​2015 Prespawn Bass fishing

In my opinion this is the best time of year to fish for largemouth bass. The air temp is finally warm enough to fish without a jacket and the water temp is now in the mid 70’s. Finding the fish this time of year gets a whole lot easier when the winter weather breaks. It took about 2 weeks of consistent air temperature in the upper 70’s and 80’s to finally get the water over 70 degrees. Coming off of such a cold winter it has pushed the prespawn and spawn back a few weeks, but it has finally arrived. They key to finding these fish are finding shallow flats with hard rocky bottom or some type of structure for the fish to use for cover. Depending on the body of water, I look on my map for coves or finger creeks off of the main body of water. Saturday 09 May, 2 friends and I set out on Tridelphia reservoir to try and find these prespawn fish. The first good sign when we launched was the water temp at 530am was 74 degrees and it was slightly over cast. The morning bite wasn’t too good to me and by 9am I had missed 2 fish and the bite seemed slow. The same went for my friend Joe but a lot different for my other friend RJ. He had 5 fish first thing in the morning to our 0. What we failed to realize is the side he was fishing was shallow with a lot of structure versus our side that had a deep drop off and not as shallow. I believe this made a huge difference. So as I moved out of the place we were fishing I finally land a 17.75” fish in about 1ft of water hugging a rock on a 4” shaky head worm. Catching that fish so shallow told me these fish were going to be and I needed to fish right off the shoreline and pull the shaky head back. As we moved closer to the main reservoir water the bite didn’t exist, the water was too deep for spawning fish. I turned my map on my Lowrance and found a shallow finger cove off of the main reservoir. As I moved into the cove I could see different light colored circles in about 2ft of water, which turned out to be bass beds. I stood up in my kayak and noticed about 5 different beds and all had nice fish ranging from 15-18 inches sitting on top of the beds. This kind of fishing is where it is very important to had good polarized glasses. My Costas worked great and I could see every fish I was targeting. I slowly pulled up about 5 ft from the beds and pulled out my shaky head rod with my 4” worm. I took 3 casts and had 3 fish, 2 got off at the boat and 1 landed one 17.5” fish. I moved off that set of beds and worked my way around targeting others. I ended up with 2 more fish out of that cove. After losing 2 and catching 4 out of the cove I decided to leave and target other shallow coves. I caught a few more fish up in the shallows and decided to call it a day. It took a good bit of the morning trying to figure out exactly what the fish were doing, but once we did we were able to put quality fish in the kayak. It is days like this I would take my kayak over any $60,000 bass boat. I watched quite a few boats pull into these coves, take a few casts and leave. They had no idea these fish were sitting in about 2ft of water. Being able to sneak up on those fish was very important, especially in the clear reservoir water where visibility is about 4-5ft.

Equipment:

Duckett 6’9 MH Spinning Rod

Lews Tournament Gold Spinning Rod

4” Soft Plastic Worm

10lb Berkley Trilene Flurocarbon