Across Mississippi, anglers target fish in all stages of the spawn, in lakes large and small. There’s just one constant: don’t miss it.
April is a strange month for bass fishing in Mississippi; Depending on where you fish, you can run into fish that are on postspawn, spawning and even prespawn patterns.
In some rare cases, fishermen can find all three at one time on the same water, for instance, Pickwick Lake and Bay Springs Lake in northeast Mississippi.
The cool, clear waters of these two Tennessee and Tenn-Tom Waterway lakes can put the fish in different phases of their procreation process.
“You have to be prepared for all three up here; kind of makes it interesting, doesn’t it?” Roger Stegall of Iuka, a longtime Pickwick guide once told me, adding with a wink, “Kind of makes it where you need to hire a guide.”
Stegall was joking around, of course, but he proved it one April day when he and a fishing buddy did this:
- Caught smallmouth bass holding on a dropoff after spawning, quite willing and ready to take a grub bounced along the shallow top of the drop until it fell off into deep water, where the smallies were waiting, suspending along the wall to feed after finishing their spawning.
- Sight-fished for big largemouths on the beds in the back end of coves.
- Found smallmouth, largemouth and even spotted bass, mostly females loaded with eggs, feeding together on the rocks around an offshore island in front of a cove known for spawning.
It is possible that other lakes around Mississippi can have fish in all three stages of the spawn at the same time in April, lakes like Barnett Reservoir, which is such a diverse fishery — upper river area with current, backwater areas shallow and warm, the diversity of the main lake with docks, piers, miles of riprap.
“With that much diversity, it’s a safe bet that at sometime in April, you will find prespawn, spawning and postspawn fish on the same day,” said bass pro Pete Ponds of Madison. “Granted, you will have to cover a lot of water to find all three at the same time. In that case, go with whatever you feel most confident challenging.”
For the majority of Mississippi anglers, who fish much-smaller public and private waters, there is no such problem. The predominant pattern will probably be the only pattern, with very little to no overlap.
“I just hope it’s the postspawn,” said angler Daniel Smith of Ridgeland, who loves to find bass settling down after the spawn, hungry to rebuild their bodies after the rigors of procreating. “Give me a 50- to 200-acre lake with bass coming off the spawn, and I’ll show you a fun trip. That’s why April is my favorite month for bass fishing, well, that and the fact that it is the perfect weather for comfortable fishing.
“On a good day, I can catch bass on a frog or other topwater bait, a worm in heavy cover and even crankbaits when they are really hungry. I’ll throw everything in the boat until I find what produces the best fish, and then I’ll stick with that lure or that lure type until they get tired of either seeing it or eating it, and then I’ll switch to the next lure that worked. Now, that’s fun.”
Ponds: Find bream beds
Ponds lives on a lake in central Mississippi, and fishes it regularly when he isn’t chasing bass for pay. One of his favorite April patterns is fishing bream beds — not for bream, but for bass.
“Think about it; bass spawn shallow,” he said. “When they leave the beds, especially the big females who leave the male to protect the bed and the newly hatched, they are hungry. Bream bed shallow, and by April, we’ve got redear already bedding, and some bluegill will move up, especially when we’ve had a mild winter and an early spring. So it makes sense that if a bass has a food source that close to her bed, why would she go any further.”
Ponds also noted that in most small to mid-sized lakes, access to deeper water is just a quick swim away for most fish, so they are comfortable holding in the shallows.
All this proved true on an April trip two years ago on his home lake, where he was working the shallows along a seawall when he suddenly lifted his head and started sniffing with a purpose.
“Smell that? Gotta be a bream bed,” he said, quickly retrieving his lure so he could pick up a rod with a Devil’s Horse tied on.
Using the wind, he pinpointed the location of the bed, launched a cast as far as he could throw it and then waited for the splash circles to disperse. Then he put the Devil’s Horse to work, giving it a couple of quick jerks, with the front and rear propellors producing audible splashing noises.
“The propellers are what makes me like the Horse,” Ponds said. “I don’t know exactly why, but it has always been deadly for fishing around bream beds. This is a big-fish pattern. You won’t be getting a lot of bites, but what ones you get will be quality bites.”
Ponds worked the lure with a few more twitches, pausing to …
… Splooosh!
The explosion of water was massive.
“Oh it’s a big one,” Ponds said. “Half her body came out of the water and crashed on that lure. Got be at least a 6, maybe bigger.”
The same scene was repeated over and over that day, on a variety of surface or near-surface lures.
“You want to fish on top, but I don’t want to use a walking-type bait like a Spook,” he said. “The props on a Horse give you a good splash without a lot of movement. A chugging bait like a Pop-R will work, but I like a bigger bait. The thing to remember is that when you target bream beds for bass, it will be big bass you are targeting, and the bigger baits catch bigger fish.
“Bass are attracted to bream beds because they are a hive of activity, and obviously, they know they can pick off a nice meal. When we’re talking about bream that are in there bedding, then we’re talking about a pretty good-sized forage fish so any bass there actively feeding is capable of snaring a really big bait. The bream will run off smaller bass, too.”
Ponds let the water settle from the previous skirmish, fishing a nearby boat dock before returning to the bream bed. This time, he tossed a Floating Bull Shad swimbait and brought it back over what he assumed was the outer, deeper edge of the bed, where a big bass might be staging for a quick run in to grab a meal.
Splooosh!
The plan worked. Ponds set the hook on another good fish, and this time, he put it in the boat.
“Love me some bream-bed action,” he said. “Can’t blame them for eating bream. I love them, too. I’ll come back over here this week with my grandson, and we’ll catch a mess.
