I’ve never been a big fan of the wind, but when it comes to fishing, they always say that “the wind is your friend”. A lot of folks don’t know this but the fighter jets on an aircraft carrier relied on the wind to help with taking off from the ship. On an aircraft carrier, just before morning flight operations start, the big carrier turns into the wind and puts the hammer down. Things go from relatively calm to controlled chaos in a matter of minutes when the carrier gets up to speed. Once the big carrier hits top speed, headlong into the wind, the rescue helicopters take off and get into position. By this time the jets are all starting up and getting flexed for morning operations and a constant 30 mph wind is blowing across the deck from bow to stern. You learn very quickly to lean into the wind and get used to it because it happened during every launch. The best part about the wind was that it blew the jet exhaust away from the bow of the carrier where I worked. Those poor guys that worked around the mid to back section of the carrier had to breath jet exhaust all day. It would constantly burn your eyes, and it couldn’t have been healthy to breath all day but up in the front of the carrier, the air was fresh and clean from the wind. This week I felt a few of those old 30 mph winds out on the lake.

This week, Monday came in like a lion. The weatherman predicted strong east winds all week and he wasn’t lying. When I walked out the back door at 4am the east wind was whipping the trees around in all directions. I thought about my options in the creek with a strong east wind and I hoped the wind wasn’t too strong for topwater offerings. Late last week I had a blast with the Z-dog walking bait, and I figured I’d just keep rolling with the Z-dog to start my week. I hit the creek at 8am on Monday morning and it was everything I expected. That east wind was coming right down the creek, and it was getting it. There are places in the creek that are somewhat sheltered from the wind and that’s where I concentrated my efforts. The best bite in the creek had been coming from the mouth of the creek but I still wanted to check some areas towards the back of the creek to see if the population of bass have increased. I’m still targeting brush on points and brush on humps in 20-30 feet of water. A lot of the fish that I’m seeing are hanging around, either near, over the top or inside the brush piles and luring them up with topwater this time of year can be a chore. I figured that the topwater would be better because of the wind and I also wanted to try some plopper or choppo action in the wind to help get the fishes attention as well as some larger profile topwater stuff.

I started with the Z-dog over brush piles, and I had limited success. I caught some smaller fish during the course of Monday morning, but the bigger fish were lacking and not as interested in the Z-dog as late last week. I think that the Z-dog wasn’t as visible to the fish in the bigger waves and a lot of the fish I was seeing on LiveScope showed limited interest in the topwater. It got me to thinking that there had to be a better way to catch these more lethargic, suspended fish around the brush. The spybait had a very low success rate and the underspin just wasn’t producing the committed fish for me, so I started thinking about my old “friend in the wind”, the Mini Me spinnerbait by SpotSticker Baits. It may have been last fall, but I remember a very windy day that the topwater just wasn’t cutting it, so I tied on a Mini Me and smashed the bass over brush Spot Locking upwind and bringing the spinnerbait over the top of brush. The wind is all it took to get the bass to react. Ryan Coleman, the owner of SpotSticker sent me a few of his spinnerbaits last year and I had a blast with them. There was one in particular that outshined them all, on sunny or cloudy days and it quickly became my favorite, especially on windblown points when the bass are chasing shad.

One bright spot to Monday’s trip was a Very nice largemouth I caught on the Z-dog but the cast to catch ratio with the Z-dog was depleting and my poor old surgically repaired shoulder was taking a beating from making empty casts. I was thinking there had to be something better.

On Tuesday I had physical therapy in the morning, so I didn’t get out till lunchtime, and I was greeted with the same east wind as the day before. I had dug around in my boat on Tuesday and found my favorite spinnerbait to add to my arsenal of baits. In my digging, I also found a little bag of Lip Thrashin chrome risers and I tied one on right away. It didn’t take long till the little riser produced a nice 3lb fish and I really thought I was onto something with topwater and the riser, but I went on a little dry spell, so I went with a bigger profile and tied on the old faithful Ima ko. It didn’t take long till I had a few blowups and a couple of fish on the Ima, but I was still making a lot of casts that were coming up empty. Most of the fish that I saw on LiveScope just didn’t want to come up all the way to the surface again. They would religiously follow the bait back to the boat, scattering as they came, but refused to rise to the bait. Every once in a while, one would commit but the success rate was one in 15-20 casts with topwater. I caught a few nice fish on Tuesday but never threw the spinnerbait, just sticking with running and gunning topwater stuff.

