Big Indiana Bass

Want to know what the pros are looking for on their graph units when they're searching out these ledge schools of bass? This is a screen shot Jacob sent to me on Day 2 of practice down on Chickamauga showing a group of bass on what became one of his daily rotation spots. This one ultimately yielded a couple of the winning fish weighed during the course of the tournament.

Along a similar line, many readers probably have some knowledge of the relationship I have with Jacob, now going back about 9 years when I first met him and took him fishing (at age 14). Since I've been running this site, I've always tried to be careful about overdoing coverage of him in light of this fact and how things might be perceived, to the point that I've never even interviewed him for this site. However, I've decided to break that long-standing tradition, but with a twist.

After speaking with Jacob today, we've agreed to doing an interview once he gets back and settled after these next couple of events - but we're going to let the readers determine the questions that get asked. You can either post a question on the Big Indiana Bass Facebook Page, or e-mail it directly to me at the site address: bigindianabass "at" ccrtc "dot" com (see 'Contact Us' in the upper left corner of site). We'll go through and pick the 10 or 12 best questions and get them answered for you. Could be Tour related, a "how-to" question, or even something about local lakes. Practice, events, baits, boats, tackle, electronics - you decide what you want to know.

So start thinking about it and get those questions submitted. Feel free to send in as many as you'd like, and we'll whittle them down to the best and most informative ones - then  look forward to his answers in the near future.

The shad that were spawned back in the spring are now swimming around in our lakes in large numbers, just about the right size for most everything to begin feeding upon them. Numerous studies on a variety of gamefish show that when available, a good portion of a predator's diet through the entire period from late summer through most of the fall will be comprised of shad. They simply become the most prolific prey in the ecosystem, and are at the right size for a majority of gamefish to swallow. They'll outgrow a lot of gamefish mouths though by winter, so the binge can be short lived.

With Labor Day over, pleasure boat traffic will start dropping off tremendously, and as cooler water temps prevail, lots of fish start feeding up, bass among them. But this is usually the start of crappie season for me, and as such, I went out this weekend and bought my state launch permit for the rest of the year. I also decided to spend some time chasing crappie out on Raccoon Saturday, and captured some neat side imaging shots of these shad schools. Here are a couple of them. The first appears to be almost entirely one long twisting group of shad. I'm not so certain the second isn't a group of white bass terrorizing a school of shad. Wish I had a jigging spoon to have dropped down at the time.

This first screen shot is of a very large and solid school of baitfish, likely gizzard shad. Notice how I just caught the far right side of the school, as the majority of the bunch were just off to my left. Check out the length of the sonar shadow they threw on the left side, suggesting to me that they were pretty high up in the water column.

This next one is pretty cool - an old submerged bridge. You can see a road running off the corner to the bridge at a 90 degree angle (bottom of the pic). There is a bunch of riprap down the side drop of the road as it falls into the channel running under the bridge. The two slanted white streaks right of the bridge are the original bridge pilings. And check out all the schools of fish hanging around the bridge. In this case, they were mostly crappie and white bass. Notice how loosely they are grouped (you can easily see individual white marks for each fish) compared to the white mass suggesting tightly schooled baitfish like in the image above.