Fishing Tips From the Pros

When a Spoon is More Than a Spoon

By MITCH LOOPER

Lots of folks fish jigging spoons. Almost all fish them the same way. Find fish on the depth finder, drop a spoon on their heads and jig up and down.

I prefer to stay to the side of fish, rather than on top of them. So, I have found a way to fish the Cotton Cordell C.C. Spoon without getting on top of the fish. Very simply, I cast it. It has been working for me, every summer and every winter, for over 15 years. And it works at times in spring and fall. Basically, it works anytime that bass are schooled up and feeding on shad.

I use either a _ oz. or 3/8 oz. C.C. Spoon, with either 10 lb Excalibur Silver Thread line on a spinning outfit or 17 lb Excalibur Silver Thread line on a baitcaster. These spoons cast very easily, allowing you to reach out and cover a lot of water each cast.

Of course, the first thing you must do is position yourself in an area that has fish. In the summer and winter you can generally find groups of fish around the main channel, long points and more subtle humps and depressions offshore. Also, in summer and winter, you can weed out any areas that don't have shad. So the first thing to do is locate some offshore depth changes that could hold fish. Focus on fishing only the ones that have shad on them at that time (I say "at that time" because a school of shad could migrate through one of these structural changes later).

When you find what you are looking for, position your boat over the deepest water and make a long cast, preferably past where you think the fish will be. As soon as your spoon hits the water, engage your reel and hold your line semi-tight, just tight enough so you can maintain contact with the bait. When your line goes slack, you either have hit bottom or you have a fish!

Rather than check to see if it is a fish, immediately pump your rod up from 10 to 12 o' clock while reeling (this will set the small trebles if it is a fish). I usually give it about three pumps. This will get your bait roughly 4 to 8 feet off bottom. Let it fall again on the same line tension as before. The second it touches bottom or the line goes slack you should be pumping and reeling again. Repeat all the way to the boat.

Most of the time you will get bites just as the bait starts to drop or just before it hits bottom. Most strikes will feel like someone thumped your rod tip with a finger, but sometimes the line just goes slack. However, since you are pumping and reeling immediately after the line goes slack you will catch these types of bites. Now, I must say here that you will miss some fish, but the beauty of this technique is that it can get a whole school of bass after it at once, so when you miss a fish, simply drop your spoon back (as opposed to reeling it in and casting again) and likely another bass will grab it. Sometimes you might miss three fish in three seconds, only to get hooked up strong on the fourth bite.

Another beauty of this technique is it allows you to cover a lot of fairly deep structure quickly. I like to have a number of potential areas on a lake in summer and winter, but only two or three of them may have fish on them at any time. So it is important to be able to cover a lot of water quickly with something that will trigger fish to bite to eliminate the areas that are not holding fish. The quicker you can do that, the quicker you can catch 20 fish in 20 casts! And that happens regularly with this technique. And from my experience, there are few times that schooled up bass will not hit a C.C. Spoon fished in this manner.

You might think you would stay hung up all the time with a treble hooked spoon, but this is not the case. As soon as your bait touches bottom you should be pumping it back up, which keeps your hooks out of trouble with bottom (for the most part). This action causes the bait to come up so high off the bottom when you pump and reel it that it keeps it from snagging in all but the hairiest wood cover (which is where you want to vertically jig it). But for most of our older lakes, where a lot of branches of the trees have long since rotted away, or in more open areas of lakes, this method of spooning is a surprisingly snagless technique.

I will use the 17 lb Excalibur Silver Thread line and baitcasting equipment when fishing in fairly heavy cover. That way when I do hang up I can crank the drag down on the reel and pull straight back on the rod. Most of the time it will pull the hooks free or bend one of the hooks. Hooks are fairly cheap and fast and easy to replace with split-ring pliers. The spinning tackle is used in areas where snags are not much of a problem.

Try this method of spooning, and you may never vertically jig a spoon again! It also works great for crappies, but that is another story…

Mitch Looper lives in Hackett, Ark. Mitch is renowned in fishing circles as being one of the world’s best trophy bass anglers.