I
first got this idea in my head years ago while
on a guide trip on lake okeechobee. My family
and i had won a trip, paid for by catching the big
fish in a redman tournament. We hired guide randy Mosley at roland Martin’s
marina there and went shiner fishing. it was a great
trip. right after that i ended up guiding here in
California doing the same thing.
i gave it a new twist though. i treated guiding as
if it were a tournament; i would show up a day before
and locate fish like i was sight fishing. i used my trolling
motor on high bypass and covered as many docks as i
could on Clear lake in one day. Then selected the ones
that i could see held the biggest bass. i’d also stop at
the High Valley Fish Farm in the oaks the day before
the guide trip and hand pick jumbo Shiners from their
tanks at .25 cents each. Back then, in the early 90’s,
they were all 6 to 8 inch healthy shiners. at the same
time they were $2.00 each on lake okeechobee.
i would load up my clients
flipping sticks with 20 lb Big Game
line, 5/0 weapon hooks at the
time, and a giant shiner. i almost
always had 3 guys at a time, $500
per day. They bought the bait.
Then, after teaching them all
how to pitch the shiner under the
dock, Wow… the stuff would hit
the fan. it was so exciting, and
these guys got so excited they
did all kinds of crazy things when
trying to land these toads all at
the same time. Some even fell in
the water. Funny stuff, but we
caught some giant bass.
later, i did this same thing
Issue 4 October 2011
on nearly all our lakes including lake Shasta for spots. What i learned from all this was how a shiner acts under pressure. More importantly, how a bass reacts to a frantic shiner. i’d already loved to spoon and was getting better and better at this over time. Soon i learned that by using a spoon in my swimming pool, i could make it surf horizontally. This looked a lot like a shiner being pitched under a dock.
tossing shiners under a dock, with big bass lurking beneath it, was so interesting to me. if the shiner was tired and lazy he seldom got hit within the first minute or so and quite often made it to the other side of the dock and off he swam slowly out of sight and never got hit at all.
However a crazy frantic filled shiner that was strong and full of life tossed under a dock with big bass never lasted more than a second or so. Bass just darted out like a mad dog and… Pow! Shiner gone. With a 3/4 oz. Hopkins Spoon you can mimic the same thing, or very close, and the bass have very little
time to do anything but react,
especially if you can steer the
bait in a way that it crashes into
a piling or a wall or whatever.
Sometimes the bait even hits
the other bass before they can
move out of the way. When the
spoon hits something it draws a
strike immediately. So doing this
in many situations really pays
off - like small schools of bait on
the surface that you can see, any
docks or willow trees.
So here is what i do, i use a
good barrel swivel 18” up the line
from a good wire snap on 17 to 20
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