play in the early spring. Good mapping with color shading at different depths can come in handy this time of year when looking for those bigger female stagers. Here’s the Staging 101 video again and another good staging video I made to help explain staging bass on Lanier.

Another area that produced pretty well for me this week was docks. I’ve been seeing a steady increase in dock activity over the last few weeks, and it seems that the bass have started hanging around the docks. One day they might congregate out in front of the dock and the next they’ll be cruising in between the docks in open space. In the afternoons they could be inside the shade patches, inside the empty slips or hanging out next to the spud poles. You just need to make the casts to see where they are or refer to your Livescope and target what you see. Once again, the worm was my choice and the deeper docks produced the best for me, and a big bonus was deeper docks with big chunk rocks around. For some reason, these bigger bass have been hanging out in deeper, shady area around docks with dark chunk rock or a rock bluff early in the mornings. If you find all those elements, there’s probably going to be a big bass hanging out there. You just need to be the first one to get there and catch that big girl before another angler hits that area. If there was rocks and docks with deep water, I probably fished it this week and succeeded. The biggest key to my success in these areas was to fish the worm very slow. I watched these fish react to my worm on Livescope and sometimes they just hover over the top of the bait in some kind of standoff or stare down and then after 4-5 seconds, maybe more, they suck it in. That’s why I’ve been working the worm very slowly. It’s not an ideal situation if you suffer from some kind of attention disorder because some of these strikes are so subtle and infrequent it’s like watching paint dry at times. I get bored and I get frustrated. Yesterday I lost 2 fish that were over 4lbs at the side of the boat and that kinda rattled my cage for a minute but I bounced back and caught a nice fish to end my day. It’s good rewards but slow fishing with the shaky head at times but I haven’t found a better pattern yet.

Yesterday evening I took Lisa out in the creek after our dinner, and we spent an hour or so running a few docks that were out of the wind. We were both using a big TRD in the same worm color and I had just replaced our very last worm on Lisa’s shaky head. She had a nice fresh worm and I had and old chewed up worm that had been through quite a few fish. I started us off with a nice 3lber from the end of a dock and right after I released my fish, I saw Lisa’s rod load up and I knew it was big. It was a nice fight for Lisa and I think it’s her biggest this year so far. It was a great catch and a very nice way to end the week. Water temps were around 60 degrees in the creek yesterday evening and the lake is a little less than a foot above full pool and dropping because the corps is generating several hours a day now. Here’s Lisa’s big 4.7 from last night and a few other memorable fish from my week. It’s a great time to go out and drag a worm around!