“A lot of people think this is something you can only do around the full moon in April or May, but it’s not. Bream cycle on and off the beds, up into the summer, usually relating to the full- and new-moon phases. I promise you, the bass know that. The bass fishing is better in the early months because the bass are already shallow, coming off their spawn. Later in the heat, I try to find beds extremely close to a deep drop. Those are good on into June and even July.”
Smith: Give them the full menu
Smith, who also has access to the same lake as Ponds, usually opts for smaller, private lakes to target.
“Give me a 15- to 50-acre lake, and I’m happy,” he said. “The reason is that in such an impoundment, it’s likely that all the fish are on the same page at the same time. And being that they are smaller lakes, I don’t have to arrive with much information about what the fish are doing. It’s small enough that I can make a quick pass around enough water to figure it out. In April, I start right on the banks.”
Smith has many rods at the ready, each with different lure types tied on.
“I give them the full menu,” he said. “A frog, swimbait, spinner bait, buzzbait, square-bill crankbait, shallow crankbait, soft plastics — all of it. Chances are pretty good that I am going to get some action on just about all of it, at least on an overcast morning when the topwaters will work. Sooner or later, I’m going to hit on one that seems to get the biggest fish most often.
“I know I can keep working right on the banks where the bass spawned and catch the smaller buck bass, 12 to 15 inches, using nothing more than a worm or a spinnerbait. But I’m looking for the big sows, so I’m ready for anything from a foot to 5 or 6 feet deep.”
Smith catches most of big April females in a postspawn pattern on the smaller lakes, targeting the first good cover away from a bank. He proved that pattern on an April 2018.
After launching, we fished the shallow banks along the windward shore and caught a lot of the smaller buck bass, but only two 2- to 3-pound females. Topwaters caught the females, but the bucks were happiest with shaky-head worms. Unsatisfied, Smith turned up the speed on the trolling motor and rounded a bend in the shoreline that led to the lake’s biggest cove.
“This is where most of the bream bed, where the deep water is closest to bass spawning areas and, most important, where there’s a row of stumps in 5 feet of water,” Smith said. “Take that Bandit 200 and start banging those stumps.”
We did, and in the first 20 minutes, we boated 14 long, skinny females, obviously just finished laying their eggs on the bed. Four of the fish would have been 8 pounds or better had they still had their eggs. The other 10 were would-be 6s that were more like 4s.
Smith chose to leave them while they were still biting to let the area calm down and said he had an idea, if we wanted to try some topwater.
Across the dam, on the north end of the lake, was a small cove still hidden from the sun, in the shad of standing timber, featuring more stumps, plus a lot of old laydowns that had Smith drooling at the prospect of throwing a frog over the cover.
Using two variations of the Scum Frog produced by the Mississippi-based Southern Lure Company, we went to work.
I threw the Scum Dog, the plastic frog that can be worked with the “walking-the-dog” action of a big surface plug like a Zara Spook. Smith chose the Big Foot, which has legs that churn the water like a small buzzbait.
Both worked. We only caught one each in that cove on our frogs, but they were our biggest of the day — would-be 10s that were skinnied-down to 8 pounds or so.
“A lot of people think that you can only throw frogs around vegetation, and they’re right that they work good in that situation,” Smith said. “What a lot of people don’t realize is how good a frog — especially ones with a unique action like the splashing feet and the dog-walking pattern — will work over underwater wooden structure.”
For the last hour that morning, we worked the entire shoreline on the shady, east side with the frogs, backed by a whacky-rigged Senko worm. If a fish swiped at the frog and missed, the Senko would finish the deal. We ended up catch another 10 each, all thin females in water ranging from 1 to 5 feet.
Skip the docks, literally
Pete Ponds, like most bass pros, seek out docks, piers and other horizontal cover, on the lakes they fish. According to Ponds, April is one of the best times to put those structures to good use.
“That’s one of the first places I look in April to find big females after the spawn,” he said. “They are always good places to look, all year, but postspawn makes them even more attractive, because when the fish leave the beds, the first cover they can usually find is a dock or a pier on the bank in the spawning area. It offers cover, and it offers baitfish, too.”
Ponds has become proficient in skipping lures, like Senko-type worms rigged weightless and wacky-style on a light finesse hook, as far up under a dock as it can go. Seeing it in practice is a marvel to behold.
“I can’t tell stress enough how efficient that is,” he said. “Anybody can fish the outer edges of cover, but only those who are proficient at skipping baits, whether it’s a worm or a spinnerbait or anything, to the very back of the cover can reach where the fish like to get.
“It’s such a strong pattern that I recommend all bass fishermen who have access to waters with lots of piers, marinas, docks and boathouses try it. It just takes commitment and practice, lots of practice.”
Ponds uses a 6-foot or 6½-foot medium-heavy or heavy spinning rod, with a quality spinning reel spooled with fluorocarbon, as light as he thinks he can get away with. Stay away from baitcast reels or be prepared to spend most of the day picking backlashes.
Using a sidearm, down-angle cast, Ponds aims to hit the water about halfway between the boat and the pier, letting the lure skip three or four times before reaching the cover and then two or three more after that.
“Practice, practice, practice,” he said. “That’s the key. I’ve seen guys who aim closer to the boat than I do and guys who aim closer to the pier than I do. Halfway works for me because I like the bait to skip a few times before it gets there, and I want the loudest skips to be closer to the pier than to the boat. The skipping is important because it mimics the fleeing action of a shad running from a predator fish. It will get the attention of a bass and have it looking for where that baitfish is.
“When it comes bouncing under the pier and settles down … BAM! She’s all over it.”
