Two years ago 12 members of the Spalding County Sportsman Club fished our April tournament at Clarks Hill.  We fished 16.5 hours in two days to land 102 bass weighing about 180 pounds. There were 17 five bass limits and one fisherman went home early and didn’t weigh in.

My 10 weighing 28.86 pounds won and Niles Murray had ten at 20.60 pound for second.  Glenn Anderson weighed in eight keepers at 17.46 pounds for third and had a 5.20 pounder for big fish.  Raymond English was third with ten weighing 16.71 pounds for fourth.

    I fished Thursday and Friday trying to find a pattern and it seemed fairly easy to catch keeper bass, but they were all males weighing less than two pounds. I am pretty sure they were guarding fry. I saw several balls of tiny bass up in shallow water.  A local fisherman told me for my GON fishing report he thought a great majority of bass at Clarks Hill spawned the week before we fished.

    In the spring when the length of daylight and water temperatures get right, male bass go up in shallow water and fan out a bed.  They use their tails to “fan” the water, pushing silt off hard gravel or sand to make a good place for eggs.

    Females move in and pick the best-looking bed and drop their eggs. They may release eggs in several beds before going back out to deeper water and basically sitting still for several days to recover.

The poor male stays around the bed chasing off bream and other predators that would eat the eggs. They will hit just about any bait that comes near them during this time.

For about a week after the eggs hatch the male stay around the young fry, protection them. But then he will get so hungry he will start eating his own young.  Those males are very easy to catch during this process.

I was lucky enough to find four rocky points where bigger bass were feeding on the shad spawn and caught five weighing 13.56 pounds on Saturday. I was able to rotate around the points all day. When fish stopped hitting on one I would go to the next one.  Although other fishermen pulled up on them and fished a short time, none stayed on them for a long time.

Sunday I was blocked from fishing three of those points, one by a pontoon anchored on it two others by fellow club fishermen that followed me to them that morning. But I was lucky enough to land five weighing 15.30 on the one point I could fish to insure the win.