Big change for me from last week

Bobby, Chris Tetrick and I fished yesterday and the fish in the guts we had been catching prior to the rain event were no where to be found.  Fished 5 guts with zero results that had been holding both fish and shad.  There were some shad, but a pittence of what it had been last week.  Only saw a few marks and they were scattered.  Chris did catch a giant blue gill on one of the marks at 50' on a white spoon.

Got a little breeze and pulled up on a 45 degree bank in one of those creeks and within 30 minutes caught 5 on a jerk bait and 1 on a Ned.  Chris had told me the day before yesterday they were right on the bank on a jerk bait up the James.  He and his dad had caught 30 or so in a morning of fishing, with most fish being in the under 10' range.

We pulled onto the main lake as the wind slacked and started looking out there and we did find some of our  better fish of the day.  There were city blocks of shad on some of these locations with the shad being tight to the bottom.  This was up in the morning around 11 and it was bright and slick.  They were really deep on the main lake for us from 80' to as shallow as 65'.  The balls of shad were extremely tight and at times were  15 ft. thick.  We could see no visible marks either above or below the schools and at times we could make out marks in the schools.  These are the fish we caught.  It was impossible to tell where the bass would be in the shad ball, at times right in the middle. and we popped about a dozen out of the middle of these shad balls.  Nothing big but several nice keepers.  By far the Ice jig was the best bait in the shad balls.

Seemed to us that the creek fish went to the bank a bit and if you can get any type of wind in there they are all over that jerk bait.  There  are for sure bass now at just about any depth level a guy wants to fish, finding them and finding the right condition to catch them is the trick

Good Luck

Bill, thanks for the info.  Decided to go north duck hunting for a couple days as the season there is coming to an end.   I'll try the jerkbait closer to the bank as well as the ned when I get back.  I've gotten too use to video fishing lately.  Need to get back into some casting.

Bobby

I'm headed down a week from tomorrow if it's not raining. I hope the deep bite is on I have caught them in the summer but have never tried the super deep winter bite.