Sight fishing for spawning bass is very different from most fishing an angler would undertake. You are casting a bait to a bass you can see, sitting on its bed, watching the bass’ reaction to your bait, and in the best of circumstances, seeing the bass inhale the bait. I end up covering a lot of water when I bed fish at Lake Fork, much of it either navigating the stumps with the trolling motor on high, or idling with the big motor, as I move from one spawning cove to the next, then watching without even having a rod in my hand as I troll along once I’ve reached a likely area.

When I see a bass, or something I’m convinced is a bed, I’ll stop and survey the area carefully, waiting to see if a bass comes back to the bed, or if I can see another bass in the area. Bass do tend to pick the same areas as other bass to spawn in. And so there is often more than one bedding bass visible at a time. Many of these bass are so spooky with a moving boat around that you will only see them returning to their beds if you stop and remain fairly still for a few moments. These aren’t days when I catch a large number of fish. I really don’t try for bedding bass that are under three pounds, but then can spend a half hour trying to catch a bass on a bed. Many bedding bass prove to be uncatchable, most probably because they have already been recently caught and released. Those fish will usually not return to their bed when a boat is anywhere nearby, or else leave the bed at full speed any time a lure is cast to it.

So the bottom line is I spend a lot of time doing other things besides seriously trying to entice a catchable fish, so usually only hook somewhere between 3 and 12 fish on one of these Fork bed fishing days. I use good seven foot medium power fast action fishing rods, and have recently upgraded to some size 30 spinning reels to pair with them (most of my reels are smaller size 10 reels) for the Z-Man TRD plastics I use on a tiny child rig. These are finesse baits, finesse fishing being pretty much the only bass fishing I do in my arthritic old age. I keep three of these rods rigged, and no other rods on the deck of my boat, for these trips. One of the most amazing things about these finesse rigs is how few nice fish you lose. Out of the 15 bass I’ve hooked on my last two fishing trips on this timber and clumpy weeds filled lake, I’ve lost zero. I’ve never seen another finesse rig that lands such a high percentage of nicer bass.

Yesterday was the perfect weather day for sight fishing, sunny with light winds all day. There are too few days like that in the spring in Texas. Lake Fork draws huge crowds of anglers this time of year, and yesterday was no exception. I’m always surprised at how few of these fishermen are actually sight fishing for bass, and out of the ones who are, just how few are very good at it. I routinely fish right behind other boats, some of them with step ladders or other raised platforms on the deck (a practice that seems far too dangerous on a stumpy lake like Fork, to me), and catch so many fish they have missed. How does an almost 74 year old man wearing prescription sunglasses accomplish this? I don’t know, but I won’t argue with it. I take photos of all the fish I catch on these trips. It helps me keep a count of what I catch, plus I enjoy sharing pics with Bobbi while I’m out.

And so that is the backdrop for my trip to Lake Fork yesterday, that turned into the bass fishing day of a lifetime for an amateur like myself. I ended up catching 10 fish, two of them 4 pounders, three of them 6 pounders, and one 7 pounder. My best five fish would have weighed over 30 pounds. I never managed to accomplish that feat in all my tournament fishing years, or even before or since, for that matter. I didn’t even catch my first fish until 11:21, so most of the excitement was in the afternoon hours. Some highlights of the day:

11:59: I was trolling out of the cove where I’d caught my first fish, near the main point. Most days, this stretch of bank would have had too much wind on it for me to even check it, but on this almost completely calm day, I was looking. This fish was like the holy grail of bed fishing. I spotted her from quite a ways away. She never saw me at all, even while I was making my long casts towards her. She took the bait on my second cast. I got a very solid hookset, and she ran right out of the weeds that surrounded her, into the open water. This scenario is what every bedding bass angler is looking for, but doesn’t often happen. My second bass of the day, she weighed 6.30 pounds.

1:40: I had made it into my favorite spawning cove on Fork. I’d caught a couple of fish in it already. One of them weighed 4.24. This fish was far back in a tiny opening in the weeds. I only threw my bigger TRD at this fish. That rig has 20 pound test braided line on it (as opposed to the 15 pound test on my other two rods), and I knew I needed all the help I could get to get her out of all these weeds, if I hooked her. There were other bedding fish nearby, and with my pole anchor down, I was going back and forth fishing for her and the other fish. It took me about 15 minutes to catch her. My fifth bass of the day, this beauty weighed 7.04, my best bass of the year so far.

