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Good wood – and bad
Show me a log in the lake or a branch near the bank and I see a target at which I will pitch a plastic worm or jig.
For a bass, wood in the water is like a table at a fine restaurant for you and me. It means good food is coming soon. But as some restaurants are better than others, some wood rates five stars and some are best avoided.
Anglers who learn how to read the wood will up their bass catching dramatically.
Whether it’s a stump that sticks out of the water like a stubby thumb or a tangle of tree top branches that resembles a witch’s gnarled fingers, the wood is likely to attract baitfish and predators such as bass and crappies. The angler’s job is to figure out the best approach.
Wood is good throughout the open-water season. Spring, summer and fall will find fish like bass and crappies gravitating to stumps, logs and brush to feed and rest.
In spring and the early half of summer, the best lumber tends to be that which has one end on the bank and the rest extending out into 3 to 5 feet of water. Anglers who find laydowns on tapering banks can expect they are holding fish.
Better yet for the laydown lookers are those that criss-cross. If you only have one cast at that particular target, put it exactly where the trunks intersect.
Tree stumps also are good spring and summer cover. In the spring, some bass spawn on the tops of stumps or on the roots that extend out from the base. By summer, the nesting sites become ambush points, as bass hide in the washed out voids under the roots.
Most wood falls into our lakes naturally due to storms or erosion. Some, however, gets planted by people. Brush piles lashed together and anchored with concrete blocks are great fish cover. Piles created from discarded Christmas trees also attract fish.
On lakes with a lot of residential development, the majority of the flooded wood cover is in the form of docks and their posts.
Anglers who know their wood gain a major advantage over those who think sunken brush, leaning logs and dock posts are snags to be avoided.
The key to maximizing wood’s productivity is to approach it carefully and to get your lure in and through the cover efficiently.
A careful approach includes using the sun and wind to your advantage. Move the boat close enough for a cast from a direction that does not cast your shadow over the cover and spook any fish that might have been there.
Work into the breeze if at all possible so you can pull your bait into the cover from that direction. Fish react more favorably to “food” approaching naturally.
Stumps and laydowns are great places to work spinnerbaits and square-bill crankbaits. While it may seem counterintuitive to put open-hooked lures around the potential snags, the moving lures are surprisingly easy to work cleanly without getting hung on the wood.
If the wood is a thick tangle, so-called snag-proof lures are the best option. Texas-rigged plastics (with the hook point embedded in the soft body of the lure) and jigs with fiber weed guards are great choices for dabbling in and clattering around wood.
If I had only one kind of cover to fish for the rest of my time, I would gravitate to the wood. I believe in flooded wood with such confidence that I’ll even toss my lure at a single twig poking through the surface.
And the fun thing is that twigs like that might produce the day’s best fish.