Ohio bass pro Frank Scalish is a hard guy to interview. He’s a heck of a nice guy and a phenomenal angler, but he cranks out so many cool tactics that it’s hard to keep up.
So it was when he and I fished a weedy flat loaded with postspawn largemouths. I was supposed to be working on a jerkbait story, but it didn’t take long for us to get off on a tangent. The bass were in transition, and so we’d been finding fish everywhere from the beds to the main river channel.
“A couple hard-fishing friends of mine out of North Carolina, Ron Parks and Troy Armstrong, figured out that when fish are like this, a great way to put bass in the boat is to Texas rig a Yum Zellamander weightless. Position the boat along the outside edge of a spawning flat, right where it drops just enough to keep you from seeing bottom,” Scalish says.
Make a short cast along this transition zone and let the creature fall to bottom. After a long pause, give the bait one strong hop, then let it settle again.
“That’s it,” he says. “You’ll catch one on the initial drop or after the hop, but usually not on subsequent hops.”
After that, he reels in and makes another cast along that line, only landing about five feet farther from the boat than the first, and imparts the same fall-lift-drop-retrieve action.
“I do this until I’ve covered the whole transition. It’s great because you can intercept bass both entering and leaving the spawning areas.”