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Flashy Spoons Provide Versatility To Your Fishing Arsenal

When most anglers hear "bass and spoons," they immediately think "deep" without cracking a smile. The reason, of course, is that bass and spoons and deep water go together like ham and eggs and grits.

However, bass and spoons don't need deep water to complete the breakfast special. Bass and spoons can work shallow, too. In fact, spoons are one of the most versatile lures in any bass angler's arsenal. All you have to do is think outside the "deep" box.

I had a couple of good lessons in just how versatile a spoon can be a few years back. The first session came on Oklahoma's Lake Tenkiller, where Gary Dollahon did a good job of schooling me on how effective jigging spoons can be when not jigged.

That education on how to fish a spoon like a plastic worm was followed by a lesson in fishing a Johnson Silver Minnow, a tried-and-true lure that I was introduced to in Minnesota's lakes around Alexandria. There, we didn't fish a spoon as a worm or a vertical jig, but swam it through weeds, in pad fields and slowly around deep and shallow cover.

Of course, neither Dollahon nor the Berkley folks I fished with in Minnesota taught me that bass could be caught on spoons. That was a lesson I had simply forgotten. In fact, when I was a kid fishing a little pond for bass, I caught bushels of bass on my favorite lure at the time, a red-and-white Dardevle clone that I used for everything from bluegill to trout.

Spoons can make magic for bass for all the right reasons. First of all, they look like something to eat. The common jigging or structure spoon is nothing more than a piece of chrome-plated metal, but it flashes as it falls or is twitched and has a minnow-like profile.

The action of a spoon is enticing as well. Swim a spoon, and most times there's a seductive side-to-side wobble that game fish can't resist. Twitch a heavy-bodied structure spoon, and it will dart and dive like a crazed minnow.

The third attraction of any spoon is that anglers can control the retrieve and action in a way that fits the mood of the fish and the conditions. Truly, each spoon can be fished as a unique lure, something a bass hasn't seen before.

This gives a spoon fisherman a lot of advantage and flexibility. For instance, take the trip I made to Lake Tenkiller with Dollahon. We launched at midlake and headed for a nearby flat.

"Somewhere in here is a little point," Dollahon said.

We soon found the point — more like a shallow ridge that barely dimpled off the bottom — and then cruised along it, as Dollahon kept his eyes glued to his Pinpoint locator.

"There they are," he said when he spotted a group of fish on the screen. "Get ‘em!"
We dropped our spoons down and pop, pop, pop, smack! I had a fish. Then Dollahon picked one up. As we lowered the spoons, we let them submarine onto the top of the ridge, picking up nice spots all along it.

The spoon fishing we were doing was pretty much the standard vertical jigging that is a cliché of most spoon fishermen, and it was a good counterpoint to what came next.

"Now, Jackson, I'm going to show you something a little different," Dollahon said.
He lifted the trolling motor and headed toward a bluff bank not too far away. He pulled the boat within a cast of the bank and flipped his spoon into the shallows instead of dropping it directly below the boat. When the spoon hit bottom, he pulled the slack out of the line, letting the spoon fall and flutter down once again to the next rock on the shelf. After the third or fourth pull, he set the hook on a nice smallie. The next fish was a spot.

"What I'm trying to do is put the spoon in the fish's strike zone and make it act like a shad," explained Dollahon. "It's that simple."

Dollahon's technique is as simple as throwing a Texas-rigged worm or a jig-and-grub to a rock wall and walking the bait down. The pull-and-drop retrieve is the same. About the only major difference in the retrieve is that you should pump the spoon a couple of times when you finally reach bottom.

There are some other differences, of course. With its treble hook, the spoon is more likely to hang up in grass or vegetation than a worm, and it's more likely to get hung up in wood as well. Both problems can be partially overcome by replacing the standard hook commonly used on a jigging spoon with a single weedless hook. In wood, you can also fair better by using a light-wire treble that can be straightened by steady pressure.

Another key difference between a worm and a spoon fished like a worm is the bite. With a spoon, you won't spend time trying to decide if that rubber-band, syrupy feel is a fish. As a rule, when a bass hits a spoon, there is no doubt. That doesn't mean the strike will be a rod-bending, arm-jerking hit, but it will be a hit. It might be light like a peck from a bluegill, but you'll still feel it.

Dollahon uses a 6 1/2-foot medium-heavy Quantum casting rod with 14-pound test Silver Thread to throw spoons. In the open water of lakes like Tenkiller, line that heavy isn't necessary, but it helps when trying to free snagged spoons.

Another spoon technique that's almost as much fun, or maybe it's more fun depending upon your view, is using a Johnson Silver Minnow or similar swimming spoon to fish vegetation.

The Silver Minnow and its clones have been around for decades, but despite being a killer method of catching bass in vegetation, fishing these swimming spoons has fallen from favor.

But take a weedless swimming spoon, a soft-plastic trailer or pork strip, and your favorite rat/frog rig to the nearest field of lily pads, and you're in for a treat.

When bass take up housekeeping in the shallows, a swimming spoon is an effective way to ring their doorbell.

While I've known about Silver Minnows since I was a kid, I'd never fished one until a trip a few years back with the folks from Pure Fishing, the company that owns Johnson, home of the Silver Minnow. They said they had something they wanted me to try. A Silver Minnow was soon tied on my line, and a Power trailer was threaded on the hook so it would hang straight. I was then told to pitch it and swim it back. I did, and what I saw was a real eye-opener. The lure not only wobbled from side to side as it was retrieved, but with the addition of the trailer, it also undulated through the water like a snake.

Combine that wobbling, snake-like swim with the Silver Minnow's ability to slide through grass, pads, cabbage and rushes unscathed, and you have a lure that has a lot more fish attraction than many other lures on the market. The pointed nose of the Silver Minnow lets it slide through just about every aquatic weed you can think of but slime.

There are other similar spoons that have characteristics worthy of exploring. One such bait is the Red Ripper by Nemire Lures. This spoon has a broad front rather than a pointed nose. It's been my experience that the broad nose of the spoon keeps it riding up and over things better than a narrower nose. I also think the lure rides higher in the water column.
You also can find a number of different spoons similar enough in construction to work as weed beaters. The two key ingredients in this type of spoon are that the hook is fixed to the blade of the spoon and the spoon is designed so the hook rides in an upright position.

While the lures that best fit this style of fishing have weedguards, not all fixed-hook spoons do. For instance, Luhr Jensen makes three fixed-hook spoons — the Hobo, the Original Reflecto Spoon and the Pet spoon. The Hobo is the only one of the three with a weedguard. However, the other two can be made weedless by using a Tru-Turn Hitchhiker and a short piece of plastic worm.

The Hitchhiker is a coiled wire that slips onto the eye of the hook. The worm is then screwed onto the coil and threaded over the point of the hook.

The Hitchhiker also is a good way to attach a trailer to a spoon. You might need to put a stopper on the hook to keep the wire from slipping off, or you can just crimp it a bit tighter with pliers. The Hitchhiker, when allowed to swing freely and used with a trailer, provides a good deal more action than threading the trailer directly on the hook.

All of these swimming spoons show bass something they haven't seen much. While you can fish these on lighter tackle, I'd use a flipping or heavy casting stick and heavy braid or superline — basically the same rig you'd use for frogs and rats. The heavy rod helps pull grass and bass to the boat, while the superline cuts through a lot of vegetation with a quick snap.

Regardless of what tackle you use or which type of spoon you fish, these flashy bits of metal will help you catch more bass.