Roland Martin's 101 Bass-Catching Secrets by Roland Martin

Author:Roland Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2011-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

40 Jigging with Spoons, Worms, and Tailspins

About the time I started guiding at Santee-Cooper in 1963, a guy about my age from Summerville, S.C., named Tommy Salisbury became serious about his bass fishing. We got acquainted and really hit it off, and for nearly fifteen years now we’ve been very good friends. Tommy had fished three or four bass tournaments, and he asked me when I was going to enter a tournament. I told him that when I entered one, I really was going to be prepared! Well, I decided to go to Toledo Bend with him for a Bass Anglers Sportsman Society tournament in January of 1970. It was my first tournament, and I especially wanted to do well.

Tommy and I sent off and got a bunch of topographical maps, and we really did our homework long before we left South Carolina and drove to Texas. We marked creek channels and high spots and everything that looked good on the topo maps, and we went out there ten days early. We got out there about three o’clock one morning, and there was ice on the trailer steps at Pendleton Bridge Marina. It was really cold. Tommy had his boat and I had mine, and the best day either one of us had was three bass the first three days we were there. We fished mostly jigs and eels. And we’d heard about jigging those Texas spoons, so we jigged them in the creek channels.

We ran into Billy and Bobby Murray, and they were catching bass, and they showed us how they were jigging their spoons. Toledo Bend was only three years old then, and the trees had all the branches on ’em. The Murrays were pulling their boat through the branches and dropping their jigging lures right down alongside the tree trunks, and they were catching bass. We started doing what they were doing, and we started catching some fish.

The weather started warming up, and about three days before the tournament it got up to 80 degrees. Tommy and I agreed to meet one day about lunchtime at the Texas Bluff area. Tommy was headed there, and he came across a cove and smelled some fish. He thought maybe they were bass, so he suggested we go back there. The cove was almost solid trees in 60 feet of water. I had a spinnerbait on and started throwing it, and every little alley I could get the bait through, we’d see ten to twenty bass coming out of the trees after it. And the water was 50 to 60 feet deep below them! We finally measured the water temperature, and for the first three feet, the water was 55 to 58 degrees. Below that it dropped about 10 degrees. Those bass were up near the surface sunning themselves. That afternoon we caught about seventy-five bass. The next day we split up, and each of us looked for similar coves where the water was slick. Where we found slick water, we could run the spinnerbaits and catch ’em close to the top.

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