Spoons: More Versatile Than You Might Think
Nov/Dec '07 Issue (vol 15, num 6)
Once upon a time, an angler eating lunch on the lake accidentally dropped a spoon overboard. As he watched it drift downward, sun glinting off the handle and bowl, he saw a fish dart out and try to eat it. A typical angler, he was inventive and always looking for a new bait, so he went home and got out his saw and drill. Voila! A killer new lure was born!
Today’s spoons are usually store-bought and they aren’t cheap. Some spoons are just dimpled slabs of metal with a hook on one end and a split ring on the other. Others are shapelier, formed into slim shad-shapes and painted with glittering colors that reflect like prisms. Some spoons look like the handle, and some are shaped like the bowl. There are even glow-in-the-dark spoons! But all spoons are designed to do the same thing and that is to resemble a dying baitfish.
Since these little chunks of metal can be pricey, a few steps taken to minimize the risk of snagging and losing them are in order. Most experienced spoon fishermen immediately change the hook on a spoon. A softer treble hook that will straighten out under heavy pressure will let you pull a spoon off a piece of submerged wood or rock. A brittle hook that will snap off when jerked hard will also let you retrieve a snagged spoon. Either way, if your line breaks you’re toast, so the majority of spooners recommend stout line. Some anglers go as heavy as 50-pound test, but a line in the 20- to 25-pound test range is usually pretty adequate.
A shorter rod is easier to snap up and down all day long. Your reel should have plenty of power and the ability to take up line quickly. If you’ve changed the hooks to make snags less fatal, you need to keep that in mind when you are landing a fish; too much pressure and you’ll lose that toad.
Catching fish on spoons is easy. You can cast them a country mile on almost any tackle, and fish them at any depth. Add the fact that they catch just about every kind of fish in the lake and it is hard to understand why people don’t fish them more often. Finding the fish may prove to be the most difficult, especially when the temperature drops. Your depthfinder is your best friend under these conditions.
Finesse Spooning?
Arizona tournament angler Steve Foutch throws spoons all year long with huge success. Steve is mainly after smallmouth and largemouth bass and he catches plenty of them – enough to cash decent tournament checks – but he also gets a lot of “incidental catches” including catfish, crappie, yellow bass, and even carp.
“People ask me what I catch my fish on, and when I tell them a spoon they think I’m lying to them,” says Foutch. He uses them so much that he buys a hundred half-ounce and a hundred three-quarter ounce Strata spoons every year. When you’re throwing a slab of metal with a treble hook on it, you’ve got to expect to lose one now and then, especially the way Steve fishes them which is just a tad different from most.
Foutch throws spoons on spinning gear with eight-pound test line. “I’ve experimented with all kinds of line,” Steve explains, “and Stren XT works best for me.” He prefers a spinning reel which allows the bait to fall freely with a more natural action. “With a baitcaster, the line often can’t keep up with the spoon, and you’ll see guys having to feed line out by hand,” he says. He uses a medium-heavy six-foot rod and a Diawa reel. “The most important thing is to have a really good drag system,” he says.
Flats are some of Steve’s favorite areas to fish. “I like flats with a bunch of cuts,” he says, “even if the difference in depth is only four or five feet.” Sometimes the cuts are as subtle as two or three feet deep, but they still hold fish.
In summer and winter Steve fishes vertically quite a bit. He casts the spoon out, lets it fall for a bit, then rips it back like a jerk bait. A spoon falls quickly – about a foot a second – so he simply counts it down until it’s close to the bottom, then begins his retrieve. If you watch him, you’ll see that he closes the bail, but before he rips it, he actually shoves the rod forward about a foot. Then he rips it up almost straight over his head, takes up the slack, then rips it again.
The fish often take the bait on the fall, during that little pause while he lowers the rod and shoves it forward before swinging up on it again. Whenever he tries to rip the bait and feels the heaviness of a fish, the fight is on.
For surfacing fish, Foutch casts the spoon past the boil and keeps the rod tip high. No counting it down this time; he keeps the bait high and pops it back. This is an exciting way to catch fish, and much more reliable than topwater lures for boilers. The spoon more closely resembles the shad that the bass are after, and the way they drop and wobble between pops looks exactly like a dying baitfish.
Spooning has been a tremendously reliable method for Steve. He not only catches fish all year, he catches big fish. At a typical Roosevelt tournament in May, he caught nine “overs” (bass over the 13 to 16-inch slot limit) on a spoon. “Sixty percent of the fish I catch in tournaments come on spoons,” he asserts. He frequently encounters scoffers, but once they spend an hour or so in the boat with him, they change their tune. He often ends up giving spoons to his buddies and partners.
When the fish go deep, Foutch watches the bank for clues to the bottom. He keeps a sharp eye out for any cuts that run into the lake, knowing that they will continue out under the water. “Rocks are part of the equation, too,” he says. “Watch the graph, at times I’ve seen so many fish under my boat that the screen has turned black. People think that it’s showing trees, but it’s fish.”
The sunlight is what gives a spoon its flash. So, on early mornings, or very cloudy days, another lure will usually work better. On a bright day in relatively clear water, the spoon is hard to beat. However, on cloudy days Steve will try a white spoon before giving up on it completely.
“In the wintertime the fishing is more vertical, so that’s when I switch to the heavier lure,” says Foutch. “You’ll see the line go ting; they take it on the fall. The same thing happens in the summertime,” he says. Sometimes they slam it, but other times he only gets a little tick. If he gets on a really good spoon bite he can catch a hundred fish a day. He has also caught many fish over ten pounds on spoons. Most of his really big fish have been caught in the wintertime.
“If I get snagged I go right up over it and I can usually shake it loose. The half-ounce spoons don’t come out quite as easily as the three-quarter ounce ones, though,” he says. The very weight of the spoon helps pull it free of waterlogged timber.
Like many good bass fishermen, Steve examines the graph carefully before he even leaves the launch area. He looks for the depth that has the most activity and baitfish so he knows how deep to fish for bass. Once at his starting point, the graph again plays a major role. “I don’t fish there if I don’t see baitfish,” he says. “Sometimes there are so many fry or shad that the screen is just black.”
“I fish just like this at every lake,” Steve says. “It’s not on all the time at every lake, but you have to try it, because when the spoon bite is on, you can get a limit in half-an- hour.” He starts out fairly shallow early in the day, then moves out deeper as the sun gets higher. In the wintertime he’ll often throw a spoon along a wall and just let it flutter down. If he can see fish and he’s not getting bit, he’ll move out farther. Sometimes that’s all it takes to get them going.