"We've Got it Covered"

By: Ryan Clark


     It's that time of year again where the cabin fever starts to set in and feel like a permanent resident in our households (for some of you anyway).  Luckily there are still some fish biting and some preparations to make to create better fishing in your lake.   "What preparations," you may ask?  You have already cleaned all your reels, respooled all your line, changed out hooks and split rings, and even sorted out all your tackle trays.  What could be left?  Well, adding some cover elements to your lake in key locations, obviously.

 

     People often get cover and structure confused, and for those of you who fall into that category, I'm going to sort that out for you real fast.  Structure is the actual bottom contour of the lake itself.  Slopes, depressions, drop-offs, creek channels and ridges or points are all examples of structure.  These are what bass use to move from point A to point B and back again.   Now cover is completely different.  It is what is ON those structure elements that fish like to hide in or "cover" themselves with.  Like stumps, brush piles, lay downs, rock piles, grass beds, standing timber or even culvert pipes.

 

     Now that you understand what cover is you can use that information to place cover in key locations that will help your fishing.  Just placing cover anywhere isn't going to help and neither is placing cover in a lake already filled with it.  The particular lake we fish is practically barren so any cover we place is only going to help.  So by knowing this and by knowing the structure elements in our lake we can manage the cover placement efficiently, because cover placed in the wrong spot isn't going to help you.

     Before we get too much into placement of the  cover, let's talk about the things we used to create it.  Everybody knows that this time of year you can just drive along pretty much any street and see Christmas trees littering the roadside.  So we picked up a truck bed full and headed to our work area.  We also had been gathering up old broken cinder blocks that had at least one square still intact.  You can go to your local hardware store and ask if you can have the broken ones.  90% of the time they will just give them to you for free if you tell them what you need them for.   We also took a little walk through the woods and found some nice hardwood branches that had fallen.

     After everything was gathered and we felt like we had enough materials, we got to work.  First thing to do was to prep the Christmas trees so they would sink and also sit vertically in the water column.  We cleaned up the bottom of the trunk to about 9-12 inches so the trunk would fit into the hole in the cinder block.  We then wrapped wire around the trunk above the cinder block and wrapped the wire around the outside of the block to the bottom of the trunk and wrapped it again.  this would ensure the trunk wouldn't slip out of the block and the block would hold the tree upright.  We also would chop a few rings out of the middle of the tree so that the larger fish would have a place to hide and also to have less buoyancy in the tree. After prepping our trees we got to work on the branches.  These branches were perfect.  Each branch was about 15ft long and had a bunch of weird twists and some forks where the main branch split.

     Now it was time to place our newly made cover.  But again, you have to put the cover in the right spot or it wont do you any good.  Think about how you are going to be fishing that particular spot and place your cover accordingly.  You want to try to make funnels with the stuff your sinking.  For example, try putting a few trees in a row about 4-5 feet apart so that they are not touching underwater, but against something else, like a grass edge or along a sunken log.  Cover placement is all about making an easy ambush point for the fish.  We placed ours on submerged points in a row, under some docks, along a rock wall, and about 2 feet out from the shoreline trees and bushes that make a point in the water.  Again, it is all about making ambush locations.

 

     Since doing this last year we noticed a substantial increase in the numbers of sizeable fish we were able to catch out of the lake.  Now our cover didn't grow bigger fish, so don't think that, but just concentrated the fish in certain locations so it made them easier to catch.  Last winter we just put a few small pieces of cover in and it made a noticeable difference so this year we already tripled the amount and plan on adding more.  Here are a few of the fish we caught last year on the cover we placed.

 

     So go spend a little time collecting materials and then get your cold weather gear on and get to work.  Just remember, the work you put in now will pay off huge over the next year.  Not sure about you, but "we've got it covered!"

Timing it right!

By: Ryan Clark


     Winter fishing is all about picking your days and locations.  Certain weather patterns call for different locations to be fished effectively.  We've been waiting for a particular series of events to fall into place for "Location A" for 3 weeks and it finally happened.  It turned out to be, what todays youth would say, "EPIC."  

     The local meteorologist called for some pretty awful weather for the week ahead.  Luckily for us there was a "pot o' gold" at the end of that rainbow.  Four days of sub freezing cold and 30 mph winds would make way to a beautiful day of sunshine and 61 degree warmth.  Our target destination had a shallow, black, and muddy bottom and we knew that with even a little bit of sunshine that the bass would make their way to "skinny water" in a hurry to warm themselves up and get a full belly.  This is exactly what happened.

 

     Between the four of us we ended up landing 37 fish that included Bass, Pickerel and Crappie.  The Pickerel were relentless with a 4:1 ratio of Pickerel to Bass.  Countless fish were lost during the fight and many more right at the sides of the boats.  I lost a 5 pound largemouth as I went in for the lip and I'm sure passers by would have thought Mike Iaconelli himself was out there in that kayak.  Throughout the day many more obscenities echoed across the lake and we all knew a nice fish was lost.

 

   
 It was a pretty incredible day with the amount of action that we had.  90% of the fish were caught on fluke style baits in a foot or less of water.  Made for some pretty intense top-water action too.  Topwater Bass in January in Virginia?!?!  CRAZY!!!