TACTICAL SESSION

By Tim Tucker

In the spring when the bass are shallow and easily accessible, all the world is a carnival for bass fishermen. It is the time of year when almost every Texas angler feels like an expert.

But when spring ends and summer arrives, the shallow-water feeding frenzy festival ends, sending many bass enthusiasts into a tailspin. As the days get hot and bright, the majority of the Lone Star bass populations head south toward deep water. There are still some bass that can be caught in the summer, but every fisherman worth his flipping stick knows that both the quality and the quantity move into their deep hiding spots.

In there lies the problem.

Deep structure summertime fishing separates the men from the boys in reservoirs all over Texas. It requires considerable skill in reading depthfinding electronics, understanding proper boat positioning and deciphering the sometimes subtle signals of deep-probing baits. But those who have mastered the techniques involved will tell you that the rewards are well the effort.

• • •

It was the quintessential “You should have been here yesterday” story.

Bruce Benedict, a top tournament pro from Forney, was waiting on the shores of Lake Fork with a story that was more fun to tell than to hear.

A day earlier, Benedict and a friend had endured the kind of heat and humidity that would send most anglers scurrying for air conditioning to enjoy the fishing experience of a lifetime. Although they lost track of the total number of bass that were boated with a Carolina-rigged lizard and released, they counted 20 fish that weighed between 5 and 9 pounds. And they were caught using one technique over a single deep-water roadbed.

As luck usually has it, the wind screamed the next two days on Lake Fork and we experienced modest success. But three days later on an 18-hour fishing trip to O.H. Ivie Reservoir in The Middle of Nowhere, Texas, we used the same technique to seine more than 300 bass off of two huge underwater points. Such successes were not new or rare for Benedict's favorite summertime technique. It had delivered tournament victories for him on lakes Bob Sandlin and Palestine as well.

The technique is sometimes called “strolling,” but Benedict refers to it as “dragging.” Dragging is basically a passive-aggressive technique that works over a piece of deep structure with a precision not usually associated with deep-water fishing. Benedict looks passive as he holds his rod tip low (putting no action on the lure) and operates the trolling motor while concentrating intently on the screen of his liquid-crystal depthfinder. But along the bottom of the lake, he is aggressively dissecting each piece of cover along a specific structure.

Dragging or strolling is not the same as trolling. Trolling uses the outboard motor to randomly roam areas of a lake, while dragging is more of a methodical seek-and-destroy mission that zeroes in on individual fragments of cover on a targeted structure. It is more accurate than trolling or deep-water drifting, which is popular in California.

Benedict uses two types of soft-plastic lures for the technique — a 5- or 7-inch lizard and small ringworm. His Carolina rig utilizes a 1-ounce weight and 3- to 6-foot leader manipulated with a 7-foot medium-action All Star Carolina-Rig model.

“Dragging is a method of presenting a lure that works, largely, because the lure is presented with a constant motion,” Benedict explains. “Dragging a lure is simply a matter of using either a reel or your trolling motor to move your ( Carolina) rig along at a specific speed. Speed is the real key word.

“I prefer to use my trolling motor. I start off slow in the morning and gradually increase my speed until I determine what kind of speed it takes to get a strike. There will be times when you have to run it on high-24 to get a strike. The proper speed that a lure moves through the water is a large part of why a bass strikes a lure. If you have the perfect lure at the perfect depth but at the wrong speed, you won't catch fish. But if you get the perfect lure at the right speed, you can catch fish after fish after fish off of a spot.

“On deep structure, this is a better approach than casting and retrieving. If you cast out a Carolina rig and start a steady retrieve while keeping the lure on the bottom, this could be considered dragging and would be effective for about a quarter of your retrieve. Then the angle of the distance between the lure and the boat changes. The closer you get to the boat, the more the rig tends to come up off of the bottom, which is no good. And you can't maintain the proper speed of your drag by casting and retrieving.”

Benedict emphasizes that the lure has to be on or near the bottom to be effective in the summertime. For him, dragging is most productive in 10 to 45 feet of water (although it works well in shallower water during the prespawn season).

“This is a super efficient way to cover massive amounts of deep structure, the kind of areas where most fishermen don't wander onto,” Benedict adds. “These are the areas that most fishermen don't understand because it is so difficult to make presentations to structure/cover combinations that you can't see with your eyes.”

