Published: April 12, 2008 06:54 pm            

A good spring fishing trip to Lake Athens

This past week Robert Sadler and I fished Lake Athens.

At this time of year some of the bass will be on the bed, others will have spawned, but most of the bass should be fairly shallow.

It’s best to start fishing at first light. This day turned out to be heavy overcast with mostly light southerly winds. There is an abundance of bait fish in the shallows at this time of year.

Immediately after we started fishing Sadler landed a three-pound bass on a Nichols white and chartreuse Pulsator spinnerbait with gold blades. These bass were in the very edge of shallow grass.

A few minutes later a six-pound bass slammed my new Nichols red Chatter Box with a red Texas craw. At this time of year around good cover you can’t find a better big bass lure than this. Since Nichols came out with the red Chatter Box, I’ve caught many bass over four pounds. It’s a big bass bait. You won’t get many strikes, but all you do get will be quality size bass. The mistake most fishermen make using this lure is not fishing it long enough. Many give up after a short while. When bass are eating this bait you can fish it all day long and expect to catch five or more big bass.

We moved around a lot fishing pockets, points, coves and good sandy banks near deep water.

There are a lot of bedding bass up near the dame area, but most of these were reluctant to strike. We chose not to fish bedding bass but to use square bill crankbaits in bream and red colors and move around a lot.

Sadler fished a chrome rogue bait a lot and caught several nice bass in the three-pound range. At times he would slowly twitch it on the top. At other times he gave the bait a couple of hard jerks and paused to let the bait rise. This seemed to trigger more bites.

Every time we stopped and fished a new area we would quickly catch two or more bass. We used a variety of other baits, including road runners, flukes, sienkos and buzz baits. All caught bass. Sadler also caught a two-pound white bass on his Nichols spinner bait.

Later in the afternoon we returned to the small grassy pocket where we had caught bass early that morning. In a short while Sadler landed three more bass in the two to three-pound range on his rogue. I tied on a new bait called a Rage Tail made by Strike King and hooked into a two-pound bass.

At this time of year you can catch bass on a big variety of lures. We chose to use mostly power baits and move around a lot. I’m sure you could slow down and go through the same areas and catch several bass on the slower Flukes and Sienkos, especially the bedding bass.

Lake Athens has a lot of shallow water grass and a lot of water primrose. We did see a little coontail moss and lily pads. Wherever we could find a mixture of these grasses we caught more bass.

We caught about 25 bass that day up to six pounds. About five were in the three-pound range. It was a good trip.

Jerry Miller can be reached at gonefishing813@peoplepc.com

        

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