2:24: This fish was one of the other fish I was fishing for when I caught my last fish. She was on a deeper bed with a male mate. Neither of these fish stayed on the bed well or showed much interest in my bait when I first fished for them, so I had moved to the back of the cove and fished for several likely looking bed fish there, but failed to catch any of them. On my way back out of the cove, I stopped to try these two fish again, and she immediately acted much more aggressive this time, and took the bait on my fourth cast. My sixth bass of the day, this one weighed 6.42.

4:31: After catching another 4 pounder, I’d left my favorite cove and moved to another smaller cove I really like. There were a number of fish to be seen, but most were either just cruising the shallows, or sitting suspended, with no visible bed nearby. This beautiful fish appeared to be on a bed, but when I cast a bait to her, she just moved to another spot that looked like a bed. When I cast there, she took off to another spot. This is a common occurrence, musical beds, I call it. When fish do this, they usually aren’t catchable, so I moved on fairly quickly. I managed to find a nice chunky 3 1/2 pounder a little further into the cove. That fish stayed on the bed, acted aggressive toward my bait, and was soon getting it’s photo taken and being released. I didn’t find anything else that seemed catchable in the back of the cove, and as I moved back out of the cove, this fish was again on the bed where I’d first seen her. As soon as I cast to her, she again moved to what looked like another bed. When I cast there, she immediately inhaled my bait and took off with it. As I set the hook, I don’t know who was more shocked, me or the fish. She ran behind clump after clump of weeds, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be able to land her. But I followed with the boat, then managed to coax her around the worst clump of weeks, and netted her. My ninth bass of the day, this one weighed 6.55.

One 3 3/4 pounder in the next cove, and my day was done. An unforgettable day it was for me.

The wind was fierce all week this week, but I made a couple of trips to Lake Fork anyway. Monday was a howling south wind, with main lake water temps in the lower 50’s, and just like last week, there were some shallow cruising bass, but none that would hold a bed and take a bait.

Thursday was a very chilly morning with the wind whipping from the northwest. My favorite area is a bit better protected from that, and even though the morning water temps were just as cold as Monday, I figured the warmer weather in between would finally have a few lower lake bass on the beds, and I was right. It was still very tough, and I only caught 5 bass, but two of them were 4 pounders, and I had to call the day a fun one.

No monster bass Thursday. This 4.46 pounder was the best fish of the day.

Last week was the first week of March. I’ve been starting with my annual Lake Fork trips that week. But there was a flooding rain early in the week, then a couple of cold windy days, so I didn’t make it to Fork until that Thursday. The water temp at the part of the lake I fish was just 49 degrees, and there were no bedding bass to be found anywhere. So I wrote it off as an exploring trip, and scouted some areas of the lake I hadn’t been to in a long time. And I decided I was going to give the lake another full week to warm up before I came back, and just fish Cedar Creek this week.

I launched mid lake Tuesday morning and went back to my best jig and bobber spot. The crappie were biting there, but not as well as two weeks earlier. I didn’t find a good jig and bobber bite anywhere else that morning, and the wind got up so much I wasn’t able to fish the dock and bridge spots I wanted to try out later. I ended up just doing some bass fishing in protected areas, but only caught one small bass. I ended up with 15 crappie.

Tuesday’s jig and bobber crappie were definitely flying their spawning colors.

I went back to the same part of the lake Thursday morning. The jig and bobber bite was very tough, and I only managed a couple of crappie. The wind wasn’t bad on this day, and I was able to spend some time fishing docks and a bridge, but that was a very tough bite too. I ended up with 8 crappie for the day, and one bass. But the bass was a nice one, almost 4 pounds.

This bass from Thursday morning weighed 3.85 pounds.

This week was mostly warm weather, so I’m thinking those Lake Fork bass should be on beds in the part of the lake I like to fish, so I’m planning on going back and trying it again this week. It looks like a windy week coming, not good when you’re trying to see and fish for bedding bass, but I’m going to give it a shot anyway.

I managed to get out fishing twice this week. On Tuesday, I made another trip up my favorite Cedar Creek winter crappie creek. But word had obviously gotten out about the fishing there. There were so many boats in the creek that I left after catching 10 crappie, and headed back down to the main lake. Water temps on the main lake were 46 to 48 degrees, and the fishing there was very tough. I only caught one small black bass. When I went fishing again yesterday, I decided to fish the mid lake. With water temps still so cold, I wondered if I would catch much there, but decided to give it a try anyway. I decided to start the day with some jig and bobber fishing. Little did I know then that every fish I caught on this day would be caught on a jig and bobber.

