Fall is my favorite time of the year to fish, and November is my favorite month. However, with this global warming thing it seems like everything is changing this year. This cold weather and a few snow flurries in north Alabama are more typical of December and January than November.
I would normally be fishing around schools of shad in 3- to 5-feet of water during November, but this year the shad have moved to deeper water, about 18- to 25-feet deep.
It took a few trips to the lake to find them, but they are there and surrounded by bass. My weapon of choice for these deeper fish is a jigging spoon.
These massive schools of shad can only be located with a depth finder. These schools will be on the bottom and some will be 8- to 10-feet thick and 20- to 50-yards long.
You may or may not see the bass around these shad, but you can bet they are close by. When you catch one bass, it is not uncommon to catch 8 or 10 more from the same area in just a few minutes. Ninety nine percent of the bass caught from this deeper water will be spotted bass.
Boat control is very important when jigging a spoon.
Position your boat directly over the shad or bass, lower the spoon to the bottom until your line goes slack, then twitch the spoon about 3- or 4-feet of the bottom and let it settle back to the bottom on a tight line.
Many strikes will not be felt. When you twitch the spoon it will just feel solid. Other times you may feel a slight tap on your line or maybe the spoon will stop falling before it reaches bottom.
The spoon may become tangled in the line and feel like a fish pulling. Some of this can be prevented by using a soft tip rod or maybe by not jerking the spoon up quite as hard.
The last two trips I have made to Logan Martin Lake, I caught bass in places I have never fished before.
These fish may never be in these places again, but looking for new places is about as much fun as catching fish anyway.
As the water gets colder the fish will move deeper. The deepest I have ever caught a bass on a jigging spoon was 65-feet.
The largest bass I have ever caught on a spoon was a 9-pound largemouth about 45-feet deep at Lake Martin.
Yes, sometimes I do catch a few largemouth bass on a spoon. On a few occasions I have actually caught and released over 100 bass on a spoon in one day.
I have even cut the handle off of a coffee spoon, drilled a hole in both ends, attached a hook, jigged it and actually caught bass with it. Maybe that is why spoon fishing is so much fun.
