DOUBLE DIPPING SPOONS
How to Use a Satellite
EDITOR'S
NOTE: You can have your cake and eat it too. Charlie
Ingram, a bass fisherman on Lake Eufaula in Eufaula,
Alabama, on the Georgia/Alabama border, practices catch
and release when he fishes for bass. But he also takes
home a mess of crappie for the skillet on almost every
outing. Ingram has developed a technique for bass fishing
that allows him to catch big bass and large crappie
at the same time. The bass go in his back livewell,
and he shows them to his buddies at the marina before
he releases them. He puts the crappie he catches in
his front livewell and never opens it until he arrives
at home. Then he takes the speckled sides out to fillet.
While fishing a jigging spoon at almost any time of
the year, Ingram catches crappie weighing 3/4-pound
to 2-pounds each. Also when fishing a jigging spoon
in these same places, Ingram takes bass weighing 2-
to 10-pounds each.
The
last time I fished with Charlie Ingram I told him we
really needed to catch a big bass to use for photography.
Ingram said, "I've found an underwater stump out
on the end of an underwater creek channel point that
drops off into the main river channel. I usually can
go to this stump and catch a fairly nice-sized bass.
Sometimes I find that stump difficult to locate. However,
if we can find it, I believe we can get a large fish
for your pictures."
As we motored out of the marina, I dug my hand-held
GPS receiver out of my gear bag. I had put the Alabama-Georgia
chip in it to give me a very-detailed description of
the area I'd fish. I also could mark spots to fish.
When we finally pinpointed Ingram's secret stump, I
marked the spot as a waypoint on my GPS receiver. As
soon as we started fishing our jigging spoons, I caught
and released a 2-pound largemouth. Joe Price, another
fishing buddy of mine on the trip, caught two bass and
a crappie. Ingram took a 6-pound hybrid-striped bass.
We'd gone back and forth over the stump for about 45
minutes or an hour before Ingram gave up and agreed
to move to another site.
"I
really thought we could catch a big bass at this spot,"
Ingram said. "But that big fish must not be here
today. We'll come back later and check this place again
before we leave." Ingram got up from his pedestal
seat on the boat. I looked at my GPS receiver and realized
each time we had gone back and forth across the stump,
the receiver had marked a visible trail on the screen.
When I looked at the screen, I could see that the dot
marking the stump had turned into a black spot with
trails going back and forth across that spot.
"Charlie, look at this," I said as I showed
Ingram the screen. "We've come across that stump
from every direction except from north/northeast. Let's
go across the stump one time from that direction, and
then we'll at least have covered the stump from every
point on the compass." Ingram agreed to make one
more pass over the stump. As I watched the screen on
my GPS, I noticed the last pass seemed to complete
the spokes of a wheel going into the hub. Just as Ingram
reached the stump with the front of the boat, a fish
hit his jigging spoon, and his rod bowed up. A 7-pound
largemouth came up and tried to tail walk on the surface.
As surprised as the fish, Ingram, Price and I finally
got the bass in the boat. We all had learned a good
lesson and a new technique for fishing invisible cover.
"I was ready to leave that stump," Ingram
commented. "If I had, I'd have missed that big
bass. That GPS taught me something I never knew before.
If you can see the direction you've traveled each time
you pass over underwater cover, you can more thoroughly
fish that cover and catch bass you would have left if
you hadn't used the GPS receiver."
TOMORROW: WHAT ABOUT PESKY
BASS
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