Wednesday morning I hit it early and found that topwater was on life support early, so I went to the spinnerbait on a windblown rocky point. On my first cast with the spinnerbait, I was targeting a group of fish just beyond a brushpile with LiveScope and I made a cast just past the group. It was a small wolfpack and I ran the spinnerbait right through them. The cool thing about a spinnerbait is that when the fish hit that thing, It’s brutal. The bigger fish attack that spinnerbait with extreme prejudice and they can jerk a rod right out of your hand. That constant load that the blades of the spinnerbait make can be somewhat hypnotic, and if you’re not expecting it can startle me. In this case, I felt the lure unload for a brief second and then the rod just doubled over. I pulled and reeled down on the fish and I knew it was a good one. The problem was that the fish went straight into the brush that was between the boat and the fish. It was a good fish and the more I tried to coax the fish out of the brush, the more tangled the fish because so eventually the line broke and my only spinnerbait in that pattern was gone.

I tied on a chrome bladed Mini Me spinnerbait and started throwing it but my confidence level for the chrome blade wasn’t as high as the white painted blade so eventually I went back to topwater and found a little Gunfish bite in the afternoon hours. The little chrome Gunfish was my “go to” bait a few weeks back and with the wind this week, I brought it back into the rotation Wednesday afternoon. No real big fish but it did produce some great blowups and a few fish over brush. On Thursday morning I had therapy but before hand I made a trip to the little tackle store on Buford Dam road and I picked up 3 more of my favorite 3/4 ounce Mini Me spinnerbaits, which were the last 3, by the way. I also purchased one smaller chrome Choppo, not the bigger one that we had success with on Hartwell but the smaller version. I knew the choppo would produce something.

After therapy on Thursday, I hit the lake with around noon and immediately went to a big flat in the creek where the wind wasn’t as direct. There was still a chop on the water but it was perfect for the little chrome Choppo so I gave it a hurl. This is no kidding, I pulled on it once, and a big bass just smashed it on the surface. The rod doubled over and, in an instant, the line broke. It broke right at the knot between the braid and flouro leader. I should have known better, I hadn’t used that rig in a while, and I should have checked the knot. At any rate, the Choppo was gone, and I didn’t get it back after waiting around to see if the fish would shake it out. At my second stop of the morning, I pulled out the spinnerbait and started throwing it around the fish that I saw on the LiveScope and almost immediately I hooked a giant. It was an epic battle back to the boat and the big bass just kept making those bulldog runs when close to the boat. I actually got the net under the fish at one point and the fish was able to swim over the top of the net before coming unbuttoned. It was definitely my biggest bass of the year and losing the fish got in my head for a while. I kept hitting brush with the spinnerbait and on just about every stop for the rest of the day, the spinnerbait saw action. Most of the afternoon on Thursday was spent throwing the spinnerbait over and around brush and I was getting some good numbers. I found that if I approached a point or hump, I just used the spinnerbait with nothing else. I found that if I threw the topwater, the fish would scatter with very little success but if I just threw the spinnerbait without topwater, the spinnerbait success was far greater than the topwater success, if that makes sense.

My LIveScope was a big part of my success on Thursday but I found that I really didn’t want to watch the fish birddogging my bait back to the boat so I would turn the transducer away and just wait for the rod to load up. It was actually more fun not knowing exactly what was happening and feel the surprise of the bite rather than watching it unfold in real time with LiveScope. Nonetheless, it was fun with the little Mini Me on Thursday and Then again yesterday I relied on it heavily for my bites. I did catch a few sporadic fish here and there on topwater but I found that the spinnerbait bite was best hitting the undisturbed fish over and around brush in 20-30 feet of water. The spinnerbait really stood out on windblown points also. If the wind was blowing onto or across a point or hump the fish were generally set up on the leeward drop-off of the point or hump. It was like the fish were waiting on the bait to be blown across the point and they were ambushing it on the edge of the drop off. The spinnerbait worked well and every once in a while, a fish would just break ranks and slam it. One of the biggest keys to my success was to give the bait a good 10-15 count when fishing out in those 20-30 foot depths. Most of the fish are suspended around the 15-30 depths and running the spinnerbait at 15 feet is usually right in their wheelhouse. Another tip is to keep your rod tip down when using a spinnerbait. You want the spinnerbait to run as level as possible and by having a rod tip up, the spinnerbait is running at an up angle. I like to keep my rod tip very close to the waterline on my retrieve. Once I connect with a fish, I raise the rod tip to keep the fishes head up. If I see the fish is going to jump, I quickly lower my rod tip. You don’t want these fish to jump and throw that spinnerbait.

I finished my week with nothing but spinnerbait and when tallying the numbers for the week, the spinnerbait produced the best with over 20 fish, the Z-dog came in a close second with at least a dozen. The big chrome Choppo accounted for 6-7 and about the same for a chrome whooper plopper. The gunfish, Ima ko and Riser caught multiple fish this week but the standout was definitely the spinnerbait in the wind. The water temps are sitting at around 80 degrees and slowly falling as well as our lake levels. Here’s some of my memorable fish from this week.