DOUBLE DIPPING SPOONS
What About Pesky Bass
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.
Often my tastebuds dictate where I fish and for what
I fish. If my tastebuds begin to tingle for a platter
full of crappie fillets, this urge supersedes my desire
to catch a largemouth bass. On one trip to Eufaula,
I told Ingram, "I really need to catch a mess of
crappie to take home for a fish fry on Friday night.
Have you got some spots we can fish?" Ingram grinned
like a cat that has a canary in its mouth when its owner
looks down and asks, "Have you seen Tweety Bird?"
and told me he had several places where we could catch
crappie. "Many bass fishermen at Lake Eufaula sink
brush on the ends of main river points that drop off
into the main
river channels," Ingram mentioned. "These
brush piles usually load up with crappie most of the
year. We'll take our jigging spoons and catch a couple
of nice-sized limits of big fish." True to Ingram's
word, we fished about 15- or 20-underwater brush piles
on the ends of main river points. We generally would
catch four or five crappie off each brush pile while
fishing the jigging spoon vertically through the brush
before we caught one of those pesky bass. In one day
of fishing, we took 53 crappie we put in Ingram's front
livewell and caught and released 15 bass weighing from
1-1/2- to 4-pounds each.
When Ingram caught a fat, 3-pound, butterbean-shaped
bass, one that any bass fisherman would feel proud to
catch, he looked at the fish and said,
"John, I'm sorry these pesky bass have disrupted
our crappie-fishing trip. But I guess we'll just have
to put up with them. They don't know we've put our jigging
spoons down there to catch crappie and not bass."
Ingram laughed as he released the bass and started fishing
again.
And actually that's the one problem I've encountered
with fishing the jigging spoon like Ingram does -- the
lure doesn't discriminate between species. The jigging
spoon has the ability to catch any fish on underwater
cover when you lower it to that cover. But I've learned
I can put up with catching pesky bass when I go crappie
fishing and really don't mind taking home a mess of
crappie for the skillet when I bass fish. You will too.
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