Stick to bass-fishing fundamentals on colder waters

So what about the coldest area of the state up in the northeast corner and the slow-to-warm clear waters of Pickwick Lake and Bay Springs Lake (Tenn-Tom Waterway)?

Yes it’s cold in February, Stegall said, but ….

“That still doesn’t mean you can’t find the fish moving shallow,” the longtime Pickwick guide and pro angler said. “I’ve developed a pattern here that works even when the water is still in the 40s, but you get a quick bump in it, say from 42 degrees to 45 or 46.

“That’s enough to trigger a bite and move some fish up into some creek channels.”

Success is about knowing how to make the fish bite.

“One of the things that really works here, that I love to do, is to take a lipless crankbait and fish those creeks,” Stegall said. “I use the Strike King Red Eye Shad … because I like the way the Red Eye Shad swims down when you pause it.

“I know is sounds crazy, and I even had this one client I guided who said I went from being crazy in his eyes to being what he called ‘the smartest man on the planet’ after we caught about 100 or 120 bass in a channel on a lipless crankbait. It was a combination of both smallmouth and largemouth and we had some brutes.”

Stegall said he usually tries baits that are bright, like orange or chartreuse, to help get a reaction strike.

“But you have to work the bait slow to get a lot of strikes,” he said. “You don’t just throw out there and burn it back. You run it as slow as you possibly can and still get the lure to swim and wobble.

“They’ll kill it.”

On other North Mississippi lakes, FLW pro Pete Ponds has used a Bandit crankbait, either in the 100 (shallow square-bill) or 200 (deeper, 4 to 5 feet) series to follow fish on their spring migration at the state’s largest Corps of Engineer flood control lakes — Grenada, Enid and Sardis.

A slight bump in temperature can initiate the prespawn migration on those waters.

“On those lakes, when fish start migrating, they move to the secondary points and creek bends leading up in the coves,” Ponds said. “Usually, when these fish start moving up, the bigger ones will stage off those points, but they are still aggressive.

“When the water warms up, even just a few degrees, it triggers a feeding period.”

And how does he put fish in the boat?

“They’ll take a crankbait, especially one you can work slow, using a few sweeps of the rod to move it along after a series of quick reels,” Ponds said. “When you go from fast to slow like that, they’ll hammer it.”