Hi, first post here!
I have a question about post spawn and weather patterns and would appreciate any advice.
A little background:
I have been fishing the northern parts of both Lake Keowee and Lake Hartwell in SC all year and have done good catching hundreds of small bass with only a couple 3 pounders sprinkled in.
As you could guess I seem to have a lot of trouble catching decent sized fish on both lakes.
Usually favoring Wacky rigs, Neko rigs, Carolina rigs, Jigs, Jerk baits, Crank Baits, and Top Water, I have recently made the change to focusing on using jigs on shallow cover and larger top water plugs in the hope to hook up on bigger fish.
Unfortunately I have had no such luck with these lures and was especially upset to not have caught a nice one on the jig, during the spawn.
Even with using larger Top Water setups I'm still catching smaller fish.
Now to the question:
Last week I hit Crowe Creek Landing on Keowee hoping to catch some Post Spawners feeding up on secondary structure (Humps and Ledges 20ft of water) near spawning locations.
I arrived at my planned fishing areas just before day light. Conditions were very cloudy with 10 mph winds
Keowee is a gin clear lake (72-75 water temp) so I used 10lb test and threw sexy shad 6xd and jerk baits to no avail.
Later in the day when the weather cleared, I did spot some decent bass hanging out under one of the many docks found on the lake and by the looks of it they seemed to have stress growths on their bodies.
With that info it seems that these bass were still recovering and my question is, is there a typical time frame bass take to recover from the spawn?
I understand that they will feed up after the spawn but when does that happen?
There is also a low pressure system moving in Friday morning and am wondering if, even though the bass may be in post spawn recovery mode, will they still feed up just before a low pressure system?
Also any pointers on catching larger fish on these lakes (if you are familiar with them) would be awesome!
Thanks.