Bobbers are used in fishing in a wide variety of places and conditions. But jig and bobber fishing for shallow spawning crappie is very specific, and the conditions have to be just right to catch much. Crappie tend spawn deeper than black bass. While you can often see bass on beds at that time, seeing crappie spawning is pretty rare. I never have. But in murky water, sometimes they do spawn very shallow. And school fish that they are, there is sometimes a surprising number of them together in very shallow water. Enter the jig and bobber. It’s simply a crappie jig, rigged very shallow, usually 12 to 14 inches below a bobber. You just cast it out and let it set (mostly) in water that’s 2 to 4 feet deep. If the crappie are there, and that’s a big if, you can sometimes catch quite a few in a short time.

The crappie are only there a short time and while, like bass, more than one wave of them are likely to show up spawning shallow in a spring season, you have to be in the right place at the right time to catch them. In a shallow lake like Cedar Creek, which also has a lot of water level fluctuation, that can be pretty tough. When I first moved to this area, I spent time every spring trying to locate good jig and bobber spots. I did get into some great jig and bobber fishing now and then, but was mostly disappointed with the spots I found. The few that worked, all had years when they didn’t work at all. And on most fishing days, it seemed, there were other techniques that would produce better. Still, I have a couple of spots mid lake where I try a few times most years.

Yesterday, I caught 26 crappie on one 50 foot stretch of sea wall, and caught nothing else all day. Did I mention that a jig and bobber bite can be very specific? This spot is near the back of a long narrow cove. The middle of that part of the cove is only 3 feet deep, and near the sea wall where the crappie were is only 2 feet deep. It’s a long ways from water of much depth, much further than most people would think crappie, a mostly deep water schooling fish, would ever travel to spawn. But there they were. It can be very surprising just how many big crappie can be in such a shallow spot. A half dozen of yesterday’s crappie were 2 pounders, and most of the others were really nice size crappie. And watching a bobber quickly disappear underwater is a blast, more fun than people who’ve never done it would suspect.

One of yesterday’s 2 pound crappie.

Astute jig and bobber crappie anglers will tell you that the jig and bobber setup matters a lot. You want a bobber that just barely floats the jig, and so will go underwater without much resistance at all. It’s because of the way crappie feed. They don’t snap or bite at a bait. They tend to feed facing up, and their mouths are big enough that they just open it and suck the bait in. If there’s much resistance to the bait being sucked in, many them won’t take it. You can still catch some fish on the oversize bobbers that so many fishermen tend to use, but a delicate one better matched to the bait so that it sinks very easily will catch a lot more crappie. For that reason, you see all kinds of barely floating crappie bobbers, everything from porcupine quills to pencil shaped bobbers. I opt for something simpler, the styrofoam bobbers that are inexpensive and easy to find. The smallest I can find is a good match for my smallest jig, a 1/24th ounce jig with 1 inch plastic shad. But I use my bigger crappie plastic more often, a 1 3/4 inch shad, on a jig with a bigger hook. That will sink the smallest styrofoam bobber, but isn’t heavy enough for the next bigger styrofoam bobber you can find. I solve that by just cutting the bobber shorter, to make it barely float above the jig. It’s a simple solution that works well.

The jig and bobber that caught most of yesterday’s crappie. Yes, the top of that plastic is frayed from having so many crappie teeth on it.

In the morning, the water temp in that shallow cove was barely warmer than the main lake, 52 degrees. But by afternoon, it had warmed up to 59 degrees, a reminder of why those crappie had travelled to it, and were doing what they were doing. I had left that spot when the bite slowed after catching 19 crappie, but when I didn’t catch anything at all in the other spots I tried, I came back to that spot in the afternoon and caught 7 more crappie. I don’t know if I’ll make it back to these crappie this year or not. It’s March 1st. This is when I usually start making my bass bed fishing trips to Lake Fork. The water temp there is bound to be colder than usual too though, so there may be very few beds to be found on the lower lake, which is the only part of the lake still clear enough to sight fish for many bass. But I’ll probably make a trip or two there next week anyway. Even if the fishing is very tough, I can scout the lake and check out this year’s water conditions. As much as I love jig and bobber fishing for crappie, I love sight fishing for big Lake Fork bass even more. We’ll see what the week brings.