Hunting Big Fish

This spring I did some of my first sight fishing during the spawn. We spotted many good sized fish during pre-fish outings and caught a few. One particular area rather amazed me. As backwater lakes along the river go it is rather deeper than average. I spotted a lot of fish up shallowon deep banks spawning in the smallest of ledges. On one spot I noticed an easy five plus guarding a bed, and an amazingly large bass cruising out off the ledge or drop. If I had to guess I'ld put that fish in the 12-15 pound range. I haven't seen that many big fish up close so... take that with a grain of salt. For comparison it looked a lot bigger (to me) than this 11.48 a friend of mine caught a week later in a different area.

My friend's 11.48 http://www.yumabassman.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=bassfish;action=display;num=1117413687

I have never caught many fish in that particular backwater, but I have heard it is a rather well known spawning area.

Anyway, I am curious as the water temps rise where I am most likely to find those big fish. It is a deeper than average backwater (8-9 feet). I know in another deep backwater of similar depth I have caught or hooked a few nice fish later in the summer. The conventional wisdom around here though is that the majority of the fish head out for the river as the temps climb towards our searing summer heats, and there is no doubt that they guys who flip the main river in summer tournaments weigh in a lot of decent fish.

So if you were to go hunting to for that big girl this late in the year where would you look for her?

For any who may be passing this info on to my local competitors. Its a difficult backwater to access. If you know the river that should put them right on it. LOL.

These big bass hang in some of the worst possible places for you to try and fish, and once hooked, they are close to impossible to pull out of that trash. You've heard those giant splashes way back in that mess, well that's where they are, at least most of them are, sometimes if there is a steep drop off real close to their hunting grounds they may spend some parts of the day down there, but only if they are well fed for the day.

*IF* all those areas fail to produce, I will move shallow and look for lilly pads or hydrilla clumps, sometimes in as little a water as 2 feet. Even during the heat of our NC summers, it is not unusual to find cruising bass near pads/shade, anytime of the day sometimes it seems. But they usually aren't fatties, just lean, smallish, buck bass as best I can tell.

But to specifically target early summer, big gal bass here, usually one has to go below 10' once the water hits 80º on the surface. The only >5lb (8.4lbs) bass I've boated this year was taken in 15' of water, by slowly dragging a wacky-rigged Senko down a ledge that started to falloff at about 4 feet and descended down into about 28' of water. This was 3 weeks ago, 95º ambient, 82º surface, and 78º at 15 ft on a 13,000 acre impoundment (We boated 8 bass in this area, with this method, on that day.). The only water that was cooler was "down by the dam", and a thermocline showed up at 35 feet (72º at that depth). The only things we caught in there were a couple of small stripers, a hybrid and a pickeral. Go figure.