• • •

Accomplished pro and former guide Alton Jones is another expert at locating and catching deep-structure bass. It is a style of fishing that he learned out of self-defense as a guide on Richland-Chambers Reservoir for the hottest months of the year.

“My favorite way to catch a big fish on Richland-Chambers is actually in the month of June and it's cranking structure,” says the two-time B.A.S.S. winner from Waco. “Richland-Chambers has very specific spots where the fish stack up in the summertime. A lot of old roadbeds. A lot of pond dams and a lot of points with good drops on the edge of them. Some of them have timber and some don't.

“What I like to do is position my boat in the deep water and cast up over whatever piece of structure I'm fishing. I'm usually targeting depths of 12 to 15 feet and throwing a pearl-white Fat Free Shad. I crank it down real fast, and then stop it and fish it as slow as I can possibly fish it with a little bit of a stop-and-go erratic motion.

“Whenever I pull up on a deep-water spot, a crankbait is always the first lure I throw in the summer. It seems like if I'm going to catch a fish over 8 pounds it's going to be on the crankbait as opposed to a Carolina rig or Texas rig or any other thing. So I always approach it with a crankbait first in case that big fish is there. A lot of times, you pull up and fish a spot first with a worm or Carolina rig, and you'll miss that big fish and end up spooking the fish. You'll never get the bite. So I always, any day, I'm going to crank it first.”

In the summer, Jones targets offshore humps, ridges, tank dams and even a long-forgotten bridge in 15 to 30 feet of water. The bass are most likely to feed on top of these structures along an edge that falls off into deeper water.

“You may have a tank dam that's maybe 100 yards long, but there's going to be a sweet spot that's about the size of the hood of your car,” he adds. “Once you learn those sweet spots, you can go to them time and time again. You don't have to fish the whole ridge.”

• • •

Kelly Jordon spends much of the year traveling the national bass circuits where he known as one of the sport's young bucks. But Jordon can be found working over the hidden bass holes on Lake Fork almost every day during the summer where he has enjoyed some phenomenal days.
“My favorite thing is fishing the humps, drops, creek channel bends and roadbeds on Fork beginning in late May,” says the Mineola pro, who also guides on the famed trophy lake. “That's when you catch some giants on Fork. It's really awesome all summer.

“Let me tell you how good it can be, A lot of times, every one you catch will be over 6 pounds. I can remember an afternoon where I caught 29 over the 21-inch slot at the time. I think 21 of them were over 8 pounds and 12 were over 9 pounds. I had no 10-pounders that day; they were all about the same size.”

Jordon has exploited such big-bass bonanzas with a variety of lures, including jigging spoons, lead tailspinners, Carolina-rigged Lake Fork Trophy Tackle Ring Frys and heavy jigs. But his greatest and most consistent success comes on a deep-diving crankbait like a Norman DD22.

Lake Fork is home to a huge array of deep-water structure that concentrates its largemouths, but Jordon prefers secondary points associated with spawning areas and major creeks. As the summer progresses, he follows the fish farther out into more main-lake areas. The “magic” depth is about 18 to 25 feet.

One key to this pattern: Jordon actually scours each submerged site with his depthfinder before making a cast. If he can't mark bass on a spot, Jordon moves on to another target.

• • •

Waco's Randy Behringer was once known as one of the country's best offshore structure specialist, a skill that enabled him to win two B.A.S.S. tournaments during his career. Today, it is an expertise that serves him well on Texas lakes from Rayburn to Whitney.

That is especially true in the summertime. During the warmest months of the year, Behringer searches for somewhat subtle depth changes that are found on well-defined channel bends, intersections and areas where a channel swings close to a roadbed.

Behringer's favorite summer style of fishing involves casting a Texas-rigged plastic worm while drifting across “subtle structure like a gradually sloping points. I'm thinking of one at Lake Palestine that runs 400 yards from land with only a 2-foot drop in depth. But that 2-foot break can be a fantastic place to fish in the summer.”

Interpreting the reports of his depthfinder, Behringer hunts for pods of baitfish, which usually point the way to the most active bass.

“Also, it's important not to dismiss a spot where you only see one or two fish on your depthfinder,” he emphasizes. “You've got to remember that in, say, 25 feet of water you will only see about 8 feet of the bottom because of the cone angle of the transducer. If you run over a couple of fish in the space of 8 feet, it's a good bet that there are others in that area.”