Saturday’s sunrise disputed the dismal weather forecast for the Memorial Day Weekend. My plan was to fish a small SMB lake between Hackensack and Longville. There are so many great bass lakes along the County Road 5 stretch between Hackensack and Longville it’s unreal. My experience this weekend can be duplicated on dozens of lakes in the area. The water clarity was a little reduced due to the abundance of rain recently, and was about 10-12 feet.
I hadn’t had the chance to fish in the area yet this year, so my plan was to target gravel and scattered rock flats in 4-10 FOW. The first spot I hit was a mix of sparse reeds with gravel and sand. I wanted to see what all the hubbub was about with the Rapala Shadow Rap. I was immediately impressed with the action, it reminded me of a fluke but with 3 trebles, my hook-up percentage was bound to be better. It was perfectly neutrally buoyant, and would hang there FOREVER.
First cast with three or four quick hard snaps of the rod followed by a 2 second pause and it began. Smallie after Smallie came aboard. The hot color was gold without a doubt. I worked all good looking rock shorelines, and keyed in on scattered brush piles.
Sara’s Shadow Rap Double
If I caught a bass in one area, I kept working that same small area and it would almost always yield another 2 or 3 fish. Even with the reduced clarity you had excellent vision and could easily see the fish following the baits. The trick to getting them to eat was quickly increasing the cadence of jerks and making them more erratic forcing the fish to chase faster. A small pause was then too much to handle, leading to face full of hooks.
Tubes worked alright but it was much harder to cover the large sand and rock flats. If I had a fish follow and not eat, I’d throw back the tube and it was pretty much lights out every time.
After beating up on the bass for 3 or 4 hours, I decided to throw on the scuba gear. A lot of the fish were actually still pre-spawn surprisingly, but there were also quite a few bedded fish. The fish were much more scattered than I originally thought, and they would often be traveling along small contour changes. If there was a 1 foot drop along a break, 90% of the fish would be right along side it.
Sunday the weather was overcast and a little cooler and the fish wanted the bait presented much more slowly with smaller twitches and longer pauses.
Work the brush piles hard after you pick off one or two fish, many of the fish were reluctant to come up after baits. Grind them out with tubes!
If I had some advice, it would be don’t buy any Shadow Raps….well at least until I put in my order! This is such a fun time to fish smallies and especially if you have kids because the fishing is relatively easy and of course those SMBs sure take you for a good rip!
The top and bottom pictures especially are a very clear picture of the bottom and structure. Classic small habitat… At that depth were you using the regular Shadow Rap or the “deep” version?
Yes, it always helps when the water is so dang clear. I was looking for new structure to fish and all I had to do was look down!
I seemed to have better luck with the regular Shadow Rap over the Shadow Rap Deep. It says the SR runs 2-4 but I could fish it down to 6 feet no problem, maybe even 7. It was nice because I could work it down a break from 1-7 feet and effectively target those depth ranges. So it was about perfect at 3 feet or so off the bottom when I got out over 10ft. With the clear water, those bass had no problem keying in on the bait a little higher in the water column.
The deep does all of 8 feet and was hard to work up shallow on top of the shelves. I did like it for the steeper breaks casting parallel with the shorelines.
I’m going to be in the Minnesota Fishing Challenge this weekend on Gull – see any application there for Shadow Rap or X-Rap? Similar latitude but different water/structure… Would like to maybe try though ~
Definitely. Especially with a lot of the fish being shallow. I went into a back bay where it’s prime LMB territory, and popped 5 or 6 of them right away. I’m probably starting to sound like a broken record about the Shadow Rap but I really think they are going to be a dynamite bait. Excited to use them in different situations.