This time of year in Kentucky, fish deep points for success

admin — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 03:57:10 +0000

The meeting of the land and the water often points out the fish for us.
This was, it seems to say, its earthen or rocky digit extended from shore outward, “Out here.”
Rodney Hairgrove knows that straight bank is never quite as attractive to bass as one with a wrinkle on it. The irregular shape of a point, a protrusion of the shore toward the deeper recesses of the water, is a double dose of fishing fortune: On one hand, it attracts and congregates the bass; on the other, it constitutes an often glaring feature that should flag the attention of the angler and usher him to where the fish wait.
Hairgrove, 37, spends much of his time probing the waters of Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley. A transplanted Texan and now for years a Marshall Countian, he operates Big Bear Guide Service out of Big Bear resort on Kentucky Lake’s western shore. When he’s not guiding other fisherman for black bass, white bass or crappie, he’s often bass fishing just for pleasure or in competition. A frequent tournament angler, Hairgrove is a regular in the check-collecting lines of area events.
Much of the fishing year, Hairgrove looks for and finds bass around points in the bays of the two canal-linked reservoirs.
“It starts early in the spring when bass start moving in during the pre-spawn, and it goes on after the spawn when fish are moving back out,” Hairgrove said. “Some of the bass never leave the bays, though. Some of the points that have a good food source and deep enough water nearby will hold fish all through the summer. They’ve got everything bass need, so there’s no reason for them to leave.”
To understand the attraction of bass to points, fishermen must remember that what you see is not necessarily what you get. While points are obvious to the eye, the portions of them that are above the water line for anglers to see are not really what counts. Bass only care about the stuff below the surface.
“What’s important is what’s under the water – what’s on the point and what it’s close to,” Hairgrove said.
“Some good points will have only maybe five feet of water up on top, and others will have 10 or 12 feet up there,” he said. “Even if it gets pretty shallow on top, I think you have to have up to 15 feet or more close by to make it a good spot as the weather gets warmer.”
With deep-water access close by, a point is more likely to be used by bass that can scoot in and out on feeding forays, Hairgrove said. When those fish are on a point, a sharp drop along one side of it will be most likely to hold them when they are there, he added.
Features on a feature – extra elements on a basic structure – are usually what make one point better than another, he said.
“It always helps to have some cover on a point – stumps, brush, stake beds or big rocks,” he said. “Especially if you’ve got cover along the edge of a sharp drop on one side of the point that’s where the fish are going to locate.”
An error that some fishermen make is to relate a point to the place where water and land meet. They sometimes tend to fish right where a point slopes into the lake and where the water is too shallow.
“Early in the morning, fish might get right up on the bank, but most of the time they’re going to be back out a way,” Hairgrove said. “Some of these points run 200 to 300 yards out into the lake from what you see up on shore.
The places that hold fish might be way off the bank.”
That’s where topographic maps and electronic depth-finders come into play.
Information not available upon first glance on the water is what is critical in deciding which points really are worth fishing.
“Probably 60 or 70 percent of the good points show up on a good topo map,” Hairgrove said. “You can see features on the map that make them good. The rest, though, aren’t legible on a map. You have to find them with a depth-finder. The points that aren’t obvious and don’t really show up on a map probably are a little better because they don’t get fished as much.”
Each productive point is different and has its own features to which bass relate. A point that is as long as a football field may boil down to a single location the size of a living room sofa where bass regularly congregate. Learn the spots one at a time and remember them to accumulate a series that can be fished in hops, Hairgrove suggested.
“There are hundreds of points on Kentucky and Barkley,” he said. “You just have to put in some time to learn the good ones and where the best spot is on each one.”
Fishing tactics on points can vary with the season of the year, the time of day and the depth and cover of the sweet spot on each. The biggest variance is depth.
“Even in the summer, early in the morning you can catch fish up and feeding on the shallow ends of points,” Hairgrove said. “You can catch them on topwater lures if they’re up on the surface.
“A lot of it, though, will be off in deeper water. You can throw plastic worms, Carolina rigs, jigs or crankbaits and get down to where the fish are.
“I like a big worm, a Texas-rigged 10-inch (Harville) Baby Huey, or later in the summer, a smaller, 6-inch worm,” Hairgrove said. “A Carolina rig with a one-ounce weight and a lizard is also good because you can cover a lot of water so quickly.
“Crankbaits are awfully good, too,” he said. “You can use Poe’s 400s, (Norman) DD22s or Luhr-Jensen Hot Lips crankbaits and get down as deep as you need to for summer bass.”
Bass naturally adapt to points as routes between deep and shallow water.
Just as they focus the attention of fish, points are a logical draw for fishermen; at least most points are glaringly obvious where they curl off the land into the water.
Knowing which points are the most generous and finding the high-odds spots on each one takes a little experimentation and study. That’s the fine-tuning. But the basics are clear: If a fisherman doesn’t recognize the bass-attracting characteristics of points, he’s missing one.

—Steve Vantreese

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This time of year in Kentucky, fish deep points for success